Bangkok Babylon. Jerry Hopkins

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СКАЧАТЬ let his boozy exploits get a touch out of hand. At a dinner I attended at the Oriental Hotel, one of the other guests was a Hong Kong businessman Shrimp said he was courting as a client. By ten o'clock, time for the piano player to go home, Shrimp was standing on the table, yelling at him to play on. The prospective client quietly picked up the tab when Shrimp wasn't looking and sneaked out. Another time, I joined Shrimp for lunch and he was legless before the final course. I decided then that he might be a before-lunch friend.

      Another couple of years passed. To my surprise, he'd finally married Mayuree, the Thai woman he'd always rather dispassionately introduced as “the mother of my children,” who were then seven and nine. His business, in the interim, not only survived but blossomed, and by 2003 he had several “divisions” with a payroll of thirty and a client list that now included companies such as Nestle, Coca Cola, Holiday Inn, JW Marriott, the Peninsula and Oriental Hotels, Hilton and Playboy.

      “One of the divisions is design development, taking care of the look, the design, style and manner of the company. It's brand engineering, really. You engineer the identity of their brand and put that brand out. Another is the photography for the advertising. Everything is interrelated. I also have a multi-media division for web site development, CD ROM, all the high-end computer tech aspects. Another division is signage systems. We design, manufacture, install and export signs for anything from a small restaurant to enormous commercial complexes. The last piece of business is outsourcing. We have a creative factory of computer artists, all Thais. Every morning we get ad briefs downloaded from the U.S. and in the evening we send the finished ads back, up to two hundred a day. For catalogs, magazines, phone directories.”

      Shrimp and I were having a “sober” lunch. (I drank two beers and he had a bloody Mary and a single glass of red wine) when he said this. “Sounds like a story of rehabilitation to me,” I said.

      Shrimp laughed and said, “Disgusting, isn't it?”

      Yet another year passed, as I put this book aside for another project. When again we made plans to meet for a meal, I told him I wanted to confirm or have denied some of the wilder stories I'd heard, as well as get some more from him.

      “You expect me to remember?” he said. He suggested a close friend come along to jog his memory. I agreed and learned that some of the stories were true and some probably were not, never mind which; what difference did it make? Does anyone really want to be told that Marco Polo didn't go to China or that Columbus didn't discover America?

      The Italian meal was consumed, the wine bottle was empty, and another day was done. “So,” I said, “how tall are you?” Again, he said he swore that he didn't know. Then he smiled, his now small mustache bristling beneath a bald head, and said in a whisper, “Five feet, five-and-a-half inches.” It was as if he'd revealed his most sordid secret. Was I satisfied?

      “Final question,” I said. “Do you miss the calendars?”

      “I'd be fool if I said I didn't.”

      He said that earlier in the year he'd produced six softcore videos for Playboy and was negotiating to shoot another six, under the title Asian Angels. He said he was also talking about shooting calendars for Playboy. I recalled an earlier assignment from Playboy that hadn't worked out when they refused to run his pictures because the models were too “dark.”

      “That was when they wanted the girl-next-door look,” Shrimp explained. “Times have changed. Now my tastes are more acceptable.”

      Urban Guerilla Priest

      Father Joe Maier took a seat at the table across from me, and as I ordered two mugs of Heineken draft, he took a call on his cell phone. It was January 2, 2000, the start of the new millennium, and we'd met to celebrate numerous past failures and occasional victories and a future of more of the same. A moment later, he ended his call, abruptly stood, and said, “There's been a gas leak at the ice house. You want to come along?”

      We ran to his car, and as he sped through the Bangkok night, driving as I'd never seen him drive before, he explained that the place that produced ice for many of Bangkok's drinks was near his AIDS hospice and two of his shelters for street kids.

      “Tell me what you know about freon,” he said.

      “I don't know much. What I remember from physics class is that it's an odorless, colorless gas that has no effect on humans, but according to more recent studies, it screws up the ozone layer. Why?”

      He said that was what he was told was leaking into his neighborhood, the Klong Toey slum, the largest of some 1200 urban areas that were officially designated as slums in Bangkok. About a year earlier, Joe said, there'd been a fire in the ice house and it should've been shut down permanently, but the woman who owned it paid a visit to a local politician who paid a visit to the cops and nothing was done. That's the way troubles were handled in Bangkok.

      We were still speeding through the streets, squealing as we hit the corners, bouncing into and out of pot holes. I laughed.

      “What's so funny?”

      “I had a thought. You know those movies where the cop's driving an unmarked car when he gets a call and he reaches out the window and puts one of those flashing lights on the roof? Where the light is stuck to the roof by a magnet and is plugged into the cigarette lighter? I just had an image of you doing that, except you have a flashing crucifix.”

      He laughed as we slid around another corner and the rest of the way to the ice house we argued about what kind of noise should be coming out of the car when the crucifix was in place. We agreed it couldn't be a siren or anything that sounded like cops or an ambulance. I argued for Gregorian chants and Joe held out for “Ave Maria.”

      At our destination, our joking stopped. “That's not freon, it's ammonia,” I said as we exited the car, “–and that could seriously kill somebody.”

      All around us, life was proceeding as usual. At a food stall across the narrow street from the ice house people ignored the bad smell and spooned up bowls of noodle soup. How unusual, after all, was an offensive odor in a Bangkok slum?

      Joe accessed the situation and we took off at a trot toward the Mercy Centre, where, after he was assured that everything was alright, he left me with a friend. Bangkok is one of those unusual cities where personal safety was pretty much assured everywhere and at all times, but Joe insisted that unless you were Thai, Klong Toey had not only bad smells, but also the whiff of danger for outsiders. As a longtime resident known in the neighborhood, he figured he was exempt from any such threat.

      As I waited for Joe to return, I remembered how he'd come to Bangkok in 1967, straight from seminary in California, to say Mass to American soldiers fighting the war in Vietnam. His grandparents were homesteaders farming wheat in what was then called the Dakota Territory. His parents–German father, Irish mother–ran a whorehouse in Chicago for a while and after Joe was born, his dad became a fisherman on the West Coast, a ship's captain running supplies for the army to the Aleutian Islands during World War II, a truck driver in Washington state, a farmer back in South Dakota, a traveling salesman, a guitar-playing minstrel, a house painter, a womanizer, an absent father and a drunk.

      Joe's younger sister and brother were born in the harsh Dakota winter and both times, at age ten and twelve, Joe drove the tractor, pulling the car behind him with his mom and dad in it until they reached the county highway, where they waited for a snowplow to clear a path into town, so that his siblings could be born in a hospital. He milked cows. Ran a threshing machine. Finally, the old man just sort of disappeared and when Joe went to catechism summer camp, classmates laughed at his clothing, one pair СКАЧАТЬ