Welcome Me to the Kingdom, page 17
He could say things in a way that made Benz believe they would happen. But Benz didn’t want a funeral pyre. He picked up the can of gasoline and walked past Tintin’s pile to pour whatever they had into the generator.
“What are you doing?” Tintin asked.
Benz began disconnecting the stadium of headlights, one at a time.
“Put on Rocky again.”
Tintin didn’t respond. Each light that disappeared threw new shadows on his face.
“I can do that,” he said as Benz reached the final light.
The film felt short and clumsy, the ending now inevitable. But when the reel finished Tintin reloaded it.
And so they went through it again, listening to the arrhythmic murmuring of the fan and waiting for the generator to sputter out, the projector’s flare to fade.
Neither of them dubbed the film. They let the images run silent.
Call me Pinky. Let me guess, you’re a sideline? I don’t know why Pi Nawa wastes her time on you part-timers. Most of you don’t have what it takes. You don’t come back after the tour. I know your type. Go on, this is us. The doors swing in.
Classier than you thought, isn’t it? Not a blow-job bar. Not a massage parlor. No by-the-hour agreements. We’re as upscale as you’ll find on this soi. As a cheer-beer girl, you’ll get a commission on what your tables spend. Get them to buy you tips, “lady drinks.” That’s the idea anyway. If you want to make real money, you’ll need to get them out of here. Men use the bar to window-shop. For us, the real money’s in outcalls and what the farangs call the “girlfriend experience.” Make-believe. They can be so coy.
I mean, until they get you back to their hotel room. Then they’re all the same. Then, it’s two pops. Most can’t, without chemical help, manage more than that in the ninety minutes. It used to be one, but if they blew their load right away, they’d still want the next hour and change and the truth is it’s sometimes easier to fuck them than talk to them.
There are cameras in all the corners. The guys can get shifty about being recorded. We tell them it’s for their protection. It’s not. It’s there for us. The hotel rooms are another story. If you get into trouble, call Pi Nawa. You know she bailed me out once after this man took me to dinner at a hi-so French place—I mean really French, like everything blanketed in cream, the waiters politely looking down on me. Then he went to the bathroom and never came back. On his way, he sent our waiter with a bill. Some sick joke. But even Pi Nawa has her limits. There are bad times, bad men. You show up to a room and it’s two instead of one. Or four. That’s four times the money. You do what you have to do to get out.
Back here’s the staff area. Clock in, clock out. Lockers. Bring your own padlock when you come in. You like that? Lotte has a thing for glittery stickers. He’s the main bartender. After Pi Nawa, Lotte’s your best friend. Split your tips and he’ll look out for you. He’ll fill your beer bottle with drinking water, that kind of thing. Can you hold your alcohol? Anyway, you’ll learn to backwash.
Bulletin board. This envelope’s for business cards. It’s mostly the Japanese who leave them. Some of the girls are cold callers, and they’ll go through all the cards. I’ve never seen the appeal. Discount coupons for cosmetics, waxing. This section is for side jobs. Paid weekends in Singapore’s nightclubs are a good starting point. Money’s good, like foreign good. You take home tips and commission. Lodging’s included, bunks and toilets, even instant noodles the one time I went. But you’ve got to pass an interview. They like their girls light-skinned, pretty, no stretch marks. It’s a good backdoor into the VIP circles. Local circles, too. Rich kids and their “N-up” drug parties. There’s money in that. But also drugs, mostly uppers. You have to know your limits. Or you could end up like that pretty, Babybelle. Poor girl. Now we all know her name. What’s your nickname? No, you’ll need something more memorable.
Don’t be taken in by this quiet daytime street, it looks different by night. You know, this whole strip—from the 7-Eleven that sells out of lube weekly to the grandma omelet place at our end of the soi—one family owns it all. Old money. The head of the clan has big hair to match her big name. Owns a classic Benz on suspension so spongy it looks like she’s coming around the corner on a parade float when she arrives, mornings of the first Monday, to take rent. Everyone thinks they’re above this work but everyone takes a slice. So I say, you’re not special. There are the Mae Sai girls, the Phayao girls, the small-timers in your side-soi karaoke bars. And then there are the downtown girls, and we’re not the same. I had one university girl like you. Looked just like you. Sweet and skinny. Mommy gave her an allowance bigger than most salaries. But she wants a trip to Seoul. She wants SK-II and a Leica. In she comes. There are dabblers. There are part-timers. I could time the swells in you sidelines by the releases of new iPhones.
Don’t get me wrong. There are the old-school ab-op-nuat places, with their bleacher seats and one-way windows and coffin rooms. There are the girls trafficked from Myanmar, from Cambodia. There’s that shit on the border. But right here, the money can be good. “C-suite salaries on the street level,” I like to say. And once you’re taking the money, you won’t be able to imagine working anywhere else. That’s the trap. We’ve come so far. The only time it gets to you is when you’re alone, and the tips are down, and the cock is sour. But then you look around for help and…See? Nobody is alone here.
With everything going online it’s only becoming faster, greater. The men, the money, the want. In the kingdom where from birth the royal decree has been “enough.” Take just enough for yourself, we’re taught. In Buddhism and song and Isuzu ad. You know what my nickname was, originally? Not Pinky. I was born number twelve of twelve kids and my mother called me Pho—Enough! It isn’t.
We’re outside Metropole when this native thirty-something in a miniskirt takes Bird’s hand and asks him in English, “Mister, my friend, you want sexy massage, mister?”
Stella and I stamp our heels and laugh. It’s funny because this woman’s so floor-country Thai that she could be Bird’s mom. Well, his mom before she married up and into Bangkok, settling in with his Yankee dad like he’s a retirement plan. Bird says in easy Thai that he’s fine, no thanks, and this woman looks like she’s swallowed a straight capful of drink.
“Then I’ll give you half off because you’re luk khrueng,” she splutters, recovering. Half off for a half child. Sometimes these natives are even funny.
The club’s guard takes IDs but it’s the faces he reads. Bird and Stella have to nestle me between them, wash out my muddy color, a fault I lay at my mother’s feet.
Inside, it’s Bird’s table, so Bird’s buying. The rum drips out golden and familiar and smelling like metal.
Stella drags her chair next to me, leans my head on her shoulder, and holds up the bottle. “Photo, please.” She hands Bird the phone.
I check the image. “Don’t post that. I look like a raccoon.”
“That,” she says, tapping the screen, “is why we have face correction.”
Even though we’re both luk khrueng, I’m dark beside her. Hers is a color I know well from the billboards that make a rat maze of our city: Stella modeling this yogurt drink or that instant noodle. Mostly, though, it’s whitening creams. Her latest, a Skytrain spread, shows Stella as one of twenty winking women, their portraits cobbled together to form a palette grid. White Peach is the darkest on their skin gradient. Stella’s color they call Mascarpone, as if any natives know what the hell that is. Now they think it’s a skin tone—just two squares off Porcelain.
Even when it’s not Stella up there, it’s her I see: showcasing a push-up bra or the latest lace thing from Seoul. Stella’s body, you could strum the lines of it.
“Yoga,” she always tells me.
Like hell yoga, I don’t say. Just like I don’t look at the P-stamped pill she slips under her tongue before a meal—what she calls her supplements, and what Bird, during Stella’s ten minutes in a toilet stall, calls puke pills. But that’s also false, because it all comes out her ass. Picture that on your palette.
Bird slaps down his empty glass. He closes his eyes, rolls his head and smiles, his cheeks like waxed apples. He wants to dance. And so Stella and Bird and I come together like old lovers, the moves unambitious but satisfying. We know what not to talk about: the hooks of Stella’s hips, say, or Bird’s eyes traversing the contours of that man’s shoulders, his jawline.
Visiting Metropole is soothing, especially on a night like this. As long as you hit the selfies early, you can dance seams right through your body cream, through your face cake. And tomorrow when your cubicle buddy asks you where you went, and with whom, from over the top of a mirror that’s magnifying her brow, you’ll have something to show for your night.
“Oh, Metropole,” you can say, knowing she’d never get in. Because the club is really a temple, see. It’s about ritual, dance, idols. Entering the black box shores up a glossy-magazine worldview; only uppity natives with big-eye contacts, premium-bright whitening cream, and loose perms are going to manage to steal by the guard. So what you’re looking at—you with a hopeful reflection, you with the fine-tuning filters, you with an income disposed on cosmetics—is the fairest in the land.
* * *
—
“It’s two in the morning,” Mom says, discovering me in the kitchen at barely 1:45, fighting the corkscrew.
The cork pops out and wine sloshes over the white tiles. I steady my arm to pour a glass, playing sober. “So why are you awake?”
Mom says, “It’s two on a weeknight.”
And I say, “Stop, okay? I’m an adult.”
I make an exit with my glass. Mom follows me, turns the lights out one at a time, chasing me into my room.
Sleeping’s hard because I can never keep the day from coursing through me—echoes of interactions and what I didn’t say in them. Most evenings I need my comedown wine, a habit I inaugurated one night in a hotel room, an American’s (I know, I know, but the farangs are easier, most are just passing through, you know?). Unable to sleep next to this guy, I drank alone in his kitchenette, twirling the complimentary corkscrew, my thigh sticky with his goo. I thought of Dad’s scratchy good-night kisses when I was young. Dad setting down his leggy wineglass, what always looked to me like a busty woman in red waiting for him to finish with me. Mom was never that curvy woman, not even in her next-to-spinster age when she should have been filling out from the middle. Mom will always be severe through and through. Dad’s gone.
I was halfway down the bottle when the American woke up for the toilet.
“Sorry,” he mumbled, running his thumb down my spine. “Jet lag.” He stood with me at the window.
“See those apartment towers there, like a row of graves?” I pointed. “The second is me and my mom.”
“And your dad?” he asked.
“You ever meet a man named Rick on your travels?”
“I guess?” he said, reaching for the bottle.
“Yeah, me neither.” I took another swig and left him the tannins.
* * *
—
In the morning there’s a gruesome smile of wine spit on my pillow.
My morning routine: rubbing cream on my butt. There’s a coin-sized spot where, since I was thirteen, I’ve been blotting whitening Gluta, testing, testing, turning my private part pied. Most women spread this stuff on their faces, but you don’t know what the gunk can do to you. It gets rashy sometimes, my spot.
“You’re not using it between your legs, are you?” asked my dermatologist, seeing that my face is the same color it was on my last visit. “Because I have something for that, too.”
You know what Gluta is? Some say it’s cancer cream. I’m not sure whether that means cause or treatment, but next time you’re too fired up to sleep, next time your best friend’s over and she complains between swipes that she’s, like, bored—bored!—try googling glutathione injections.
You know the saying: Beautiful by way of the knife. Nowadays: By the needle. By self-induced vomiting and snacking on ice. By sanding down your face. By the belt machines that jiggle cellulite off your hips, like fat sloughing off a spit roast. By acid masks. By sweatboxes. By the hour on a high stool in the cosmetics section of the mall, the fluorescence spotlighting your every flaw. By hamster-wheeling in the gym. By breaking your cheekbones and trimming your lips, snip, snip, let’s restitch that face, doll.
“Fakes,” Stella likes to say, with her beautiful-by-birth entitlement.
But it’s a way of life. It’s the way of the “pretties,” those second-rate models famous for their car-convention appearances. Pretty as title, as vocation. My question about the profession is: Whose ambition is it to become a car accessory? Also, is there, like, a pretties hierarchy? It’s one thing to drape a Maserati—at least that machine has curves—but whose job is it to sexy up the family wagon? I’m just saying, because once, when I was younger, Mom’s friend suggested I try it someday.
“You might be dark for a luk khrueng, but the fact that you are half white should be enough to land a pretty job.”
And if that’s how my life had gone? You’d find me in a bar pushing beers by now. “Hey, boys, how about I bring you the BIG bottle?” But that’s how those girls live.
Only, yesterday there was a newspaper story about a pretty accidentally injecting Botox into her bloodstream. She died.
You’ll understand my caution with the cream.
Mom outside my door, yelling, “Lara, it’s seven-thirty already!”
Mom in the driver’s seat taking me to my magazine internship. Taking advantage of commuting time, of record-breaking traffic to tell me what I’m doing wrong. It feels like we’ve stalled forever among anonymous greys and whites, fiberglass encasing other people’s lives, shutting in the shit-slinging I know is going on. I suspect Mom planted the traffic here just to shame me.
This is the hour when across Bangkok, on Skytrain platforms and outside police booths, in factories and parking lots and schools, superiors stand with megaphones, imparting daily lessons to those lined up before them. Why should I be any different?
“I know you don’t want to listen to me,” Mom says, as the light winks from green to red again without our ever moving.
I eat cornflakes from a Winnie-the-Pooh cup and watch motorbikes trickle by. At least someone’s getting ahead.
“You remember Bo, Nina’s daughter?”
“Mom, you’ve told me about Bo.” I flip down the visor, pretend to retouch my eyeliner. “Also about Inky, Waan, and Joy. You’ve shown me their graduation photos. I practically know their starting salaries.”
I review my reflection, a ritual from my childhood ballet lessons, biweekly exercises in bearing the sight of my body sausaged into a unitard and practicing grace, practicing my plié, my belly an accordion. Also the nauseating rubbing of my thighs. Also the hashed and furrowed flesh. Hell is a hall of mirrors.
“You can’t waste your life, okay?” Mom says. “Everyone else has grown up. When are you going to finish university?”
“It’s not like I’m a failure or something. It’s just taking me longer to figure things out. My career’s not exactly a straight line.”
“What would your dad say?”
“Fuck Dad.”
“He tries to talk to you.”
“No, he sends you money—that’s not what I’d call trying. He doesn’t get to tell me what I should and shouldn’t do with my life.”
Mom falls quiet. The row of cars, like a belt of luggage, conveys us onward.
* * *
—
A man grins into his mirror, taps his front teeth as if adjusting the fit of a smile that he’s just installed. He tests the effect by walking past a woman, who undulates, goes weak at the knees.
“That’s how we sell toothpaste,” my editor tells me, handing me the storyboard sketch he just acted out.
Not all the luk khrueng are modeling, see. Somebody has to write copy.
My manager demonstrates his own grin now. He’s why we use sex to sell bottled water.
“He’s right, though,” Stella says later, when I complain about my day organizing a tooth shoot. “The woman is the measure of the product’s success.” She points at the stage that’s been erected in a shopping mall’s foyer. “Hey, here’s Bird now.” Applause, and Bird emerges uncomfortable, leveling that bow tie.
We’re here for the launch of MRMan magazine—Modern Renaissance being what it stands for, a lesser GQ. MRMan’s staff seems to be under the impression that Gatsby-themed events are new.
“Here’s Bird,” I echo. He stands up there with the MC and looks good, I have to admit. His hair is a polished car hood, his teeth newly minted. He takes his white looks from his white dad. Lucky asshole.
Already I’ve eaten too much of the finger food borne by pretties displaying matching flapper-girl chignons. My nails raise red tracks on my skin. This is how I handle discomfort, scratching like a child, pretending the problems are skin-deep. I take another flaccid piece of food from a pretty. Her torso is a cigarette.
Stella eats nothing. Her bootheel makes a testy tap-tap, impatient with the media team in the corner that has yet to flock to her, to broadcast the word, the who-what-where of her outfit, the oh-this-little-thing? that ornaments her hair. Tommy Mookjan designed it for me, she would explain. But tonight nobody asks and up onstage Bird is floundering in Thai.
MRMan’s MC is too native to understand Bird’s illiteracy—our boy is international-school educated, see, a modern heir to the colonial bootlickers of old, those officers with their clean Queen’s English unable to communicate with their own countrymen.
