Bangkok Babylon. Jerry Hopkins

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      Another time, when a young priest in the slum was threatened–he later became an archbishop–one of Joe's neighbors (now deceased) carved up the would-be assailant and fed him to the fish in the polluted canal that ran alongside the Slaughterhouse.

      “It's war,” Joe said. “The slums never invited me. I walked in and said here I am, let the Klong Toey wars begin. It was total arrogance and bravado. I tend to overstate and over-emotionalize, but I'm right. We've never done anything legal, but we've always played it straight, we've never broken the rules of the street.” He paused and then talked about a bishop in Brazil who told him, “When I help the poor, they call me a saint, and when I teach the poor how to help themselves, they call me a communist.” Joe paused again and finished his small speech: “I'd rather be a communist.”

      For twenty-five years, he was the only priest who visited Bangkok's meanest prisons. He also conducted Mass every Sunday for a quarter century at the prestigious Asian Institute of Technology, from which he also received, following a year's study, a degree in urban development. After a while, he incorporated his foundation (in the church's name, of course), and by 2003, he had built more than ten thousand slum houses of his own design and was riding herd on thirty-three schools with an enrolment of 4,500 kids and more than seventy thousand “graduates” who'd learned the basics of literacy (from teachers who were born in the same slums); five shelters for over two hundred orphaned, abandoned and abused children; the city's oldest AIDS hospice for fifty children and 150 adults; social workers on the street seven days a week; a legal attack team that represented two hundred kids in courts and police stations every month; a twenty-four-hour medical clinic, a credit union and women's advocacy group; and several self-help, skill-teaching programs that produced everything from candles to Christmas cards.

      As I remembered all this, I stood near the compound that included the AIDS hospice, two of the shelters, the largest school and the foundation's offices, a $4-million fortress called the Mercy Centre, financed by an American businessman from Atlanta.

      As I ruminated, Joe told me later, he arrived at the neighborhood police station, where for the next twenty minutes the portly, balding, sixty-year-old priest from South Dakota, whose mixed Irish and German blood boiled at thirty degrees Celsius, the average daily temperature in Bangkok, informed the cops who had the misfortune to be on duty that night precisely how they were fucking up. (His words.)

      Why weren't any cops on the scene at the ice house? He wanted to know. Why didn't they have a loudspeaker announcing the danger from inhaling ammonia gas? Was anything being done about the leak? Did they know how harmful ammonia was? What was the plan if someone got sick?

      There were many cops who welcomed Joe, and there were others who liked to get rid of him as quickly as possible, even if they had to capitulate a little, so in a short time, it was agreed that the police would dispatch someone to the ice house with one of those battery-operated megaphones and search for any injured or ill, in the plant and in the immediate neighborhood, and if any were found, to take them to the hospital.

      After collecting me, Joe and I hot-footed it back to the ice house, where he confronted the owner, who was sitting nonchalantly on the loading dock. The smell of ammonia was still noxious in the air.

      Now, Joe gave her holy hell, causing her to lose a bit of her face as there were several others present, but extracting a promise to pay for any possible hospital costs.

      With the cops arriving and the woman moving to greet them, Joe and I returned to his car. “This,” he said as we walked, “is how journalists and priests get killed.”

      I laughed again. “Happy New Year to you, too, Joe.”

      Ménage à Trois

      I wasn't the first foreigner to build a home in Nam Bua Daeng. Ron Hutchinson, a Scot, was there before me, marrying and building a two-story house for my wife Lamyai's closest friend, Jeab, an abandoned mother of two who'd met Ron at the same Three Roses bar where I later met Lamyai. He also bought her a pickup truck, taught her how to drive and sent a monthly allowance from the comfortable sum he earned working in Saudi Arabia.

      Jeab was six years younger than Lamyai and about two-thirds her size, a spunky little thing with a firecracker personality. She also drank and was addicted to a card game called “hi-lo.” But she was not, entirely, a layabout. Nam Bua Daeng was more a “hamlet” than a village, without a store or a place to eat, so once she quit the bar business, Jeab erected two rows of shelves beneath a roof, lined them with the basics–dry noodle soup, soaps and shampoo, batteries and light bulbs, cooking oil, whisky, a selection of pharmaceuticals, snacks and candy and cigarettes–and stocked a standup, glass-fronted fridge with soda and the cheapest brand of beer. She also moved in a tank of gas and set up a three-burner, outdoor kitchen, preparing soups and stir-fries every day, priced at the equivalent of 25 US cents. It helped pay for the gambling.

      At first, Ron was someone who visited Thailand on holidays. He didn't gamble, but he smoked and drank voluminously, so it was no surprise when he was disabled by a diseased liver and emphysema and his employer retired him at age fifty-nine. At about the same time Lamyai and I moved into our new home, he began fulltime residence in Nam Bua Daeng.

      It wasn't easy for them. Ron's money and belongings were still tied up in Saudi Arabia and he continued to drink and smoke and an earlier hip replacement acted up and he was reduced to using a walker for a while. Even when he recovered, he did little more than sit in a chair in the little “store/kitchen” and make change while smoking, drinking and watching football on TV. While Jeab played cards between selling bowls of rice and soup.

      Sometimes, Jeab said she'd stop gambling if Ron gave up the booze. Sometimes it was the other way around. But then one of them would backslide and all hell broke loose. Once, Jeab bit into Ron's left arm, leaving the crescent marks of her teeth as a permanent scar. Another time, when he passed out in the middle of an argument, she was so angry she shaved him bald. The villagers, whose homes were only a few meters away, were delighted; it gave them something to talk about.

      All that said, I really believed that Ron and Jeab cared about each other, that their shared spousal abuse–the “boxing,” as Lamyai called it–was their way of showing love. They also kept few secrets about their mutually enjoyed time in bed together, providing further entertainment for those living within hearing.

      Still, Ron never really got into being a resident of Nam Bua Daeng. He knew only a little more Thai than I did and didn't like Thai food, insisting that Jeab prepare the meat and starch dishes that sustained him all his life. He refused to visit the monks' encampment in the woods. Aside from Jeab and her daughters, I was his only friend, and a one-week-a-month pal at that. His house had the only telephone land line in the village and he enjoyed sending and receiving e-mail. The last time we talked, he asked me to bring some new software for Jeab's oldest daughter, for whom he had bought a computer. He taught her how to use it, thus making her the only computer-literate Thai in miles.

      The next time I went home to Nam Bua Daeng, he was dead. Lamyai and I visited Jeab and she showed us photographs of Ron, curled in eternal sleep; an autopsy showed his liver had beaten his lungs to the final punch as he slept. Over the desk where he once sat making change, Jeab had erected a small shrine, with his photograph, flowers, incense and a glass of beer.

      Lamyai and I accompanied Jeab to visit the monks and after arranging some fresh flowers in Ron's memory, she asked if we wanted to “see” Ron. She retrieved a sealed vase from one side of the altar and said it contained his ashes. She then produced the two titanium parts of Ron's artificial hip that hadn't melted during the cremation and clinked them together. “Ron not come here before he die,” she said, “–now he here forever!”

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