A Goddess in the Barroom: A Trans Experience in Thailand.
How she smiled like Kali, my barroom nymph.
In the 16 weeks, I lived there, I didn’t venture far outside Prathai, my latest hometown.
My friends, colleagues, and neighbors, Ashely and Sarah, were forever off galivanting. They were two ebullient girls from the USA. Two churning sources of wonder at the strange beauty that surrounded them. They spent their youth with wisdom and decisiveness that never failed to impress me. They were very well-rounded individuals. I looked at them in awe, at times. Sure, they looked out for me, didn’t they? Like you would a drunken old Aunty. They accepted me as a friend and equal though I was two decades further down the road than they were. They enjoyed the leftfield gushings of my Irishness and I was only to happy to make with the witticisms.
I found the two-hour bus ride to Korat, the nearest city, a daunting experience. The lavish servings of sky and fields made me aware of how isolated I was. Awareness was something I wasn’t comfortable with. Too much greenery and not enough beer, that’s what struck me. For a brief period of time, I thought I was broke. A word to the wise, ATMs in Thailand are fickle, histrionic machines. I hated dealing with the damn things. I had a phobia of them before I ever graced the place and I had a horror of them when I left. I’d have a beer or three to quell the nerves. Then I’d go face one like it was a loan shark. All my fiscal nightmares came true in Prathai. Not one of the four ATMs in town would accept my card at one point. So I had money but couldn’t get at it. The panic almost bored a hole through me. When one finally worked after a few weeks of fruitless attempts it was like winning the lottery.
Ave Fucking Maria, I thought. If the place had a chapel, I’d don the weeping veil and light a candle in gratitude.
Holidays came and went and the girls went on jollies and I stayed behind. I have no memories of these vast, featureless fiestas. I was drunk the entire time. I was writing my memoirs in the vestibule of my villa in a deflated haze. A registered dipsomaniac, that’s all I was. I wrote sentences so thick and complex it was like dreadlocks hung from the pages. When the girls said they were going to Korat for a weekend, I almost took the hand off them wanting to go.
I could have had another type of life there if I’d allowed myself. A life of seeing new things and days winding down in nice hotel rooms. My brain teeming with exotic imagery as I handed myself over to sleep. I had skimmed across continents like a stone across water but I was an uneasy traveler at the best of times.
I was on a glazed form of auto-pilot.
Three cans of Chang in the morning helped me get on the bus. A sweet numbness allowed me to be nonchalant. I was rocking my hot pants and I knew it. The grinding gears of my nerves were no longer an issue.
Korat was a fucking ugly city. It reeked of decay and dust. Like a rotting molar in a camel’s mouth, it jutted from the gum of the land. The drinking continued in my hotel room as the girls went to settle in and rest before our night out. We were to meet a load of people I’d met briefly in Bangkok at the beginning of my time in Thailand. The teaching agency that had recruited us had put on an orientation course at the Suda Palace Hotel. Ash and Sazzer had maintained friendships with the people they had met there. They had even traveled to Bali with a few of them. I had not.
As they composed themselves for the evening, I was out in the streets having a gander. The lights of the city in the gathering dusk were cold and squalid like New York in the 70s. I sat and had a beer with two glamourous Thai women with excellent English and the worldly self-assurance of Madames. One ogled me with an eye with an inbuilt loupe. It was Saturday night after all and the demons were out hunting already.
I was on buggernaut mode. A deracinated Studio 54 Magoo. Pinballing from incident to incident in an exhausted apathy. The world around me bleary as a cheap watercolor.
The bar where we met Ash and Sazzers’ mates had as much spark as a hollowed-out coconut shell. Everyone in the joint had the wan white pelt of the tourist. An ESL teacher’s convention soundtracked by anonymous dance music. Ash and Sazzer milled with their peeps and the air was alive with small talk. I’m bored with their friends. Like oil and water, we were.
I’m wearing black skinny jeans. My favorite circulation stoppers of all time with a black crop top I bought in Beijing, years ago now. A trio of 40s starlets aping the three wise monkeys. Oh, the irony.
The Thai guy DJ looks as fucked off as I do. He spins tunes with the face of someone splitting a carcass, he looks so grim. The place is aflame with “Wooah Wooahs” and faded bro hand gestures. I grant myself euthanasia by beer in my stark seat in the corner. Have mercy on what’s left of my soul.
Fuck this, I’m going to the bar.
There’s an immediate change in climate as I sit on a stool up there.
A blessed detachment from the stagnant billabong a few feet away from me. I despair at the youth of today sometimes, I really do. So young and so, well, conservative. It's like the Thai chapter of the Ivy League is having a meeting here. They wouldn’t know a decent night out if it farted in their faces. God help us, sure.
From the corner of my eye, I see her coming.
A vision emerging from the bathroom. Her white blouse wrenched open, reflecting the insipid light show of the club, making them brilliant. A perfect breast sticking out with a matter-of-fact pertness. Hmmm. Who’s this character then?
She sits in the stool next to me. An Asian form of Frenchie (Marlene Dietrich) in Destry Rides Again. Sitting with her legs apart she corrals me in, bathing me in her louche presence.
The only way I can tell that she is Katheoy ( Thai Transgender Woman)is the brazen way she displays her femininity. She is the ultimate wet dream girl, a smiling porn star, sussing the room with amused contempt and sass hopping off her.
“ Hello my dear”, she purred, “ you are looking fabulous this evening, Girl”.
Mein Gott, Praise from Caesar. Her side-eye is sharp, significant, and appraising. What a dame, I thought, a real genre buster this one. No traces of the country boy in this skilled show of flamboyance. My drunken senses light up like Bangkok. She is urbane, educated, cultured.
Is it just me or could this woman be my sister?
I spluttered some compliment, my eyes wide at the sight of her. She took it with the satisfied grace of a Goddess accepting a peasant’s offering. I offered her a cigarette. And there we sat, in our own version of a film noir, as the beigeness around us frothed up like milk in a microwave.
“Darling”, I lean into her in a gust of bravery, “you must give me the name of your doctor. He did a great job”.
She smiled.
“When are you going to take the plunge?”, she said with a perfectly drawn arched eyebrow.
A pearl formed in my mind at that. Small and exquisite. It rests and shines as confident as the morning star on the dirty cushion of my brain. It’s a moment I mull over now the hurly-burly of life has been lost and won. A tiny flare of authenticity through the carnage of memory. A restorative beam when my spirit sags.
How she smiled like Kali, my barroom nymph. And how easily she was devoured by the night. I can’t recall us parting. A landslide of barely digested incidents washed her away out of my life. A gushing of splinters. All I have is a shred of memory of the girls putting me to bed like it was a compost heap they were dealing with.
Damn me. I’ll never learn.
