apologies...

... for the absence of my weekly saturday night drunken rant/pity party/blatant observation served up on a platter of pretense. sorry to break up the status quo, kids. time to venture into the uncharted waters of sober sunday scribbling.

i get to go away on wednesday. to thailand. again. i'm excited. although i know the country is probably a little different since i was there last, in 1992, i'm sure it'll be as mind-blowing. bangkok, when i was 15, was probably one of the most life-altering times of my existence. from then:

An early morning flight on Cathay Pacific. For breakfast we’re served cheeseburgers and fries and M&Ms in our free firstclass upgrade. Mom and Dad start a fresh new day with champaigne. The attendant my brother has befriended gives us Cathay stockings, knit green and red wool, Christmas stockings with chocolates and crayons and paper and sunglasses. great. crayons. I hide in the world of falling Tetris blocks and the tinny walkman version of Naughty by Nature’s O.P.P. Not too long after we’ve already landed, bellies still full of burgers and fries. It seems Mom and Dad had enough time though, to get a little champaigne-giddy. Looking back, it could have been a giddiness caused by the excitement of just having landed in Bangkok. I don’t know. I just followed them, waiting in lines, and picking up cases, and waiting for cabs.

Driving through the streets of Bangkok, gritty, more intensely gridlocked traffic than Hong Kong in a city that seemed never to end. We drove past slums and ghettos and projects and shacks and beggars and bums, children on the street crying, vendors selling cheap knock-offs of Gucci, Versace, Chanel, Nike, Rolex and Reebok, moms panhandling to feed their sons who are missing legs and arms and eyes and in and amongst it all, clean, ironed, starched and shaved white middle class Westerners taking photos of it. It’s a perversion almost worse than the girls no older than I standing on street corners in bras and imitation-leather minis and stilettos waving down cars with pained grins and tiny teenaged fragile shaking hands.

This time it’s the Park Hotel, Sukhumvit 22, dark alley dirt road, no sidewalks just knock-off stalls and stray dogs and American shoppers looking to get the best deals on Nike straight from the sweatshops so they don’t have to pay the mark-ups back home, trying to find them fast enough so they don’t have to witness the horrific reality that is Bangkok too long before they try to wiggle their McDonalds, Carl's Junior love handled bodies back to the safety of the shiny, golden out-of-place Park Hotel on Sukhumvit 22. “It’s such a shame” is a phrase I’ll hear out of too many of them, staring, gawking, snapping photos but refusing to drop a couple baht in the cans and hats of visibly starving beggars.

The Park Hotel was luxury beyond what we’d ever seen in our blue-collar townhome lifestyle back home. Made me think of Vegas, out-of-place, in the middle of a dustbowl, glittering beacons for the rich or not-so-rich but willing to spend, a vacuous void in which to throw your dollars and baht without the danger of supporting the destitute, who made up the majority of Bangkok and some of Vegas, too. Shiny brass handrails and lamps and casino carpets, lace and velvet window dressings, and a long, mahogany check-in desk, with Thai girls, just pretty and lucky enough to have gotten a job sucking up to Western tourists, and avoid having to suck ‘em off in the streets.

Of course, I was too young at the time to put any of this together. Existing in my own selfish head, hedonist teenaged ignorance, I ran to the pool with my little brother and swam and marco’d and polo’d, soaked and burned in the orange Thai sun until I was crisp, pruny and exhausted. Another unwakeable slumber, this time in a spacious queen, in a spacious room in a city that seemed to go on forever.

The Red Corner was the “Western” style restaraunt we frequented during our stay in Bangkok and my 15-year-old eyes fell in love with the baby-faced waiter who served me soda and fries. Almost completely devoid of any knowledge of English, he shuffled around in that truly Asian way, beaming a shocking white smile made even brighter by dark, milk chocolate skin. Already having demanded we eat at the Red Corner for every meal because they served nutritious American fries, my fickle little heart looked forward to seeing (courting?) my lovely, grinning, Siamese love interest again and again.

Buckled into our neon fanny-packs, we ventured out into the wild, commercial streets of Bangkok, the air thick and brown, 8 lanes of cars on every road, in every direction until the ends of the Earth. Tuk-tuks, men on bikes with or without motors hauling around baskets full of Mr. and Mrs. Jones from Connecticut or Sam Pratt, Christmas-breaking from Harvard, backpack in tow. Along every street, stores spilled out onto the sidewalks, selling trinkets made by the tiny little hands of this country’s children, leather goods, Buddhist bells, wind chimes, silk pajamas, sneakers, watches and little 24 karat gold nose and ear pickers inlayed with lovely rubies and mother of pearl. We spend and we spend and we spend, my brother and I buying 2 tons of pirated cassette tapes of Seal, Public Enemy, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and 2 Live Crew.

In the mood for a marine adventure, we made our way to the bank of the canal, hopped in a longtail boat, warned not to let the water splash on us for fear of foreign diseases so crippling we’d wish we were dead, we huddled and took photos of little brown boys leaping off their back porches, resting on stilts over the bank into the brown, muddy water, splashing and laughing with delight. Men sat on logs, perfectly balanced, holding fishing lines, relaxed and smiling and waving as they hear us roll by snapping photos like some misled group of paparazzi. Long, slim boats slid past us full to the sky with fruits and vegetables and cages with live chickens in them on their way to make their living selling their fare at the floating markets, a wave-rocked merchant bazaar in the canal, the muddy canal, in the dusty city of Bangkok, the skeleton in Asia’s closet, the fatherland of suffering.

End of the line. We hop out, need some relief and look for the toilets, pay toilets, filthy pay toilets. Drop some baht and relieve ourselves of the endlessly sipped flat, warm orange fanta and make our way back into the city.

We push through the slimy, filthy air and smells of body odor, peanut sauce and insense flowing out the open doors of all the golden peaks of temples and palaces, The Kingdom of Siam, hidden amongst dingy concrete buildings, a booming sex trade and golden nose picker sales. We make our way up one street and down another and they all look the same and people follow us, begging us to buy their goods, going so far as to cry and pull and grab, throngs of desperate female and male faces longing for your “American” money, it gets to be too much and they swim together in the heat and the humidity and going long enough one could swear it was one giant face of some Asian demigod, begging for your purse, tears streaming to the dusty ground, look at my little girls, my little girls they’ve given up their innocence to eat... The once great and beautiful Kingdom, fallen, defeated under the pressure of global economics.

It was exactly at this moment when my heart began to cave in. When I got my first real shot of what the hell I was going to be seeing over the next year. My family, a very loving family, a very intelligent family, accomplishments unheard of amongst the Jones of Connecticut. Suicide Counselor Dad and 6th Grade teacher Mom had huge hearts and made mine huge and gave me respect for all life, all people, all animals, all cultures and ideas and religions. Bitter as I was, I loved and love still, everyone and I had no idea people suffered like this. I sauntered up the ramp of an overpass and came to a woman with her eyes sewn shut, missing her leg, a child in her lap no bigger than your average American television set, begging through tears in a foreign tongue, and there’s no need to mince words here, it was sick. My heart twisted inside me, my knees softened, I trembled as I took out the money I had exchanged in the airport the previous day from Hong Kong dollars to baht, and dropped it into the little, brown, army cap she had turned upside down by her feet. I felt ill. The child started to cry and the blind woman felt around, found the bills I’d dropped in her hat and bowed, repeating words I’d never heard before, sounded like crying, though if there were tears, they would have collected in the sewn lids of her missing eyes. She tried to smile but there was nothing to smile about. The money was nothing, it meant a couple of meals for her and her little boy, but what then? I couldn’t stand it and wished to go home and I told my parents that and they agreed and we left and hid, like the other Westerners, in the cozy cool of the Park Hotel. My sleeping that night was much less heavy, tossing and turning, seeing the woman with no eyes everytime I closed mine.

i'll post pictures. if i can drag myself out of the gulf long enough.

posted by Courtney at 12:11 p.m.

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