August 5, 2006

PART THREE

1

DON’T buy contact lenses on New Year’s Eve. Or, rather more importantly, don't decide to put them in for the very first time on New Year's Eve, and particularly so if:

1) You intend to drink and smoke heavily for the following 12 hours.

2) You're on a beach in the tropics, where sand blows all over the place and has eye-irritation potential to the absolutely be-fucking-jasussing max

3) You have no idea how to take out contact lenses, and

4) You are highly likely (see point 1) to forget even having put them in, in the first place.

Yes, folks, it's Juzzzy In Dual Scrape Bonanza, a 2-4-1 if you like, The One Where He Almost Blinds Himself And Utterly Humiliates Himself (Again) Too.

But first, picture the scene. It is around 3pm on Koh Samui, and my friend's father has just returned from the opticians up the road where he has replaced the spectacles he'd lost earlier that day (in the sea, while swimming, pissed) with contact lenses that have been inserted, he informs me, by a bevy of olive-skinned, intensely white uniform-clad stunners of the optician persuasion.

Before you could cry "astigmatism", off I scampered down the beach, happy finally to have an excuse to pop into the shop where I'd normally be found dawdling past at a snail's pace and walking, Harold Lloyd-style, into lamp-posts.

"Sawadee khaaa," they cooed in unison (trans: eh up fella, 'ow's it goin'), and that was it. Gouge my eyes out with falcon talons if you have to - I'm having contacts.

Now, I have to say, the consultation was going well. There was a lot of "suay taa" going on (beautiful eyes) and I was feeling pretty dandy. Bugger it, I thought, I'm going to see if I can take one of them for a drink tomorrow. The stock answer (meaning yes) came: "Your ollyday not mine." But that was it - I was on, for a drink at least. Then she and three others pinned me to a chair and prised my eyes open, finally managing to place said contacts onto my by now pulsating pupils (yes, pupils).

A couple of "chok dii's" and "khop khun khap's" later (good luck and thank you), I was off, contact lensed up like it was going out of fashion, skipping down the beach in the way that only someone who has ever experienced the joy of suddenly being No More Four Eyes For Me No More (No More) can understand.

Next up: aforementioned 12, or maybe even 14 hours of Lashed And Eviscerated Like A Dawdling Spanish Bull, taking all manner of quenchables and unmentionables in equal measure, and finally back to my chum Mikkel's bungalow to collapse.

Or collapse for an hour, anyway. Because I woke at around 9am in dire need of a bathroom visit. Only problem was, I couldn't see. And I couldn't see because my eyes were apparently glued together. And this scared me quite a lot, not least because Mikkel was well away upstairs and unaware of my plight.

So I'm banging and battering and stumbling around the ground floor of the bungalow in just a pair of shorts, tearing my skin in places and starting to have scrapes and smears of blood across my body. Obviously, being still A Tad Tired And Emotional, I begin to wail. Loudly. I am panicking.

Mikkel eventually screams at me to shut up, which I didn't, and he realises there's a problem. He fires up his moped and I hang on to him as pillion, tears streaming down my face, terrified I'd lost my sight, my only possible glimmer of joy being that I could at least look forward to an elongated career with Motown.

We reach the opticians (dawning on you now, eh?) where Mikkel decides, sensibly, to stay outside, while I stumble in, half naked, smeared in blood, my shorts halfway down my arse, stinking of ale, blubbering, right into two spectacle frame displays which go everywhere, and start yelling incoherently about being blind.

Twenty seconds later - count 'em - having been held down by five (admittedly rather fine) optician girls, I was contact lens free and seeing perfectly.

So I lived to see another day. But strangely enough, the girl in the shop couldn't make it for that drink in the end.

And I don't wear contact lenses.

2

JANUARY seemed strange after The Lovely Rebecca. After she’d gone, you could say I was a little lost for a while. Certainly, for the first month we exchanged lots of loved-up emails, more because we could than because we felt we had to.

There were thousands of miles between us physically and even more mentally in that we knew we’d likely never see each other again. It probably didn’t help, either, that I wrote Parts One and Two of these Thai Tales on Mikkel’s porch shortly after she left, and emailed them to her, hoping strangely that she might be amused by my calamitous nature, without thinking for a moment that she may also have been appalled. Certainly, talk of Dental Lub, contact lens girl et al seemed to leave her less than pleased.

But I wasn’t really bothered. Not enough. After all, she was back in France with her beloved human rights barrister boyfriend Fab (named after a popular hundreds-and-thousands smothered English lolly-ice, I do believe) and I was tasked by Mikkel to become his unofficial bag-carrier, tripod handler, occasional interviewer, dining companion, drinking partner and general all-round gun for fire. I’d also, of course, moved into his place.

So my whole set up had changed. Sure, I was alive, thanks to both Mikkel and Mark. But I really was in no better state. I needed to go home. Problem was, my flight wasn’t until February 17 – the day after my mother’s birthday. The other problem, which we’ll come to later, was that while I needed to go home, I didn’t want to. There was nothing there for me – nothing but shame, anyway, and I still didn’t feel able to deal with that.

So instead, I moved into the spare room at Mikkel’s “bungalow”, in fact a two-storey wooden house set about a mile-and-a-half back from the beach, with a scruffy green garden that played host to crickets, cockerels and quarrelsome dogs. It was also directly across the road from the Samui School of Learning, which merrily opened its gates around 8am each morning to the shrills and shrieks of two dozen kindergarten children – all around the same time Mikkel and I were getting in from a night out and were almost ready for sleep.

Mikkel had swopped his single inch-thin floor mattress on the ground floor for The Lovely Rebecca’s proper double mattress on the first floor, reached by climbing The Steepest And Ricketiest Wooden Staircase You Have Ever Seen. This was no easy feat in times of utmost sobriety – a state we were not very familiar with anyway – and nigh on impossible when mau – drunk – or mau maak – very drunk. (For budding Thai language enthusiasts, you’ll be glad to know that I was often greeted in bars with the cry: “Mau maak laew!” “Very drunk already!”)

So what with the cockerels’ hellish shrieks reverberating across the mountains like gunshots in a spaghetti western, the steady whirr of mopeds skidding past our bungalow as the Thais made their way to work, and the tourists either half-crashing their way home from a party or tentatively buzzing their way back to the beach, and all on top of the cacophony of kids shrieking blue murder at each other across the room, it was a rare day that the 8am nap ever came about. (Plus, the delightful Roz worked as headteacher across the road. Roz was English, charming, beautiful, funny, and all-round marvellous. Everyone who met her fell for her, but it didn’t matter. She was – is – with a local gentlemen called Liam, and they remain an item to this day. Still, we can all dream, eh? Anyway, the point of this is to say that neither of us felt like chatting to Roz while we had hair like Yahoo Serious, breath like long-ago condemned breweries and – more often than not – young ladies of a certain nationality creeping silently across our balcony.) This was when the occasional early morning trip to Friendly store on Lamai Beach Road began to become a daily occurrence.

(There’s an element of snobbery to this next anecdote which I feel the need to explain. I’ll probably fail, and fail dramatically, but there you are.)

Friendly supermarket, which was not supposed to be a 24-hour affair but was anyway, sold everything. From ice-cold plastic bottles of water – around 6p for a litre – to high-octane alcohol; curious air-filled biscuits that tasted of nothing and were but a mere mirage to hunger; chocolate; Pringles (and, oh, how many times did we make that mistake?); laydee paper (never failed to tickle us, that one); fresh orange juice; the English Language papers The Bangkok Post (which we both liked) and The Nation (that neither of us did); cigarettes (a packet of Marlboro Lights were 60baht, or 80 pence); and, of course, an extensive selection of drinks both hard and soft, hot and cold (plus a myriad of other things too intensely boring to list here.)

Outside, on the comparatively cool porcelain benches, would be sat the pasty farangs, on their own or in pairs, usually, in vest tops with fake designer names, stubbly and red-eyed, glugging away from their large, litre-bottles of Chang, the vile but strong local lager, the strength of which (in its local form, anyway) could swing from “strong” to “really bloody strong” from one day, or bottle, to the next. (Chang means elephant, incidentally, and the beer – presumably now with a regulated strength and taste – is the principal sponsor of Everton Football Club in the UK.)

It was, it must be said, an incredibly sad and depressing sight – even coming from someone who’s wrecked large portions of his life and certainly every single relationship in it by believing that just one more dusk-till-dawn party won’t do any harm.

If these same men had been in the UK and sat outside Tesco drinking Special Brew at that time of the morning, they’d have been moved on. People would have avoided meeting their eyes, and mothers would have hurried past with their children. As it was, the Thais – polite as ever – just carried on about their business, while the farang mau baa – crazy drunk foreigners - got on with the job of Seeking Early Morning Oblivion.

Still, it was here that Mikkel (as I never had any money – again, more of which later) would purchase two Nescafe Ice Coffee Turbos – chilled tins of coffee the same size as the mixer cans you’re handed during a plane journey. Into the shopping basket would also go a copy of The Bangkok Post (depending on the time of day, anyway – yesterday’s paper rarely arrived before that day’s afternoon), and two nice, chilled white Wine Coolers.

Our scrawny, shaking fingers would scrappily snap open the coffees and we’d pour the ice-cold turbo-caffeine pick-me-up down our bird-like gullets. We’d smack our lips in appreciation. Say something like “fuck, that’s good”. Then toss the bins in the waste paper bin, before I’d be back riding pillion and we’d head off to Lamai market, whereupon Mikkel would buy a bag of “the green stuff” (naam prik num, literally water chilli young, but in fact is young chillies mashed down with baby eggplants into a cold but wonderfully spicy and refreshing dipping sauce) for 10 baht, or 15p, and two bags of khao niaow (sticky rice) for about 5 baht each. Another ride on the bike, this time to the beach itself, next to a restaurant that claimed to be the oldest in the resort and which may well have been, but quite easily may well not have been, either. Adjacent to this was a small hut selling, among other things, barbecued-to-order plaa duk, catfish. Mikkel would order one of those, for 20 baht, and a plate of som tam, that fiery chilli-infused salad that originates from Thailand’s northeast.

Finally, we’d feast, tearing pieces of dark fish from the unforgivably ugly but undeniably delicious catfish with one shaking, delirium tremor-afflicted hand (although we’re convinced it was just the heat and the dehydration, naturally) and dripping handfuls of rice and spicy salad in the other. We’d wash that down with water, pay the lady what we (Mikkel) owed her, and then retire to the shade of a palm tree on the white sandy beach edge to enjoy our wine coolers.

The time, as we sipped away at these slightly sparkling alcoholic beverages, would be around 8.30am. Inevitably, one of us would declare: “Hey – it takes the edge off the day.” But the fact was, on the grounds that we hadn’t had so much as a wink of sleep yet anyway, yesterday was more often than not still to come to an end.

3

WE met a guy called Marty, a Canadian from Vancouver Island who pronounced his name as Mardy. Mardy, a tubby, middle-aged, middle-management, married man, was on holiday on Koh Samui with his rather nasty friend, Rick.

He was obviously interested in the local ladies and made no bones about telling anyone who would listen. But he was buying the drinks, so at least in Mikkel and I he had a captive audience.

He wasn't impressed with some of the big waves that were coming in, leaving that well-kknown pollutant seaweed all over the beach (later to be meticulously cleaned by the Thais, or dragged back into the depths by Mae Nature).

"You know," he said, in a phrase that Mikkel and I would find ourselves constantly repeating: "They wanna clean that shit up."

(One of his favourite anecdotes was to tell everyone how he organised "Mardy's Pardies" back home which, along with his own homemade Kalhua (which used to render the Native Americans very pissed, apparently) used to feature a whole "hog" that had been smeared inside and out with "garlic juice" and then roasted on a spit. No, really.)

Mardy, who struck me as something of a Colin Hunt character - you know, raucous, wracking laughter at his own jokes that were invariably drab - seemed to take quite a shine to me, though. One afternoon as we sat throwing Sangsom and Cokes down our greedy necks (think baby starlings awaiting regurgitation at the rum fountain) I must have been particularly on form because, noting our difference in size - him being the "zero" and me being the "one" in a number 10, if you can imagine - he suddenly chortled in that North American way and declared:

"You know, for a liddle guy, you god a lod of poke! What's your star sign?"

Now what kind of question is that for one grown man to ask another? Other than a weird one?

I will never, ever understand the fascination with star signs. People - more women than guys, it seems, but it's not exclusively a female pastime - check them all the time. Jonathan Cainer makes over £1million a year - yes, a million - from his phone lines. Justin Toper (remember him?) emails his pearls of wisdom from his luxury home in Bermuda. And Russell Grant (the Christopher Biggins of astrology)- well, let's just move on.

And yet if you work on the basis that there are at least 60,000,000 of us in the UK, say, at any one time, then that means that little nugget of shite in the Daily Blame that's written just for you is equally applicable to a mere five million others in the country, too.

A clairvoyant once told me (when I was interviewing her, I hasten to add - don't even get me started on that lot) that I should treat star signs like flowers, in that you get different flowers at different times of the year.

Well yes, I replied. Very nice. But there are more than twelve varieties of bloody flowers, aren't there?

Here's what www.astrology.com just told me as part of my "free" "reading" (in the interests of accuracy, you understand):

"You are a gambler and an adventurer at heart, one who loves to take risks, to discover and explore new worlds, and to take the untried path rather than the safe, reliable one. You are an independent soul, freedom-loving, and often very restless. You need a lifestyle that provides opportunities for travel, movement, change, and meeting new people. A steady routine which" - oh for fuck's sake, enough!

I'm a Sagittarian, by the way.

4

MIKKEL was due to leave Samui a month before me, but was able to put his flight back for a fortnight. It meant he was able to able to complete a lot more footage of his and The Lovely Rebecca’s film, to which I was more than happy and indeed eager to help. His documentary was about the protracted relationships between Thai people and foreigners, mainly if not entirely those between Western men and Thai girls.

Obviously, the distinction most people draw is that lonely fat perverts from the wealthy west, with sickening displays of gross largesse, find themselves a winsome and willing Thai wife, usually a prostitute, often younger than themselves who, if they were still at home, working girls nonetheless, would be completely out of their league.

Well, I wouldn’t even begin to argue with that.

But in the same way we snigger at celebrity women of a certain age dating or even marrying toyboys, and vice versa, it is not to say that some of these couplings cannot work. On Samui, certainly, while there is sex tourism, while there are men sniffing out and paying for sex, while there are equally predatory girls on the prowl for rich and unsuspecting tourists (these girls are not all the poor country girls sent to the city to become “waitresses” to help their sick family back home), and while a lot of it can be and often is unsavoury, that is to do a great disservice to the majority of Thai people and, indeed, the genuine relationships between Thais and farangs that few snigger about because they never hear about them.

These are the relationships of many years’ standing, which have borne children, businesses, and see relations of both sides travelling to the other’s countries much in the same way aunts and uncles visit one another in the west. Just a little bit less often. And with more of a language problem. Separated by one-and-a-half-continents on one side, and one-and-half continents plus the world’s two largest oceans on the other.

Still, Mikkel and I sought out and interviewed several people, Roz and Liam among them. We rode around the “girly bars” at night, him tooting his way through the crowds while I held on for dear life with my knees on the back while taking moving camera footage of the bars. We rode halfway to the top of a hill that boasted the local Overhang Rock, which Mikkel assured me offered incredible views and had a wonderful bar. (I should have guessed when the moped gave up half way because it was too steep. Yes, the views were great, but I would have enjoyed them much more – or even if at all - had I not been on the verge of a heat-and-exhaustion breakdown by the time we reached the summit. Oh, and the bar had closed years earlier.)

Working – and especially climbing – makes for a thirsty business, however. So normally, after a few token hours with the camera, and perhaps either a swim in the sea or a chill for an hour on the balcony (with a bag of ice, a bottle of Sangsom, some Coke and some bastard Pringles – and endless Marlboro Lights, of course), with me perhaps bashing out bits of Parts One and Two of this tome, we’d head off into town to say “hey” to our (Mikkel’s) legion of lady admirers.

Two of those nights come back to me with shuddering intensity – or, rather, the mornings after do, anyway. The first was when I’d collected my clean laundry – almost the entire ensemble of clothes I’d taken with me – and on our way back to the bungalow, Mikkel and I had decided to have a couple of drinks. A couple more followed, and a couple more after that. I put my laundry behind one of the bars for safe keeping (and this I do remember) and then went on to party. We were leathered. At one point, possibly outside Friendly supermarket, I was obviously trying to fit in with the other farangs a bit too much as Mikkel was apparently having great difficulty picking me up off the floor. A motorbike taxi home, almost making the thing crash because although I could just about hold on, I couldn’t actually sit straight, and kept wobbling the bike from side to side. Needless to say, it was goodnight from me.

Next morning, I remembered putting my clothes somewhere safe. Problem was, where? We trawled all our regular haunts and quite a few irregular ones, too. But it was not to be. The clothes were lost forever. (Although I’m sure I saw a few items being worn quite blatantly by some of the bar girls. Didn’t want to “lose face” by asking, however.)

The other was when I was sat on Mikkel’s balcony in nothing but my ridiculous white trousers, on one of the highly uncomfortable triangular mattresses, with legs crossed, cigarette lit, and a section of The Bangkok Post raised high above my head.

Mikkel, lying opposite, suddenly piped up: “I say, old fella?”

“Yeah?” I replied, a stream of smoke lazily creeping upwards from my mouth towards the boastful gecko squatting upside down on the porch ceiling.

“Good night, last night.”

“Yeah,” I said again. “Even though I feel like absolute death.”

“Yes, well, I’m not surprised,” said the eloquent Dane. “It looks like you were so smashed you managed to soil yourself, too.”

I dropped the paper. Cigarette fell from my mouth. Spread my legs.

Surely not?

But there it was.

A large, light brown stain right across the backside of my ridiculous pants, plus a thick heavy stain down the inside of one leg.

“You know, you’d better clean that shit up,” he said, lighting up a fag while chuckling to himself. “And Seedy?”

“Yeah?” I was still aghast, and almost speechless. And needing a shower.

“Don’t forget to put that in your tome, old boy.”

Always said I would, my friend – always said I would.