April 25, 2009

1

THE cold water spluttered and stuttered out of a cyan blue pipe that was strapped up to the ceiling against the rusting, broken aluminium roof that let in water when it rained, which, being the tropics, it did, and often.

On the see-through bamboo walls, a selection of coloured toothbrushes had been slid into the bindings, and across them marched a determined line of red ants, destination unknown, tiny little fellows with a bite like hot copper piping being seared into your flesh. And they were fast, too. Once, when jumping down from the bar to the barbecue area when Odd was baking barracuda and swordfish and crab over ferocious flames while hungry customers looked on, I briefly placed my right hand on a bamboo rail to steady myself. The ants weren't happy. What felt like hundreds of tiny hot mouths clamped down hard, sinking miniature incisors into the flesh of my palm. Seriously, horribly, white-knucklingly painful.

Higher up from the toothbrushes and their ant army, also stuffed into the binding, was an array of Thai barman clothes: T-shirts featuring either Bob Marley or Che Guevara, shorts, and old, well-worn Y-fronts. This was the washing line of the madhouse. All items - and I do mean all - shared by Hong, Ben, Bum, Nin, and occasionally Khun Den and Bao, the tattooists, more of whom later, all of them from the sprawling, violently poor city of Nakhon Si Thammarat, all of them slightly menacing in their own way, all of them firm friends to this day, only one of them any longer in prison, in leg chains, for murder.

Empty watermelon shampoo tubs lay on the sodden, rough concrete floor, which was hideously dirty, and upon which I was standing, naked, as the cold water trickled out of the makeshift shower and down across my goosebumped torso. I was tanned almost black; the front half of my hair was blond. My eyebrows looked like two white versions of the dangerous, red, eight-inch centipedes that would lurk in the shadows of this ramshackle bamboo toilet-cum-shower when the heavy rains lured them from outside. It was, quite literally, a jungle out there.

The toilet itself was a regular affair, in that you peed into it or sat on it. Not that there was an actual seat. And not that you sat on it, either, as hovering was the only answer. Despite the holes in the wall and the roof, inside this 4ft by 4ft box was thick with humidity and along with the ants and the deadly centipedes, the mosquitos swarmed and flickered around the dangerously unguarded lightbulb that swang inches from the gurgling pipe.

There was no flush, either. Next to the toilet, taking up half the space of what little room there was in the first place, was a large plastic bin full of water. Floating on the top was a smaller bowl, like a child would use to eat cereal from. This was the flush. I would scoop bowl after bowl into the toilet bowl to wash away the ablutions into a cess pit somewhere in the jungle, but not far away enough so you couldn't smell it.

Getting even to that point was interesting. If there ever was toilet paper, which there almost never was, it could be placed into the toilet, but would instead sit festering in a bin in another corner of the humid pit, covered in gorging flies, until someone with a hardier stomach than mine could be bothered to empty it.

In the absense of paper, I was forced to go "traditional". When finished "on" the toilet - and the first time I had to do this, the word "grimace" lacks any of the shame, filth and self-loathing I felt at the time - I first half crouched as I doused my backside with water from the flush tub, then had to use my own left hand to properly clean up. Grotesque. But - and I know this may be hard to swallow (for want of a better word) - remarkably cleansing, too. That's not to say I don't take personal hygiene seriously, but I'd never felt cleaner. And after the first couple of times performing this hideously unnatural natural act, you get used to it, too. Scolding instructions from childhood would come hurtling back like freight trains: Now wash your hands. Stop biting your nails.

This, then, was my Thai en suite bathroom: A stand-alone bamboo shack buzzing with flies, with stolen and unprotected electricity playing Russian roulette with a "shower", where I would stand next to angry red centipedes, bent over while scooping out my own shit with my hand or washing ants off my toothbrush.

Six months of that, dear reader. It's kind of character building.

2

I sat on the scorching hot sand watching them tear away Auy Bar from the top down, hacking away at the bamboo with machetes. There was a team of them at work, slashing and swiping with the large, heavy blades. No one wore a hard hat. Only two of the eight wore anything on their feet. Flip flops. But the healthy disregard for health and safety madness was merely a sideshow in what was taking place before me.

My "home" was being torn down. My bedroom, which consisted of a raised flat wooden surface on which I'd place the bar cushions when I eventually closed up at night, with an old towel as cover, gave up little resistance to the swooshes of the knives. The aluminium roof that turned the room into a furnace with the arrival of a blistering dawn each day, fell away. The crow's nest - where I'd spent one cold, frightening night six months before - fell easily. The Auy Bar sign and some of the walls were carried out to a van, perhaps to be used later for another project.

After three hours, the work was done. Ironically, the only thing left standing was the toilet, ten yards into the jungle. There was some mild interest from the other beach bar owners - Mr Joe, who months later would be shot in the back of the head; Coffee, of Black Coffee bar, who ran an illegal book-keeping operation in Lamai betting on English football, and who once stood on one of those red centipedes and ended up with a foot like a honeydew melon for a day, and who taught me that chak wau meant "wanker"; Kum, next door, who was entirely crazy and once scared the life out of some tourists as he ran down the beach towards them, desperately trying to get them into his "bar" - which was in fact eight broken seats and an icebox - without realising that the large fruit knife he'd forgotten he was holding might be an off-putter; and Bao, down at Graffiti bar, another Rasta, who was married to an English girl, and who was the reason Keith and I went to Lamai in the first place, because they had used to employ Robbie, Keith's friend, who had also gone to Thailand and never returned several years before.

We were too late. Robbie had thrown away his passport, moved to Bangkok, and still lives there now, illegally, teaching English, and drinking lots of Mekhong whiskey (which is really rum). Still, people in glass houses...

So there I was. Visaless, penniless, plane ticketless, six thousand miles from home, and now homeless, too. Truly, a beach bum.

3

Back in 2004, when you walked up from the beach onto what Mikkel called Easy Street, but was actually called Lamai Beach, even if it wasn't a beach, because it was a road, directly opposite was a bar called The Tavern. We didn't go there very often. It was run by a genial Londoner called Steve and his girlfriend, the entirely aptly named Nut. A tremendously beautiful, buxom girl with a mind as unpredictable and ferocious as a live volcano. That was why, when I wandered in there asking if I could have a job - or indeed, a bed - Steve was on crutches, as she'd attacked him the previous day with a chair.

"Sure," said Steve. "But I can't pay you, mate. There's a recession on."

Inside The Tavern was comparatively gloomy. Unlike Auy Bar, which sat on the sand looking out across Lamai Bay, where we would see the sun rise up out of the dark and watch as the tropical storms flew in during the rainy season, this was a dark, air-conditioned room, with a huge roll-down TV screen for the football, an off-balance snooker table, Heineken on draft, and a menu boasting such traditional Thai food as ham, egg and chips, Irish stew, full English all-day breakfasts, pies, and Tetley tea.

The snooker table was my bed, which with the addition of cushions wasn't nearly as bad as you might imagine. Especially when, for the cost of the equivalent of 15p, a couple of Valiums kept you knocked you out for ten hours.

But it couldn't last. A stick-thin lunatic with albino eyebrows curled up asleep on a snooker table was starting to put the regulars off their Chaz and Dave selections.

So I moved again. Into the tattoo shop.

4

Bao (another Bao, which means brother, and was "brother" of Bum, even though they weren't, but were both Rastas) and Khun Den (yet another Rasta) had a tattoo parlour out on the main ring road. It wasn't very busy. Me and Khun Den slept on the floor of the shop, while Bao slept in the backroom with his young girlfriend, Taa (meaning "eyes").

Days were always the same. Bao would rise bright and early, regular as clockwork, at about 2pm. He and Khun Den would immediately inhale industrial lung-size plumes of marajuana smoke from their pipe. Only then did they feel at all ready to face the day. While Taa prepared food - normally leftovers from the night before, which sat in the open air beneath fly covers in the open kitchen at the back, with such genuinely delicious dishes as pilchards mashed up with chillis, or various soups, curries and fish - Bao and I would play badminton over a washing line to the side of the shop. Khun Den would disappear off on a motorbike into the jungle to find more marajuana (from a dealer, that is. Nothing romantic like a natural dope field a la The Beach.)

When Khun Den returned, they'd have yet more smoke, then Taa would serve up the food. Sat cross-legged on the floor next to their bed, we would each have a cup of water and a bowl of khao suay in front of us - beautiful rice. Rice being their staple diet, the Thais respect it. A spoonful is always taken first before anyone goes near the accompanying dishes, of which there is normally one soup, one or two curries, and raw, long, green beans which crunch in your mouth, releasing hordes of vitamins into tortured souls.

They tattooed on occasion, and the money was good. I was in charge of sweeping. They do a lot of sweeping in Thailand. Their outside toilets might not be up to much, but general household cleanliness is almost an obsession. They also shower several times a day.

Despite being stoned out of his tits each waking moment, Bao was a tremendously talented tattoo artist: Khun Den was, too, and he had the extra skill of being able to also use a traditional bamboo tattoo stick. Both of them, naturally, were covered from the neck down in tattoos. I think that amount of skin art can look vile - certainly on Westerners - but on the brown skin of those from the southern Orient, it seems to work.

Their English was excellent, particularly Bao's. A man with no education to speak of, who'd been in and out of prison many times in his youth - for "fighting" he would say, chuckling with his big white teeth, dark eyes gleaming - was literate, talented, thoughtful, generous, and genuinely funny in a foreign tongue.

One night, as I sat there feeling bad about eating his food and cluttering up his life (although this is quite normal - the Thais like crowded houses for some reason, and they're very "family", even to those not related), he looked at me as though a lightbulb had just gone off inside his head.

"Dut Tin!" he said. "I know what I want to ask you."

"Yes?" I said.

"You know English. You know it good. You must to help me with something."

No problem, I thought. Anything I can do to help someone who's really helping me.

He plucked out a DVD from under his desk and slammed it into the player.

"Okay," he said. "I want to explain these words to me."

It is fair to say my heart then sank when Liam Gallagher appeared on the screen, launching into Wonderwall.

* MORE Thai Tales here. Read in reverse order, from the bottom up. Not for the faint-hearted.