Bangkok Old Hand Read online

  As I sipped away at a beer, and then another (this was a marathon performance), I mused about times past, and my career as a sex-show star floated up from the murky recesses of my mind.

  I was in Rangoon, and I had spent the evening with an old Burmese friend and some of his cohorts. Like practically everyone else in Burma, they were operating on the economic fringe. Hpo, my friend, was a black marketeer. His associates had a variety of pursuits. The guitarist was a smuggler, for example.

  This was my first trip back to Burma in two years, and I had been accorded a marvellous welcome. We were sitting outside at a rough wooden table under a thatched roof on poles, just up from the Pazundaung Creek. It was raining. (It is always raining in Rangoon in August.) The women were keeping a low profile. Earlier, I had been introduced, but now they stayed in the house across the way, cooking a variety of dishes which were served by the children, set down one by one on our table beside the flickering candles. Bottle after bottle of Mandalay Rum had appeared out of the dark, together with packs of black-market cigarettes. Nothing was being spared. The guitarist had sung a number of Burmese songs, and was now playing Beatles songs in my honour because I was a foreigner. I sang a Canadian song. (Actually, all the Canadian songs I know give me a pain in the neck, so I sang "I'm a Lumberjack and I'm Okay" which is, strictly speaking, British.)

  I was trying to drink only moderately, for I had to travel the next day. Besides which I had about $2000 worth of camera gear hung up on nails to dry. In local currency this stuff would have fetched three times as much. I was at ease with this crowd, but still — that was a lot of temptation, in a country where the average yearly income was a small fraction of two grand.

  Hung up to dry? Well, yes. You see, I had dropped it all into the river at sunset. I had been taken on a cruise in the rain at sundown. As I stepped into the little boat a buckle on my camera bag broke and the whole lot went into the water. The Canon A-1 was an electronic marvel that could do almost anything the photographer might like, except sustain a good wetting. Especially in salt water. The Pazundaung Creek was quite saline, along there, being close to the sea. My buddy held an umbrella over me as I wiped lenses and cameras on my wet shirt and told myself that it didn't matter because I was having a good time and I had always been a mediocre photographer anyway.

  Right then I was still resigned to the distinct possibility the gear had all been ruined. But I was drinking moderately because maybe it had not been, and I had to get up early in any case. Hpo was under no such constraints, however, and he was getting pretty happy. Half in the bag, you could say. At one point he leaned over to inform me, with great delight and much salacious winking, that he had a woman for me.

  This I did not need just at that moment. I thanked him profusely, but pleaded drunkenness, exhaustion, a head cold, and the need to travel at the break of day.

  No problem! Or so he proclaimed to one and all. His friend — me, that is — could drink all day and entertain a woman all night and never show a trace of fatigue. Or words to that effect. I said yes, perhaps that had been true some years before, but just at that time I was in mourning for my camera equipment and I had this head cold...

  Out of the dark came the boatman. Hpo and the rest of the gang were nodding and grinning in the candlelight, so pleased at my good fortune it would have been ill-bred of me not to go along with things. So I packed all my damp camera equipment in my damp camera bag before Hpo, the boatman, and I went tramping off. into the damp night and down to the water's edge. Hpo held the umbrella over me as we got into the wet little boat and pushed off into the pitch black. Had Hpo not proven himself a loyal and decent companion in similarly sticky- looking situations several times in the past, I could have suspected that soon my carcass, minus camera, would be floating face down in the river.

  The boatman rowed for some time in silence, but for the creaking of oarlocks and the gentle wash from the stern. The darkness was all but absolute. Eventually, though, I was able to make out a glow up ahead at the about the same time I became conscious of human voices. We drew next to a big old rice barge and tied up alongside. With the aid of a rope we clambered onto the covered deck at the stern, where the cheery light of an oil lantern and a charcoal brazier revealed a dozen Burmese or so, men of all ages crouched in the warmth and dry, drinking tea and smoking.

  I was made to feel very welcome, though bobbing and smiling and gabbling at each other were the limits of communication. No one spoke English except for Hpo and me. Towards the bow the hold gaped black and mysterious. Was that a cough I heard from the darkness? After a couple of cigarettes, Hpo told me to get ready. There appeared in the light a girl of 19 or 20, clad in a sarong. Was she okay? Anxious, Hpo put the question for everybody. Would I prefer another?

  No, no; she was fine. I wasn't about to argue. She was very attractive, but it hardly mattered anyway; I was going to have to fake it, somehow. How was I going to cope with that? Most immediately, where was I going to cope with it? Then that problem was resolved. She went over the side into the drizzle and she was beckoning for me to follow. Down the side we went, then, into one of the dirty wet little boats. Okay. Great. Now I knew how I was going to cope — I was going to row us down the riverbank a way, wait a decent interval, maybe try to convince her that I had a social disease or something, and then rejoin the others. The thing was, I didn't want Hpo to feel bad.

  Once in the boat, this sweet thing and I drifted away only to find that we were on the end of a line to the stern of the barge. We were still within the spill of light from the larger boat. I could see some heads leaning out and staring at us. I gestured: Cut us loose! I gestured again, more vehemently. This elicited nothing more than an excited gabble. The heads disappeared briefly; then they reappeared. The gabble did not sound happy. Surely they did not expect me to perform here, in this filthy little canoe, within eyeshot of the barge? But it seemed they did.

  I got out my pocket-knife. I had decided I didn't care what they expected; we were going down the bank in search of privacy.

  I had started to saw away when the girl hollered at me. At first I thought it must be her rope I was cutting and she didn't like it. But then I became conscious of what sounded like a gigantic freight train coming down the river. No freight train, however, it was merely the granddaddy of all monsoon downpours racing towards us. I sprang to the oars and got us back alongside the barge; we shot up the side just as the sky crashed down.

  Now that the girl and I were under cover again, the assembly did not seem as friendly as they had on first acquaintance. "Querulous" would in fact have described the atmosphere quite nicely. Hpo, at his most diplomatic, treated with them at some length while I dealt a few cigarettes; the girl had composed herself next to me, in the meantime, adopting a placid indifference to matters. Hpo finally turned back to me to tell me he had explained that the foreign devil was not berserk; he was merely shy.

  There was a perceptible softening of popular sentiment towards me. And, after a short further parlay in Burmese, Hpo grabbed my camera bag and the umbrella and told me to stay where I was. Outside, giants still had firehoses playing on the boat. Before I could do more than register a feeble protest, the lot of them — all 12 or 15 — piled off both sides and dropped into the boats below. There was one umbrella among them and that went with Hpo, who at last sight was holding it over my camera bag in most solicitous and, I felt, utterly futile fashion.

  With every evidence of total unconcern, my companion set about hanging a couple of blankets between us and the hold, confirming my suspicion there were more people lurking in there somewhere.

  The girl turned the full and frank gaze of her lovely eyes on me. In a moment she had unwrapped herself, my little present from Hpo. In the light from lantern and brazier her skin glowed warm cinnamon; and, abruptly, I realised my earlier convictions about being unable to do my duty were unfounded. Though I did not know her name, though we communicated only in inarticulate moans and monosyllables, though my cameras wer
e out there in the Great Deluge with Hpo, though I could hear, during a lull in the rain, a dozen boat people singing what sounded like sea chanties, though on the other side of that blanket there were mysterious people in a deep black hold, it was good.

  Soon afterwards I started to feel guilty about my friends out there in the rain, so I leaned over the side and signalled them to come up. They piled back on, soaked through but in a festive mood. Now the tone was definitely congratulatory; everyone was beaming, including the girl. Had I enjoyed myself? I expressed enthusiastic approval, grinning and nodding and looking at her admiringly. Even though I did not speak Burmese, I knew what everyone was saying now; a general move to abandon ship yet again made Hpo's commentary on events superfluous: "You go once more."

  No, no. Thank you very much, but that was enough. Thank you; I am very happy. Please stay on the boat. I managed to get through to them. I believe they were not entirely displeased that they did not have to go out singing in the rain again.

  Everyone on board enjoyed a cigarette in the afterglow, and then Hpo, the boatman, and I went back down the river to our party and to yet another round of congratulations.

  The guitarist had passed out but another, almost as good, had stepped into the breach. I stayed for the life-span of a last bottle of Mandalay Rum, and then Hpo arranged a ride for me back to my hotel. At 6:00 the next morning I had to catch a plane to Bangkok.

  Back at the bar in Bangkok, years after my performance in Rangoon, the man and woman on stage were finishing with a bravura act. Looking at their faces, you realised they were oblivious to the audience. In fact they seemed oblivious to each other, judging only by their expressions.

  There was enthusiastic applause and much shaking of heads and raising of eyebrows. The go-go girls came bouncing out again, and conversations resumed. I started to tell my friends about Rangoon, but there was too much noise and, anyway, one them said, Rangoon is dead. Nothing ever happens in Rangoon.

  19 SHMOOS AND ALIEN BLOBS AND THINGS

  Back when this was originally published, condoms were only starting to creep into polite conversation. Since then, of course, it has become de rigueur to go on about them at the least provocation.

  Still, many people don't realise this, but there are more things to do with a condom than blow it up and use it to decorate a birthday party.

  I didn't buy shares in IBM till it was too late. Then I missed the big surge in gold prices. The fortunes to be made in hi-tech have been made by others. The last major investment coup I didn't pull off was in condoms.

  It's too late now; share prices have already shot up. The worldwide AIDS scare is doing much to ensure the booming health of this industry. Everywhere you look, there are articles on prophylactics. Even the no-sex- please-we're-British have put the discussion of rubber prophylactics into the parlours of conservative middle- class homes. In American colleges, meanwhile, rubbers are being celebrated by "National Condom Week" beginning, appropriately enough, on Valentine's Day. In Thailand, of course, Mechai Viravaidhya has long since established the mechai as good fun and a fashionable conversation piece. If you own one of the mechai-encased-in-plastic key chains that sport the message " Break glass in case of emergency", you can flourish it in polite company without fear of censure. (At least I think you can. You try it first and let me know how things turn out.)

  In Thailand, family planning has put condoms on the public agenda. In the West, most recently, AIDS has done the same. Worry about VD is not new, however, and neither is the condom. The other day, for example, the newspapers reported that British archaeologists had just dug up five condoms in the foundations of Dudley Castle, near Birmingham. These artifacts, made of fish and animal intestines, had been interred there since the 1640s, and it is thought that they had belonged to English soldiers.

  Recently, back in Canada after an absence of many years, and conducting my own archaeological exploration of my parents' attic, where I still had some old trunks, I came across a couple of condoms which were just about as ancient as those from Dudley Castle. These two specimens were the only known survivors of the Canadian Army Shmoo Shoot at Armed Forces Base Camp Borden, Ontario.

  I was a mere lad of 18, and was enjoying a stint in infantry officer training school. This mostly involved a lot of running around in the hot sun, when we weren't floundering about in the swamp at night instead. We also got to play with weapons of various types. One fine summer's afternoon, as a break from running around in the sun, my platoon was double-timed out to the pistol range, there to practise blasting away with Browning .38 automatics. For targets, we normally used man-sized effigies of snarling, vaguely Slavic enemies wearing Nazi helmets. This day, however, our training sergeants had promised us a Shmoo Shoot. (You may remember "shmoos" as those personable little ham-shaped creatures in the old "Li'l Abner" comic strip.)

  On the range, we discovered a large cardboard carton which contained, as it turned out, thousands of army-issue condoms. Blind Bill Hickok and another platoon sharpshooter were assigned the job of blowing them up and pinning them to a wooden backstop. Inflated, in fact, they did rather resemble shmoos. In the course of the next hour or so, the Canadian taxpayer financed a veritable fusillade of bullets, some of which actually blew away a shmoo or two. We also had the taxpayer to thank for the survivors of the Shmoo Shoot, which we took prisoner in their hundreds, stuffing them into our pockets, ammo pouches, and mess tins.

  The optimism of youth. If I'd had the opportunity to put all those captured shmoos to the use they were designed for, I would've had a more interesting life to tell you about than the one I now relate.

  For years, my dresser drawers, my trunk, and my suitcases were infested with shmoos. But now there are only two. What happened to all the rest? I seem to remember dispensing them to buddies with heavy dates and high hopes. Others got carried around until lost or tattered beyond using. I suppose some of them might have found their orthodox end. Still others, though, were directed to less conventional uses.

  The autumn following the Shmoo Shoot had me at university in Montreal. Living in residence, we students devoted much or our time, in the traditional way, to devising new ways of making life uncomfortable for our fellow resident scholars. Those of you who are veterans of university dormitories will no doubt be familiar with tricks such as the old "put-the-sleeper's-hand-in-warm-water- and-stand-back-to-watch-the-fun" caper. Another one involves tipping large dustbins full of water up against the door to someone's room in such a way that when the occupant opens the door, he is greeted with cries of "Surf s up!" and a tidal wave sufficient to bring disaster to a small coastal village in Japan. Or what about this hoary ruse: wait for the day of the big date/big game/big exam; then, with the aid of two or three cohorts, you "penny in" your neighbour — you wedge in piles of coins above and below his. latch so that he can't get out of his room. A variation of this may be employed when the target hears all the pushing and giggling and starts shoving on his side of the door so the wedges won't be tight enough to incarcerate him. Against this very eventuality, a properly prepared commando will have brought along a tin of lighter fluid, which you will now pour under his door and ignite. Flames up around the waistband of one's pyjamas have been known to make even the most stout-hearted leap back from the door and resign himself to his fate.

  But we were talking about shmoos. These devices had their uses. Water-bombing sunbathers from second-story windows was one worthy application. Better than this, however, was the alien-blob-in-the-bed routine. This had to be used sparingly, since its effect depended largely on its novelty. For this one, you need a newspaper, a condom, and a bathtub. It helps if you also have an adolescent sense of humour and a lot of time in which you have nothing better to do.

  First, you ascertain that some numbskull has actually gone out and left his door unlocked (in a dormitory, can you believe it?). Then you spread the newspaper, several pages thick, in an empty bathtub. You slip a condom on over the cold-water tap and, very carefully, you b
egin to run water into it. It is truly remarkable how much water one ordinary condom will hold. Experience tells you how much you can manage and still tie the thing off without its bursting. Supported on the newspaper, and carried by two stretcher-bearers, this entity is now transported to the chosen landing site, where it is gently rolled off onto the bed.

  Its membrane stretched so thin as to be all but invisible, the thing looks like a giant transparent drop of liquid held together only by surface tension or, perhaps, some sinister will of its own. It really does seem to be alive. When you try to pick it up, it crawls out of and away from your grasp, amoeba-like, to sit quivering, brooding and malevolent.

  Now you cover it up and sneak out, so when your dormitory-mate returns, he will first of all be confronted with a hugely suspicious lump in his bed. At this point it is conventional for the perpetrators to crowd in behind him, sniggering and trying to look innocent at the same time.

  "Oh, hey! Lookit there — what is that strange lump under yon blanket, I wonder?"

  "Gee, I dunno. Maybe it came from outer space."

  Fear of the unknown gives way to curiosity; the blanket is whipped off and the victim, eyes agoggle, jumps back to a safe distance.

  "Hey!" he remarks. Rarely, under the circumstances, does one think of anything more cogent to say.

  Sniggers are now mixed with flying-saucer noises and suggestions that he try to communicate with the Blob. Chances are he still hasn't figured out what it is, although he's pretty sure it isn't an alien life-form.

  This situation might be used as a quickie IQ test. It would very efficiently separate a few canny sorts from the mass of humanity — the dumbo majority that try to pick up the Blob. They try to grasp it gently, but there's no way. You can't get a grip on it. You just wind up chasing it all over the bed. The normal reaction at this point is to get angry: you're not about to be bested by a blasted transparently brainless Blob. No sir. So you really make a grab for it, and it bursts, and there are untold volumes of water all over your bed and all over your floor.