78. Soaring

At the culture center, I am given a stark reminder of the danger that lies ahead: less than a hundred yards away and in clear view from the windows of the fifth floor classroom is the Fukuoka Kōchisho (拘置所), the very jail I hope to avoid getting thrown into.

The Kōchishois enclosed in an old concrete wall, some forty or fifty feet high, with a bramble of razor wire at the top. Just beyond the wall, the top floor of the cell blocks is visible. In all the years I have taught at the culture center and looked out at the Kōchisho, I have never once detected a hint of life beyond the bleak enclosure.

What I do know about the jail is that prisoners are sometimes hanged there, the executions made public only after they have been conducted. There are no countdowns, no protests, no candlelight vigils, no dramatic eleventh hour stays of execution. This isn’t Hollywood, after all. It is Japan, where humorless bureaucrats oil the machinery of justice and the extinguishing of human life is as fittingly impersonal as a tick in a ledger in some governmental office.

And I’ll become a tick in a ledger myself if I fuck up tomorrow morning.

“You have nothing to worry about,” Adachi told me. 

Big of the man to say so! The lawyer isn’t the one who is going to get the third degree, or have his head slammed up against the wall, or receive an education in the subtleties of a nightstick. Whatever happens on Sunday, I’m sure I’ll be seeing stars by the end of the day if blow it.

I have gotto get in touch with Naila, again! 

I tried to contact my cousin twice before I left for the culture center this morning, but no luck. I still don’t know what I am going to tell the cops when I go in for questioning.

If only I could talk with Naila, and get her to corroborate . . .

Swallowing hard, I turn away from the window and sit down on the corner of my desk and wait for the students to arrive.

At a quarter to ten, students begin trickling in, filling the classroom with their sunny chatter. The pensioners don’t seem to have a care in the world, aside from bum knees, cataracts, and memory loss. Some of them, the older ones in particular who are in their eighties and still going strong, lived through the horrors of the war—one even experienced the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, another had been training to become a kamikazepilot as the war was coming to an end—but you’d never know it from the way they smile as they enter the classroom.

Dé Dale once commented that he didn’t know how I could bear to spend so much time every week with so many “losers”. I suppose if I also operated under the same opinion that my students were losers, I probably wouldn’t have lasted as long as I had in the profession. At the risk of my friend’s derision, I must confess that I actually like the vast majority of my students, and, for the most part, enjoy the time we spend together each week. Would I rather be doing something different? You bet! But for all intents and purposes, the job suits my lifestyle and places few demands on me other than I show up, do my thing, and collect my pay.

Now that the Kōchishois looming in the offing and I risk losing everything, this teaching gig included, there isn’t anywhere I would rather be than in this classroom chatting it up with pensioners about their enviably ordinary and peaceful lives.

I ask a diminutive woman by the name of Hideko (lit., child of the rising sun) if she did anything special this week. At the age of sixty-three, she is a spring chicken compared to the rest.

“Last week, I went toshopping,” Hideko begins.

Wentshopping,” I correct.

“Yes, yes. I went to shopping and . . .”

“No, Hideko, it’s not ‘wenttoshopping’, it’s ‘wentshopping’.” I say. God only knows how many times I have corrected the group on this very point.

“Huh?”

“I went shopping.”

“You, too, Sensei?”

Oh, good grief. No, no, no. Not meYou!”

“Yes, that’s what I said,” she counters with a smug smile.

“Never mind. Please continue.”

“Last week, I went to shopping and . . .”

When she is finished with her story, I write “go to ~ ing” on the whiteboard with the “to” crossed out in red. Below it, I add several examples: “go hiking”, “go swimming”, “go fishing”, and finally “go shopping”.

After doing a quick run-through of the grammar, Hideko finally figures out what I have been trying to tell her. What’s more, it dawns on her that she made the very same mistake only a week ago. 

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“It’s quite all right,” I assure the woman. “There’s no need to apologize. This ismy job, after all. Like a gardener pulling weeds.”

Oh, thank you. Thank you. You’re too kind.”

“Besides there are no stupid mistakes . . .”

“Oh?”

“No, there aren’t any stupid mistakes, but there sure are a lot of stupid students!”

Sensei!”

 

 Back at my apartment, I try to place another call to my cousin. It is getting late on Naila’s side of the planet. If I don’t get through to her soon, the next window won’t be until the evening, my time. Trouble is I promised a friend I would throw her a small going away party.

I dial my cousin’s number and let it ring and ring and ring.

Yal’la, Naila, answer the goddamn phone!” After ten rings, I slam the receiver down. “Fuck me!”

It is tempting to give my mother a call to see if she might be able to contact her sister, my aunt Michelin, and tell Naila to call me. The poor woman, though, already has enough on her plate caring for my father. My old man is in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s and the last thing Mama needs is one more thing to upset her. No, I’ll have to try again in the evening.

 

 

After lounging about the swimming pool all morning, dé Dale and I got itchy feet and decided to go out and explore Bangkok until it was time to leave for the airport. 

A few blocks from our hotel was a canal, one of the many noisome tributaries that flow through the city carrying human waste and pestilence and God only knows what else. Every now and then boats roaring in either direction and churning up the muddy waters pull up to jerry-built piers, unload their shaken and rattled passengers, and speed off again.

Well, I’ll tell you, the boats are probably deathtraps, but to the two of us they looked like a hell of a lot of fun. The gods may struggle in vain against boredom, but there is no shortage of things that will amuse two lads hopped up on drugs.

We boarded an inbound boat, sitting at the very front of the boat, near the pilot, with the delight of two boys climbing into the first car of a roller coaster. 

The pilot floored the engine and the boat hurtled forward at breakneck speed, down the canal under a canopy of trees. The boat banked sharply at the Ban Bat temple and continued thundering ahead, passing under a low-lying bridge and just barely averting a collision with an approaching boat. Several minutes later, when we arrived at a pier along the great Chao Phraya, the River of Kings, the two of us hobbled off, shaken and rattled ourselves.

We spent an hour wandering around Khet Dusit, where the royal palace and parliament are located, then jumped onto the backs of motorcycle taxis that zipped us back to Siam, weaving wildly through the bumper-to-bumper traffic.

The rest of the afternoon was idled away at Gaysorn Plaza and Siam Center, where you would have thought that Christmas and Chanukah had come eight months early the way we shopped, picking up souvenirs and presents like there was no tomorrow.

In the evening, we rendezvoused at the airport with Nori, dé Dale’s leggy Amazon, who had just flown in from Japan. The three of us then caught a connecting flight to Ko Samui, an island off the southeastern coast where we planned to stay for a few days before moving on to the neighboring island of Ko Pha Ngan in time for the full moon party.

Perhaps it was the altitude or the deafening drone of the twin propellers that triggered it, but midflight I began to peak again. Leaning across the narrow aisle, I asked my friend how he was feeling. More than twenty hours had passed since we had taken yabaand I was still soaring. He looked back at me and grinned like the Cheshire cat.

 

 

When my workday has finally come to an end, I consider trying to give my cousin another call, but it is still early in the morning for her. 

Better to try again in an hour. 

In the meantime, Azami and I go out for a quick bite, dropping in at Gyoshu Danshiro Shoten, an Okinawan pub just down the street from my apartment.

Without looking at the menu, I rattle off the order as soon as the waiter comes to our table: “Tofuyogoya chambururafuté, Okinawan soba, grilled Ishigaki beef, and Orion beer.”

Okinawa. Now there is a place I would not mind being, and to hell with what dé Dale thinks of the place. 

For years, I’ve been operating sullenly on the soppy emotion “anywhere, but here”, but my melancholic longing for greener pastures does have a destination—several, in fact—and Okinawa is near the top of that list.

A friend of mine checked out of life’s fast lane and moved to the southernmost island of Yonaguni where she is now spending her days hanging out at the beach, and lolling about on the engawa deck of her home, plucking a kind of banjo called the Ryūkyū sanshin and drinking the local fire water, awamori.

Although I may not be ready to live the life of a cloistered monk just yet, Ishigaki, the largest, most populous island in the Yaeyama archipelago located halfway between Okinawa and my friend’s new home of Yonaguni, would suit me just fine. The pace of life is slower there—perfect when you have nowhere in particular to go and nothing special to do. When you are rushing from one commitment to another like I usually am, just doing nothing, absolutely nothing, as dé Dale often reminded me, is a luxury.

A dip in the turquoise sea, snorkeling among coral reefs and tropical fish, a bottle of Donan 120-proof awamori and a bucket of ice to ease you into the evening, and an old man strumming away on the sanshin, singing in the Okinawan dialect, “Nankuru nai sah” (Everything’s gonna be all right) sounds like heaven to me right now.

The waiter brings a chilled mug of Orion draught for me, utchin cha [1] for Azami, and a small plate of tōfuyo.

Even in a land like Japan where delicacies abound, tōfuyo still manages to stand out.Made with the Okinawan variety of tōfu, it is first packed in salt to remove the excess water, and then fermented a second time in awamori, rice malt and red yeast until it takes on a rose-colored cheese-like consistency.

I shave off a bit of the tōfuyowith a toothpick and pop it into my mouth.Just then, Azami’s cell phone rings. 

Moshi-moshi,” she says. “Yes, he’s here with me. Hold on a moment, I’ll give him the phone . . .”

 

 

The airplane touched down on the tarmac of Ko Samui’s small airport by and by.

Dé Dale, Nori, and I shambled off the plane, ears ringing, and made our way to an improvised baggage claim area where we huddled with the other woozy passengers. Once we had our bags, we hailed a taxi that took us to the other side of the island where a pair of bungalows was waiting for of us.

By this point, dé Dale and I had been awake for over forty hours, and still “high like the kite” for most of that time. Only now were the effects of the yabafinally subsiding; the rope we had been dangling from all night and all day finally slackened enough to let our feet touch the ground.

After a trip as long as that, you might think I would have been ready to hit sack, but no, I was still having too much fun—strange fruit, indeed—and didn’t want the party to end.

Dé Dale and Nori, however, had the good sense to call it a night. With a toodle-oo, the two retired to their bungalow. The door to their bungalow shut and the curtains drawn, for the next two hours the quiet of the evening was broken every now and then with giggles and moans, and the thud of a headboard banging against the wall, steady as a metronome.

Left alone to my own self-destructive devices, I took the roll of yaba out of my pocket. There were still five more of those crazy pink pills left. Splitting one in two, I popped half into my mouth. 

Good God, what was I thinking?

The following morning, dé Dale said he wanted to get in touch with nature while on the island, so the three of us went on a quest for magic mushrooms.

I was still hopped-up on yababy then, having spent half of the night wandering around the dimly lit, sparsely populated village in a fruitless search for a party or a go-go bar or a show featuring genital acrobatics—anything that might fight back, if only temporary, an imaginary army of ants that was crawling all over me. 

Unfortunately, little was open, nothing but a dismal little cyber café with two lousy computers and dial-up Internet. A hippy with blond dreadlocks dressed in what looked like pajamas sat before one of the computers. He hunted and pecked at the keyboard, clicking the mouse with the frenzied urgency of a day trader. Watching him reminded me of something dé Dale had once said: Most hippies today are phonies.

Returning to the bungalow, I plopped down on the bed and turned on the boob tube. A Thai soap opera was on. It featured beautiful people with gleaming white teeth and alabaster complexions living lives of such material abundance it made me wonder what the people in the shantytowns along the train tracks and stinking rivers of Bangkok must have made of it all. Flipping the channel, I caught CNN just as it was breaking for a commercial. Imagine that. Changing the channel, MTV was showing Crazy Town’s “Butterfly—shugah baby—again. On another channel, NHK Worldwas stultifying viewers with its bone-dry reportage of the news . . .

“Ah, fuck it,” I said, and, turning the TV off, headed out to the beach where I waited for the sun to rise.

Later that morning, when dé Dale, Nori, and I were walking along the beach, we happened upon a beach bar, the walls of which were painted in a wildly psychedelic motif, like something out of Alice in Wonderland.

“Bingo,” dé Dale said, snapping his fingers.

He sauntered up to counter and asked the bartender, a scrawny Thai man of about thirty, and the only person in the joint, if he knew where we might be able to score some shrooms.

The bartender laughed and in impeccable English told us that five years ago magic mushrooms would have been easy to get hold of, but now? “Sorry, but you’re fresh out of luck, mate.”

Dé Dale sat down at the counter and ordered a round of Singhas. 

When the bartender brought the beers over, he whispered something to the effect that if it was partying we were after, he might be able to arrange for something.

Dé Dale was game and gave him a nod, warning, “Better not disappoint us!”

“You won’t be,” the bartender replied and took off down the beach, giving us the run of the bar. When he returned half an hour later, he produced a small case of pink pills with WY imprinted on them.

Dé Dale and I looked at each other and started laughing.


[1] Utchin cha (うっちん茶) is jasmine tea from Okinawa.


The first posting/chapter in this series can be found here.

Rokuban: Too Close to the Sun and other works are available in e-book form and paperback at Amazon.

注意:この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

77. Yaba Daba Doo!

Saturday morning, July 8th

 

I wake up early with Azami at my side, sound asleep but grinding her teeth so fiercely I worry she might crack a tooth. With a gentle nudge, she rolls over onto her side, the gnashing stops.

I go to the kitchen to make myself a café au lait. As the milk is being heated in a saucepan, the kettle comes to a boil. I place three scoops of coffee grounds into the filter, and once the milk is warm enough add two lumps of La Perruchesugar to the milk, then slowly, slowly, ever so slowly, pour water over the coffee grounds and let it drip, drip, drip into the milk.

Bowl of café au laitin hand, I go and sit outside on the balcony. My rabbit rubs up against my ankle.

“Morning, Pyon,” I say and scratch him where he likes it, on the top of his head right between the ears. “You got any regrets, Pyon?”

The rabbit stands on his hind legs and gives me a noncommittal look.

“No? Not even one? Well, I’ve got plenty for both of us.”

 

 After locking and chaining the door and shutting the curtains in the hotel room, I cut open the hard plastic containing the pink pills, and let them spill out onto the glass coffee table. Examining one, I found “WY” imprinted on one side of each tablet.

The latest edition of The Economist featured a short article about recent seizures of methamphetamines in Thailand. According to the article, anti-drug operations had netted some six million pills that very week; another seven million pills had been nabbed the week before.

“I guess this is why the shit was so hard to find,” I said, tossing dé Dale the magazine. A good month for the narcs, perhaps, but it was evidence, too, of the booming trade in methamphetamines in Southeast Asia. The article also stated that the pills, imprinted with a “WY” logo, were mainly produced by the United Wa State Army, the largest drug trafficking organization in Myanmar. Thailand was the primary market for yaba.

“Check this out,” I said to dé Dale, holding one of the pills up. “WY. Wonder what that means. Wa’s Yaba?”

Dé Dale replied with a grunt. He couldn’t be bothered to look up, focused as he was on separating the paper lining from the foil of the Nestlé Crunchwrapper. Never underestimate the resourcefulness of a junkie, I always say. Brushing the flame of his lighter quickly under the wrapper, dé Dale picked at the paper with some tweezers and pulled it neatly away.

“Ha hah!” he said proudly and handed me the foil.

Borrowing dé Dale’s Swiss Army pocketknife—the guy was never without it—I cut the foil in half, and, crushing one of the pills up, placed an amount of the pink powder onto one of the tin squares. With a straw clenched between my teeth, I flicked the lighter and, passing a weak flame below the foil, waited for the smoke to rise.

Nothing

I tried again and waited, but the shit would not burn. Instead of giving off smoke, the pink powder melted and formed a dirty liquid.

“What the hell is this?” I said, putting the foil down on the coffee table.

Dé Dale grumbled that I wasn’t doing it right and gave it a shot himself. But, still no luck.

“Maybe the bastard sold us X,” he said.

I popped half a pill into my mouth, chewed on it a bit, and then washed it down with gin. Dé Dale did the same, and returned to the task of trying to make the pink powder to burn.

“It’s awfully sweet for ecstasy. Almost chocolaty,” I said, chewing on another half.

“It’s probably been cut with something,” dé Dale replied, the irritation in his voice rising.

Dé Dale had been simmering since we left Khaosan when our first attempts to score yabahad been frustrated. And now that we had got it only to be disappointed, dé Dale was ready to boil over. After several tries, we gave up trying to coax a plume of smoke from the pink powder, and popped one more pill each.

Slouching back into my chair, I turned on the TV. MTV was playing the same irritating video by a band I’d never heard of before called Crazy Town. Since arriving in Bangkok, I had seen it more than a dozen times. The song was also being blasted from speakers at street side vendors all over town.

Come muh lady . . . Come, come muh lady . . . you’re my butterfly, Sugar baby . . .

“Ugh. At least the chick in the video’s hot,” I said, pressing the “mute” button. 

When another thirty minutes had ticked by, and still nothing, dé Dale banged his fist on the table and jumped to his feet. “Fucking bastard sold us children’s aspirin!”

He paced the room like a caged tiger, fuming. I might have been able to comprehend my friend’s anger if it had been histhree thousand baht that had been flushed down the toilet. I was more philosophical about it: there were worse ways to learn a lesson, I thought, than being made a fool of by a drug dealer in Patpong. At least it was only three thousand baht. Could have been worse.

Just as I was about to concede to dé Dale that we had been duped, though, I began to feel a mellow, yet distinct, tingling throughout my body.

Dé Dale admitted he was starting to feel it, as well.

“I don’t know what this is,” I said, “but I’m starting to feel pretty damn good.” 

“Me, too,” dé Dale said, brightening. A smile spread across his face, the furrow in his brow softened.

Half an hour later, dé Dale declared that he was “high like the kite”, so we left the suite and hit the clubs.

 

Saturdays are another full day for me. I have two lessons in the morning at a “culture center” across town, teaching the unteachable: pensioners. At noon, I have to hurry back home where I have three more group lessons, back to back.

After teaching all week and having the same dull conversations over and over again, I am usually beat by the time Saturday mornings roll around. If I’ve also squeezed translation and freelance jobs in between the lessons—and more often than not I do—then I am a zombie by the end of the week, on the fast track for karōshi, or death from overwork.

The odd thing, though, is I don’t feel the slightest bit tired this morning. I should be an emotional and physical basket case considering what is going on, but I’m not. Just like yesterday, I was full of energy when I woke, my mind racing a mile a minute, high on the adrenaline coursing through my arteries.

 

Floating on my back in the Baiyoke’s 20th floor swimming pool, I started peaking again. Every time felt like the first, an orgasm rippling through my virgin flesh. I closed my eyes and let my body sink to the bottom of the pool. 

“I could stay here all day,” I said to myself, air gurgling out of my mouth and bubbles drifting like lazy dirigibles to the surface.

If only I’d had a long hallow reed to suck air through, bliss would have been mine. I would have become a merry little sea cucumber, not a worry in the deep blue sea.

It must have been around midnight when dé Dale and I had left our suite at the Baiyoke. We wandered around Pratunam for a while where I cashed a traveler’s cheque and, now flush with cash and goodwill, splurged on a Planet of the Apes gorilla mask for my friend.

Let me tell you, a kid never got so much pleasure out of a toy as dé Dale got out of that mask. Dé Dale donned the mask and started hamming it up, climbing on to dumpsters, spinning around telephone poles. Later as we were barreling through the streets of Bangkok on a tuk-tukheading back to Patpong, dé Dale leaned all the way out, howling and beating his chest. 

After clubhopping most of the night we ended up at a hole in the wall where the Mama of the bar challenged my friend to a game of The Captain’s Mistress. “You win, you drink for free,” Mama said.

It sounded like a fair bet to my friend. What was a game of glorified tick-tac-toe, after all, to a Frenchman who was often bemoaning the dearth of suitable chess opponents back in Fukuoka? He took up the gauntlet with the blind alacrity of a bull copulating in a queue at the slaughterhouse.

“Dé Dale, I wouldn’t put that piece there if I were you? She’s going to . . .”

“Rémy, tais-toi!”

Dé Dale blamed the first loss on my interruption.

“Shall we make the game more interesting?” dé Dale suggested, anteing up the gorilla mask.

“Hey! I paid good money for that!” I protested.

“Trust me,” dé Dale said. “I now understand how the bitch’s mind works.”

It was a rout: dé Dale did not manage to win a single game. Instead of drinking for free, we ended up having to pay double, the mask sacrificed on the altar of dé Dale’s pride.

After settling the bill, dé Dale told Mama that he wanted three whores to take back with us.

Three! Boys be ambitious, indeed.

As I was wondering how dé Dale intended to divvy up the poontang—two for him, one for me; two for me, one for him; one and a half for each of us; three for him, none for me—the saddest looking specimens of womanhood you could imagine started slinking in. It was as if we had arrived late at a farmers’ market and all that was left were greasy black bananas and stinky durians.

“You gotta be kidding,” dé Dale said. “Never mind.”

Passing on the orgy, we hailed a taxi and headed back to the hotel, where to our surprise the pool was still open.

“I was almost about to dive in after you,” dé Dale told me when I finally surfaced, gasping for air. “You know how long you were down there?”

“Sea cucumbers can’t be bothered with things as bourgeois as time.”

“What?”

“Nothing, nothing,” I said, jerking my head to knock the water out of my ears.

“You were down there for almost two minutes.”

“Wow!” I exclaimed, impressed not so much by my pneumatic capacity as I was with the morning sky. It was lit up like Christmas, the sun rising above the city like a golden ornament against a crimson curtain. “Did you get a load of the sky?”

“Yeah, I’ve been staring it all this time.”

“What time is it?” I said.

“Eight.”

“Eight! Let me tell you, if this is children’s aspirin, I’m buying stock in Bayer!”

Getting up from his chaise lounge, dé Dale yelled, “Yaba-daba-doo!” at the top of his lungs and did a canon ball into the pool.


The first posting/chapter in this series can be found here.

Rokuban: Too Close to the Sun and other works are available in e-book form and paperback at Amazon.

注意:この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

76. Let's Make a Deal

Dé Dale and I were brought to a dive far off the main strip. It was chockablock with young prostitutes sitting in booths, singing along with a karaokemachine. Aside from the bartender and a doorman, there were no men in the place, not a single customer.

My first thought was that we had been tricked into coming to a hostess bar where we would be forced to buy the girls drinks. Dé Dale was ready to bail right then and there, but the dealer persuaded us to wait until he came back.

“Fifteen, maybe twen’y minute,” he said, leaving us in the care of the bartender.

We sat down at an empty booth in the back that faced the entrance, and ordered gin and tonics. 

Before long, some of the bar girls started slinking over like cats about to pounce on mice and asked where we were from.

Dé Dale replied that we were from Luxembourg.

More questions followed: How long have you been here? What are you doing in Thailand? And so on.

Dé Dale fed them a load of baloney about being orchid buyers for a flower-importing consortium. Why bother with the truth?

When one of the girls tried her best to curry favor with dé Dale, I told her: “You’re very charming, but, I’m afraid it won’t work. My friend here likes men. Little men. Hairy little men.”

Without missing a beat, the girls turned their attention to me. One of them sat down right next to me and grabbed my wimpy bicep.

“You very tall. Me like,” she said. “Do you have girlfriend?”

“Yes,” I answered. “I have four.”

“Butterfly boy!!!” They cackled with laughter. 

The girl put her arms around my neck and begged for me to let her be my fifth girlfriend. 

“I’ll think about it.”

“You don’ like me?”

“Oh, I likeyou all right.”

Not that she wasn’t pretty, she was, captivatingly so with her friendly eyes and natural, unaffected smile, but the thought of spending the next six months worrying that I might have contracted HIV or some other nasty STD was enough to make the water in me run cold.

Ten minutes came and went and dé Dale started tapping his lighter against the tabletop. “If the guy doesn’t show up in another 10 minutes,” dé Dale said, “We’re outta here.”

I had to agree with my friend. The longer we were forced to wait the more I worried we were becoming sitting ducks.

The bartender, noticing that the two of us were getting restless, came by and assured us the guy would probably be back in another ten minutes.

Dé Dale was ready to bolt. The Frenchman had the patience of a firecracker. When I suggested he have one more cigarette before leaving, he lit up and sat back in the settee, arms crossed, glaring in the direction of the entrance.

Before dé Dale could finish his cigarette, the dealer returned, short of breath. It had been nearly forty minutes.

So much for yaba being readily available.

As dé Dale was settling the bar tab, I followed the dealer to the restrooms in the back of the bar where, locking the door behind us, he pulled out a roll of ten pink pills, tightly wrapped in clear plastic. 

“I only wanted a few,” I protested. “This is way, way, waytoo much for the two of us.”

“But I bought these for you,” he said. “Ten for five thousand. ($110)”

“Five thousand?” I was taken aback. 

So much for the drug being cheap! Christ!

“I haven’t got that much on me.” I didn’t actually know how much cash I had on me and I wasn’t about to start counting the contents of my wallet before him. “I’ll take five for two thousand. It’s all I can afford.”

The dealer told me that was out of the question. He wanted to unload the whole lot as quickly as possible. It was far too risky for him to carry it around.

“Look, I only wanted five at the most and I’ve only got twenty-five hundred baht.”

“All for three thousand ($66),” he said finally.

“Deal!”

I passed a wad of bills to him, took the roll of pills from his hands, and left the restroom. 

Dé Dale was all ready to go, and, without so much as an adieubade to the girls, we beat-feet out of the bar. Once outside, we hopped into the fourth taxi we found and drove off to the Pratunam area where the Baiyoke Sky Hotelwas located. 

Getting out of the taxi a good ten-minutes’ walk from our hotel, we dropped in at a convenience store to pick up some tin foil. Not finding any, we bought a chocolate bar, chewing gum, cigarettes—anything we could find that came wrapped in foil. We also picked up a fresh lighter, some tonic water, and, once fully accoutered, made our way back to our hotel, snickering like kids leaving a candy store.

75. The Pied Piper of Patpong

As soon as dé Dale and I arrived in Patpong, we made a beeline for the Japanese street, a lane with bar upon bar catering to the “special needs” of Japanese businessmen. There was no comparable street exclusively for Germans or Aussies or Frenchmen, as far as I knew, but the Japanese managed to have a street all for themselves, employing some of the best-looking girls you’d hope to find in the trade. And what made these girls all the more attractive was that they were dressed in evening gowns rather than the raunchy outfits of the go-go girls that left little to the imagination.

They called out to the salarymenin simple Japanese, “Hey uncle, you’re welcome here!”

Dé Dale said it would be fun to pop into one of the clubs and freak everyone out by speaking Japanese, but before we could, my friend got distracted by a cigarette vendor.

“Got any Gauloises bleues?” he asked.

“No, sir. Sorry.”

“Just give me a pack of Marlboros, then.”

The vendor handed dé Dale the pack and said, “One hundred baht.”

“One hundred baht! ($2.20) Are you out of your mind? Forget it!”

“Okay, okay. Eighty baht ($1.77). Special price for you, sir.”

“Special price for you maybe,” dé Dale grumbled as he removed some bills from his wallet. “Rémy, remind me to get some cash tomorrow.”

“Dé Dale, get some cash tomorrow.”

“Would you like me to punch you now, or later when we get back to the hotel?”

I laughed, but took a step back just to be on the safe side.

As the vendor was giving dé Dale his change, something clicked in my friend’s mind: “Um, perhaps you can help us . . .”

“Yes, sir?”

“We’re looking for something a little, shall we say, stronger than tobacco to smoke.”

A small, dim light flickered on inside the vendor’s head. He smiled, nodded his head, and said, “Oh, okay . . . Kapoh . . . Okay. I got it.” Then, motioning for us to stay put, he added, “Let me get friend.”

Before long “the friend” showed up, a guy roughly our age in faded jeans and a tatty, blue polo shirt.

“You want grass,” he asked right off the bat.

“No,” dé Dale said. “We want yaba.”

“W-w-what?” The guy said, stepping back, eyes bulging. “It’s n-n-not easy t-to get.”

“Tell us about it,” dé Dale replied flatly.

“How about some grass? Real good quality.”

“No.”

“Hashish?”

Dé Dale gave the man an emphatic No. “We want yabaYaba or nothing.” He made like he was about to start walking away.

“Okay, okay. Wait. Wait.”

The guy’s eyes darted about, taking a survey of the people in the area. He gave us a good looking over, too. And, why shouldn’t he? For all he knew, the two of us, as odd a couple as Laurel and Hardy, might have been out to cheat or, worse, entrap him. 

Taking a few steps away from us, he made a call on his cell phone. 

“Okay,” he said to us after hanging up. “It take time. Twen’y minute, maybe thir’y. Not easy. Very, very hard to get now.”

Dé Dale’s eyes met mine as if to ask: you okay with this?

What are bridges for, if not for crossing

I nodded to the dealer. “Let’s do it!”

“Okay, follow me.”

We were led away from the Japanese street to a wide thoroughfare lined with noisy beer gardens and overrun with sloppy drunks.

“Wait here. I come right back. Five minute.”

As we waited, dé Dale whispered to me in French, “Any sign of the cops, I want you to hightail it to that street with all the shops there. Go all the way through until you get to the main street on the other side. Tu le comprends, ça?”

Oui.”

“Get a taxi, but do not, and, man, I shouldn’t have to tell you this is, Rémy, do not go straight back to the hotel. You do not want to lead the cops right back to where we are staying.”

D’accord.”

“Take two taxis if possible, or better yet, a tuk-tuk. They’re faster. Walk the last kilo.”

A few minutes later, the guy in the faded blue polo shirt came back and said he could get the yaba, but once again emphasized that it would take time.

Yaba is heavy shit,” he said as he led us away. 

Where did this guy learn his English?

“The police are . . . Police are . . .”

“Clamping down?” I suggested.

That seemed to be the word he was searching for. He nodded.

“Yeah, the police are clamping down. Heavy shit. Heavy, heavy shit. When you get it, hide it there,” he said pointing to his sock.

It didn’t sound like the shrewdest piece of advice to me. Were I a cop, that’s one of the first places I would look. No, it’s better to keep it tucked in you hand so you can toss it into a river, or down a drainpipe, or into a garbage bin the first sign of trouble, and run for your life into the nearest, most crowded place you can find.

“I understand,” I said.

“Ten year,” the guy said over and over. “Pot, hash, no problem, but yaba? Ten year.”

He made a gesture with his hands to show us the handcuffs that would surely be slapped on us if we were caught. 

It started to occur to me that this yabamight not be worth all the hassle and risks. Ten years in a Thai jail was no day at the beach. Just the same, I followed behind the guy like a child on the heels of the Pied Piper.


The first posting/chapter in this series can be found here.

Rokuban: Too Close to the Sun and other works are available in e-book form and paperback at Amazon.

注意:この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

73. Yaba

Friday evening, July 7th

 

As soon as I’m finished with work, I go to a Balinese restaurant in Imaizumi and wait for Azami. More shots of Ron Zacapa Centenarioand a pint of beer. Despite all I have consumed since the afternoon, circumstances are keeping me as sober as a judge.

Azami arrives an hour later with a hastily scribbled message from dé Dale: “Warrant?”

“Of course, they had a warrant,” I say. “A warrant to search my apartment, another one to search my body, and, one to make me piss into a cup. Warrants are the least of my worries. What about dé Dale? Is he okay?”

Azami says that he is. Nothing out of the ordinary has happened since dé Dale and I last met on Sunday. 

It is a huge relief, but it makes me shudder to imagine what might have happened to dé Dale and me if the cops had raided my place, then. The thought of it sends a fresh chill up my spine.

Azami asks me if I am okay.

“Yeah, I’m fantastic. Having the time of my life,” I say, downing the last of my Zacapa. “C’mon, let’s go get something to eat.”

We leave the Balinese restaurant and walk to a Thai restaurant called Gamlangdi, where a Thai man and his wife, both bubblier than cheap spumante, run the kitchen. Whenever Azami and I are feeling low or are quarrelling, all we need to do is pop into the restaurant, sit down at the counter, and chat with Mr. Chang. Listening to him talk in his animated mix of broken Japanese, pidgin English, and Thai, it’s never long before we forget what we have been upset about. We always leave Gamlangdiwith our bellies full, our hearts warmed.

Sawadi kah,” Mr. Chang beams as we descend the steps into the restaurant. “Long time, no see! O-hisashi buri!”

We take our customary place in the middle of the counter, before Mr. Chang’s work area.

Mo kekkon shita?” he asks Azami.

My girlfriend shakes her head. No, we haven’t gotten married yet. She looks towards me and rolls her eyes.

“Sir, why you wait?” Mr. Chang says to me.

I shrug.

“You should hurry up marry, have chil’ren. C’mon! C’mon! No spring chicken! Ha-ha!”

“I know. I know,” I say, pretending to wipe sweat from my brow with an o-shiborihand towel.

“Ha-ha-ha. Sir, you want Singha?”

“Yes, please.”

His plump wife, Yoopping, waddles over to a beer cooler and brings me an ice-cold Singhabeer. Mr. Chang serves Azami a pot of hot jasmine tea. We then proceed to order. “Pork satay, baikapao. . .”

Baikapaois a fiery hot dish made with stir-fried ground chicken and chopped vegetables, flavored with chili and basil and served on a bed of jasmine rice. It’s out of this world and it just so happens to be what I ate on my first night in Bangkok back in the spring of 2001. I was dining at a street stall—admittedly, not the most halalof places to eat, but damn good, nonetheless.

 

With dé Dale still in China on business, I went to Thailand two days earlier than him and checked into a suite at the Baiyoke Sky Tower.

A few months before our trip, Timemagazine happened to do an exposé on amphetamine abuse in Asia. Authorities in Thailand, in particular, were having a devil of a time trying to eradicate a potent form of speed, known locally asyaba, or “mad medicine”. 

The article, which was written by author Karl Greenfeld,[1]depicted the local drug in the most unflattering terms. As a former abuser himself, Greenfeld knew what he was writing about. But, rather than persuade me of the dangers of yaba, the article had the perverse effect of wetting my appetite for this new, exotic high. And so, while I might have written “sightseeing” on the Immigration card, the true purpose of my visit was to dig my teeth into the meat of another forbidden fruit.

After dinner, I took out the treasure map dé Dale had e-mailed me from Guangdong and hailed a tuk-tuk.

Sawadi krap,” the jockey said.

“I want to go to . . .” I checked dé Dale’s map. “Khaosan Road. Take me to Khaosan Road, please.”

“Khaosan, ka poh,” the jockey replied. “Okay, okay.”

As soon as I hopped on the three-wheeled taxi, the driver revved the small engine, kicking up a black cloud of exhaust, and took me on a Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride through town.

Khaosan was a broad street, about a block long, lined with restaurants that teamed with drunk Brits and Krauts, dirt-cheap guesthouses, dubious bars, and street vendors selling the same kind of overpriced crap that could be found anywhere tourists congregated. The street was crawling with Europeans—hippies wigged out on who-knows-what, boisterous students, and the occasional disoriented family.

Map in hand, I managed to find the dark alley that dé Dale had described, and walking down it, located the run-down guesthouse where “X” marked the spot. Sitting down tentatively at a table, I ordered a Singha.

An elderly Thai couple lounged behind a makeshift front desk, and, in an open-air lobby of sorts with several cheap plastic tables, sat three tough-looking Thai women.

As I sipped my beer, one of the women called me over and asked what I wanted. 

I answered her question with a question: “What do you have?” 

“What you want here,” she repeated testily. 

It was a reasonable question to ask considering I was the only foreigner around.

“I’m looking for yaba.”

“Why you know here?”

“A friend . . .”

“We don’t have anything today,” she said. “Come back tomorrow at five.”

I paid for my Singhaand returned to the Baiyoke.

On my second day in Bangkok, I went around the city pricing furniture, antiques, and other Asian knickknacks; the kinds of things I had been decorating my apartment with over the years. Running all over town all day in the sweltering Thai heat, by the time evening rolled around I no longer had the energy to make the trip back to Khaosan Road to try to score some yaba. Besides, I doubted the battleax at the guesthouse would actually come up with the goods. 

And so, when dé Dale arrived at the Baiyokethe following day, he found me empty-handed.

“What?” He was exasperated. “I was hoping you’d have the stuff already. Man, what kind of friend are you anyway?”

Soon enough, he would learn for himself how difficult it was to score yaba, despite reports to the contrary. But that’s the media for you. Timemagazine had reported that the drug could be found on just about any corner and sold for only a few bucks a hit. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Dé Dale and I hopped into a taxi and returned to Khaosan. 

When dé Dale had sent me the “treasure map”, he instructed me to “act cool and observe what the others there were doing.” It was for that very reason that I had sat down and ordered a Singhawhen I went to the guesthouse two nights earlier. 

But what does dé Dale go and do when we arrive? Mr. “Iam the Party” walks straight up to that shabby front desk of the guesthouse and, with a nod and a wink to the old man slouched in a worn Lazyboy, says, “I’m . . . looking for . . . something.”

I couldn’t help but smile. So, is this how it’s done, Master?

The old man didn’t budge, didn’t blink, didn’t raise a pinky.

“I’m looking for . . . something,” dé Dale said again, raising an eyebrow.

My stomach started convulsing. I had to cover my mouth with my hand and bite down on my tongue to keep from cracking up.

Dé Dale repeated the same pregnant question one more time to which the old man motioned lazily towards a woman in her late thirties. She hadn’t been there the night before.

With ever more purposefulness in his voice, dé Dale said, “I want. . . what you have.” 

It was all I could do to not burst out laughing. 

The woman answered with a definitive shake of her head, at which dé Dale finally gave up and started for the alley.

“Fuck!”




[1]Karl Taro Greenfeld is the author of the highly recommended Speed Tribes: Days and Nights with Japan’s Next Generation, Harper Collins Publishers, 1994.

The first posting/chapter in this series can be found here.

Rokuban: Too Close to the Sun and other works are available in e-book form and paperback at Amazon.

注意:この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

40. Smart Drugs & Not So Smart People

Windbreaker comes around again and asks if I like traveling.

“Yeah. I go to Southeast Asia—Thailand, Malaysia, and so on—about once a year. And, I try to visit a new country at least once every one or two years.”

“You do drugs when you were there?”

“Pardon me?”

“You do drugs when you were there?”

“Where?”

“Thailand. Did you do drugs in Thailand?”

“Huh?”

“Have you done drugs in Thailand? You know, ecstasy?”

On the bookshelf just behind Windbreaker is an article my friend dé Dale clipped for me from The Bangkok Times a few weeks ago. It describes Thailand’s illicit trade in narcotics, yaba in particular.

“You must be joking.” I say. “Of course, I haven’t.”

“Oh? Why not?” Windbreaker seems surprised.

“Why not? Because I have zero interest in being thrown into a Thai jail is why not!”

“How about Japan, you ever do drugs in Japan? You ever smoke ‘ganja’?”

“Ganja?”

“Marijuana.”

“Marijuana? No. Never.”

“You’ve never smoked ganja?”

“Look, I’d be lying if I said I’d never smoked,” I admit, somewhat apologetically. “In college, you know, I 'experimented' with it just like everyone else. Hell, even President Clinton did. But, no, I have never smoked marijuana in Japan.”

Cross my heart and hope to die.

A taller cop, thinning on top and shabbily dressed, takes a large case off the top of my refrigerator, places it on the dining table and opens it. Inside is a water pipe, broken down into about eight pieces.

“What’s this?” he asks, holding up the Bohemian glass bowl that forms the base of the pipe.

“It’s an narghilè,”I say. [1]

“A what?”

“A water pipe from Lebanon,” I explain, “for smoking tobacco. The tobacco is in the cabinet across from the fridge. Top shelf.”

If there anything in my apartment is suspicious, it’s that pipe, but, rather than pack it up with all the other things the cops are now confiscating, he returns the narghilè to its case and puts it back on top of the refrigerator. You can smoke dope with one of those, not that I’m going to tell them.

The same cop, clearly not the sharpest tool in the proverbial shed, asks if I am Muslim.

“How many Muslims do you know keep a well-stocked bar?”

I have a small shrine of sorts dedicated to St. Max Kolbe—patron saint of, among all things, addicts—stocked with Ron Zacapa Centenario, Absinthe, Bombay SapphireSatsuma potato shōchūTres Generacionestequila, Pernod, and so on to keep the home fire burning.

He sighs irritably, then, starts hunting through the contents of my refrigerator where, in addition to the usual perishables, I keep vitamins and other supplements on the top rack of the door.

“What’s this,” he asks, holding up a small bottle of filled with a green liquid.

“It’s Champo-Phenique,” I answer. “It’s for insect bites and cold sores.”

He bags it up as evidence. Then, he removes a small box. “And this?” 

“I have rhinitis,” I explain, pulling a handkerchief from my back pocket and honking the klaxon good and loud for effect. “It helps.” Sniff-sniff.

The box contains about a month’s supply of Modafinil, a mild stimulant I’ve been taking for the past three years—I happen to be slightly jazzed up on it this morning. Did I give the truth a slight twist by saying it helped with my rhinitis? Not really. It does help me keep my eyes open when the allergy meds I take daily are trying to pull the shades down.

But Modafinil does so much more, something that I’m not about to let them in on, because, as they say, loose lips sink ships, a fact that is made all the more poignant when your boat is filled gunwale-to-gunwale with plainclothesmen. Modafinil taken with a cocktail of the Cognamine and other nootropic smart drugs will have you soaring like a rocket all night and landing softly as if onto a giant marshmallow. Astonishingly enough, none of them are controlled substances in Japan.[2]

The cop drops the Modafinil into a Ziploc bag to be sent to the lab, then closes the fridge having done his bit.


[1]The names for water pipes vary from country to country. In many parts of the Middle East water pipes are called narghilè (pronounced “arghileh”). “Hookah” comes from the Indian word for the pipe.

[2]“Nootropics” are drugs that are said to enhance cognition, memory, and attention. Many of the drugs mentioned above have since become controlled substances in Japan. (Party poopers.)


The first posting/chapter in this series can be found here.

Rokuban: Too Close to the Sun and other works are available in e-book form and paperback at Amazon.