Thailand II (no pictures)

The next morning, I woke up to her curled up at the head of my bed, flipping through the hotel's phone book. As soon as I rolled over, she passed me a cup of bad coffee and gave me a dazzling smile. For a split second, I forgot the fiscal nature of our relationship, the fact that I was (and still am) trying to escape myself by escaping geographic locations, that I would never see her again. But for that brief second, I was happy. She ruined the moment by getting dressed and putting her face on. After a moment I, ever the sharp one, realized that it was time to show her the door, and my wallet. After putting on some shorts and a shirt (there's nothing worse than being tossed out of your hotel room, naked), I intimated that our night was at an end: “How much?”

“Nothing.”

“What?”

“You asked me my name, you asked where I was from, you asked about my family, you massaged my feet. Nothing.”

“Uhhhhhhhhhh.” There's nothing like a money transaction gone your way to make you speechless. “Here's some American money.”

“I don't need it.”

“I don't want it.” We stared at each other a moment, then she took the $30 (910 Baht), clapped her hands over her head, bowed, and left. I don't know if I've ever felt worse about myself than when I closed the door.

Anyway, after taking a quick nap (it's hard to sleep with a Cambodian in you bed....Pol Pot and all that), I took a tour of the city in a TukTuk. Wow.

Golden Pagodas; garlands of exquisite flowers strewn around small altars like after parade confetti; red-robed monks under yellow parasols disembarking from boats, whose provenance and sea-worthiness were questionable at best; a vegetable market so consumed by chaos that after a the first few mesmerizing minutes it actually seemed orderly, like a fractal; an abandoned amusement park; houses cobbled together from the rusty blue hoods of Ford trucks and purloined corrugated metal; the children.

The children half naked and rail thin, limping on a stump or running with a head full of steam with hands stretched out for a baht or two; the children prostrate on the pavement with torn 7-11 cups on the pavement in front of their heads and arms ready to receive alms from this unexpected visit from the bulky red-head foreigner (apparently word spreads quickly in the poorer sections of Bangkok). And of course my heart broke for all of them. But, without tossing a single baht, I ordered the Tuk Tuk to take me to the nearest bar so I could drown out the sorrow and the noise, as per usual. So, I wound up at the The Goose, on Suhkumvit Road.

The Goose was an uneventful, laid back bar (thankfully) and though I was greeted by the smiles and clasped hands of waitresses I just got my drink on. Again, as per usual, I drank too much and ate too little because the little voices of those poor bastards on the road were eating into my heart. After a while, I left and started to weave my way back to S15. Sukhumvit road is underneath the metro tracks, so there are a lot of shadowed overpasses one has to walk through in order to get to where one wants to go, and it was in one of these shadows that I was accosted by “Lisa.”

Lisa was tall and skinny, willowy even, with eyes streaked hazel and grey. Her hair fell in luscious curls (a weave, I'm assuming) onto her bare shoulders, her red dress fitted her body in the exact opposite way my clothes fit mine. In other words...wow.

Anyway, Lisa sidled up to me and told me to take her with me to my hotel. Having been sated the night before, I declined (politely, I might add). As soon as I said that, she gave me a hug, took my hand for a moment and whispered “Sure?” into my ear. I nodded, sagely, just to confirm my previous statement, because I couldn't quite get my other parts to work. She gave me another hug, then asked me to sit with her for a while. Because I can't help myself, I sat down on the curb with her. She smelled like the best possible mix of a candy cane and summer. While we were sitting in an even darker part of the street, the doorstep of a shuttered store, she offered me a breathmint from her handbag. “A true lady,” I thought as I accepted the mint. Almost immediately, Lisa whipped her phone out from some unseen pocket of her dress, mumbled into it for a while then announced that she had to go meet her friend. I wished her well, hauled myself to my feet, and continued to stumble down the street in search of the 7-11 across from my hotel (7-11s are on every corner in Bangkok, just fyi) because I needed cigarettes and a bottle of water.

At the register of the correct store (only 1 mishap on the way), I pulled out my wallet to pay and, to my (continued) amazement, I found I had no cash money. When I left The Goose, I had $200, 4,000 baht, and 150 UAE durhams in my wallet. At that register, at that moment, I had exactly nothing. “The Cunt Robbed Me” I shouted accidentally. Then it hit me: I still had my wallet, I just didn't have any money. My ATM cards were intact, my credit card was still there, my driver license and Dubai work permit and Notary Public and Security Guard Trainer and First Responder cards were all still safely ensconced in their normal spaces. In short, Lisa took my wallet from my pants, snatched the cash, AND replaced it without my knowledge. So I stood there, and even though I had been robbed, I wasn't upset. I was amazed, because she hadn't taken anything of value. Just money.

Sure, I had to walk to an ATM, navigate through the unintelligible menus of the Thai banking system, had to walk back to that 7-11 bashfully and give the cashier the ATM-smelling bills, but I still wasn't upset. Because Lisa had left me with everything that has ever mattered to me: my sister's senior picture (the one she wrote nice things on the back of, not the other one), a love poem Brenna wrote me during my freshman year in college, a short letter I wrote to myself 15 years ago, a weathered card with a fading heart stamped onto it. In short, Lisa only took money and left me the more important things. Money is replaceable, memories that I can place my hands onto aren't. When I'm on my deathbed and I can still put my hands on these little things, things which prove there was a time I could love and be loved, I will thank Lisa for not taking them. And I will be grateful for the lesson I learned: what is precious to me needs to be treated as if it were precious to me.

Which leads me straight into Istanbul.