I woke up early Saturday morning with Azami at my side, sound asleep but grinding her teeth so fiercely I worried she might crack a tooth. With a gentle nudge she rolled over on to her side, the gashing stopped.
I went to the kitchen to make myself a bowl of café au lait. Out on the balcony, as I drank my coffee, Pyonkichi rubbed up against my ankle.
“Frisky little bugger. Can’t get enough of it, can you? When this is all over, Pyon, I’m getting you a proper girlfriend. Promise. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Pyon?”
Saturdays were another full day for me. I had two lessons in the morning at a cultural center across town, teaching the unteachable: pensioners. At noon, I had to hurry back home where I had three more group lessons, back to back.
After teaching all week and having the same dull conversations over and over again, I was usually beat by the time Saturday morning rolled around. If I’d also squeezed translation and freelance jobs in between the lessons–and more often than not I did–then I was a zombie by the week’s end, on the fast track for karoshi, death from overwork.
The odd thing, though, was I didn’t feel the slightest bit tired that morning. I should have been an emotional and physical basket case considering all that happened, but I wasn’t. Like the day before, when I woke I was full of energy, my mind racing a mile a minute, high on the adrenaline coursing through my arteries.
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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 a virgin’s 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 Jean and I 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 Jean got out of that mask. Jean donned the mask and started hamming it up, climbing on to dupsters, spinning around telephone poles. Later as we were barreling through the streets of Bangkok on a tuk-tuk heading back to Patpong, Jean leaned all the way out, howling and beating his chest.
After barhopping most of the night we ended up at an empty hole in the wall where the Mama 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 the queue for the slaughterhouse.
“Jean, I wouldn’t put that piece there if I were you? She’s going to . . . ”
“Rémy, shuddup!”
Jean blamed the first loss on my interruption.
“Shall we make the game more interesting?” Jean suggested, anteing up the gorilla mask.
“Hey! I paid good money for that!” I protested.
“Trust me,” Jean said. “I understand how the bitch’s mind works now.”
It was a bloody rout: Jean 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 Narcissus.
After settling the bill, Jean told Mama that he wanted three whores to take back with us. Three! Boys be ambitious, indeed.
As I was wondering how Jean 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 femininity you ever could imagine started slinking in. It was as if we had arrived late at the farmers market and all that was left were greasy black bananas, bruised papayas and stinky durians.
“You gotta be kidding,” Jean said.
We passed on the orgy, hailing a taxi and heading back to the hotel, instead, where to our surprise the pool was still open.
“I was almost about to dive in after you,” Jean 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!”
Will you think less of me if I confessed that one of the happiest moments of my life was under that neon sky floating on my back in a pool as I tripped on yaba?
You might object that because it had been artificially induced it wasn’t real. What the hell isn’t? Christmas eve at the age of seven, jazzed up on the visions of sugarplums dancing in my head and the hopes that Saint Nick will soon be there and all that crap wasn’t real, either. That morning Yaba was closer to the truth than all the harmless fairytales of my childhood could ever have been.
Jean stood up and, yelling “Yaba-daba-doo” at the top of his lungs, did a canon ball into the pool.
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。
© Aonghas Crowe, 2009
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