So that's how I will present them here.

The day after the eclipse -- October 24, 1995.  English Teacher Q is arriving from San Francisco.  This following a suicide attempt by overdose, a week of institutionalization, and then homelessness.  He has borrowed some money from another friend to buy a plane ticket to Bangkok.  I go to the airport to meet him with a sign reading "Creepy Head."  The Bangkok airport is so badly arranged for meeting arrivals, however, that he manages to get past me.  I go home in a taxi, which takes three hours because the roads are all flooded because it's rainy season.

Day 1:   English Teacher Q and I are sitting on the balcony of the guest house.  He has found my guest house and left a message reading "You can run but you can't hide!" signed with the name of the Principal of our High School.  Finally he wanders in, with two beers.  He seems a bit frazzled and manic, but probably no worse than ever.  I give him some money to stake him until his first paycheck.

First Day of Work:  English Teacher Q has only had a few days to adjust, but the manager (the third in the six months I worked there) has agreed to employ him.  I am walking with him to catch the bus.  He had disappeared the night before, and is clearly still drunk from whatever he'd been doing.  He reeks of alcohol.  He is carrying a two-liter plastic coke bottle, 1/3 full, and he offers me a swig.  I choke -- it is approximately half Thai rice whiskey.

The Froggie Arrives:  The mean little French girl who I have a terrible crush on arrives in Bangkok from Ko Samui the day before English Teacher Q.  I don't see her for several days.  Finally I am in a little dance bar making out with a fat Swedish girl and I see her.  I go up to her and swat her and tell her I was worried about her.  She is taken aback by my irritation and makes excuses and leaves.  I see her a few days later and apologize.  A week later she moves into the same guest house as myself and English Teacher Q.  My heart lurches when I see her.  I am furious with myself for my weakness, but I am head over heels with her.

Commuting:  We are going home from work on a Saturday afternoon at about seven pm, after some afterwork beers with the staff.  Halfway back to the Lumpini Park / Khao San Road area, where we live, the bus stops.  The roads are all flooded around the river.  English Teacher Q and I take off our shoes and roll up our trousers and wade through knee deep waters for about a mile.  A couple of boys in a shallow-bottomed boat paddle by, smiling happily.  We make jokes about alligators and snakes.  The sun is going down as we cross the bridge back into Banglumpoo.  The sky is aflame like an infected asscrack.  "Well, you wanted exotic," I tell English Teacher Q.

Working:  English Teacher Q gets on well enough at work.  I walk into his classroom one Saturday afternoon.  He is manically chattering to his class, who are all sitting grinning ear to ear and giggling.  On the white board is an enormous swastika with the words "Third Reich"  under it.  The words "Death Camp" are to the side of that.  The words "mutant" and "mutation" are under that, and a cartoon of a drooling boy with flippers for arms and legs.  (English Teacher Q is a swell cartoonist.)  I deeply regret that no photo was taken of this.  "So, what was the focus of today's lesson?" I ask English Teacher Q.  "We were just talking," he says.  We go out and get drunk.

Disintegrating:  English Teacher Q and I spend our day off wandering across Bangkok.  We wander downtown to the Patpong area after taking the river taxi.  English Teacher Q has discovered that valiums and other powerful painkillers are available without a prescription at most pharmacies.  He's looking for some painkiller he's only heard about -- used in South America instead of anaesthetic for operations.  At the first two pharmacies they smile in horror at him; at the third he manages to get what he's looking for.  He's very drunk at this point, losing coherence.  He pops a couple of the pills.  As we are walking through Lumpini Park as the sun is going down -- again the sky is a virulant red and purple -- he has finally stopped bitching and complaining and started talking about how beautiful everything is.  I know this is a bad sign.  He sits down on a bench; soon he is as limp as a corpse.  I manage to get him onto a bus, though he has only rudimentary walking skills and is quite combative.  He falls over on the bus seat, slobbering all over the woman next to him.  The smiling little brown people have all moved away from us.

Work-Related Disintegrating:  I'm teaching a TOEFL class in the sound lab.  It's a late class for a Sunday -- I finish at 8:00 -- the others are already down at the bar.  I see English Teacher Q stagger past the window of the sound lab at about 7:00 -- his shirt is untucked, he is grinning ear to ear in a maniac manner, his face is red, his hair is messed.   I have a bad feeling.  When I go down to the bar after 8:00, two teachers are there talking about how English Teacher Q had drunk 5 Chang beers (8 percent alcohol) and begun shouting obscenities and acting in an incredibly embarrassing manner.  This shocks me.  Everyone in the staff screams obscenities and acts in an incredibly embarrassing manner -- how had English Teacher Q distinguished himself?

Fixating on Frenchy:  The mean little French girl quickly hooks up with the "Jewelry Mafia" a loathsome group of young Thai boys with long hair who dress up like hippie Indians and sell silver jewelry to the tourists on Khao San Road.  For some reason I end up going with the Frenchy on my day off to the central Chatuchak market, where they sell everything under the sun, including endangered species.  She finds some long-haired jewelry boy she knows and I keep trying to leave but she asks me to stay -- eventually of course we smoke some pot and I lose the will.  Why on earth am I so in love with this strange little girl?  Who knows.  We end up outside of a large shopping mall in an outdoor beer garden with a group of Thai guys dressed as Indians.  I can barely refrain from laughing.  Then the Thai guys dressed like cowboys show up.  I get a taxi home.  I'm so upset I take a sleeping pill that English Teacher Q has given me.

English Teacher Q's birthday -- late November -- the staff at the school has decided to go down to Nana Plaza.  English Teacher Q has been accepted -- the guys have even decided to chip in and get him a transsexual prostitute, as per his inclinations.  He does not get to enjoy this, however, as while we are drinking he suddenly stands bolt upright, clutches his face, shouts, "Oh my god" and runs off. "That's a bit worrisome," I tell another teacher.  English Teacher Q claims the next day not to remember what he'd done or why he'd left.

On The Bus:  English Teacher Q confesses to me that he's been having waking hallucinations.  He says that on the way to work the other day he had seen a large hand burst out of the ground.  We agree that's probably not good.  We talk a little about English teaching.  I tell him about a joke from the old "I LOVE LUCY" tv show.  Lucy is worried about the bad diction of her husband and friends, and doesn't want her baby Little Ricky to speak as badly as they do, so she hires a speech coach.  The speech coach comes in and one of the first things he says is "There are two words I never want you to use.  One of them is 'swell' and the other one is 'lousy'.   To which Fred Murtz replies, "Give us the swell one first."  English Teacher Q laughs until tears flow from this joke.

On The Roof:  One afternoon we are sunbathing on the roof of the hotel, after a night of heavy drinking at Nana Plaza.  English Teacher Q has given me a valium -- I usually don't like downers but I figure it won't hurt.  We smoke some pot too, and both of us fall asleep.  I wake up later and someone has hung their laundry out over us; we are surrounded by flapping white sheets.  For a brief moment I have a strange idea I have died and gone to heaven.

Battered Bitch Syndrome:  The French friend of the little French girl I have a crush on invites me for a walk one day.  We walk along a canal past all the old wooden houses and rickety little food stands.  The French friend is 28  -- it seems she has just as much of a crush on the little French girl as I do.  I'm somehow not surprised by this, nor am I particularly surprised when she reveals that the little French girl's Thai boyfriend hits her frequently.  We confront the little French girl about this later and she smiles in a way that suggests she's pleased that we're upset about it, but she's not about to admit there's any kind of problem.  I am miserable.

Under The Bus:  I go down to English Teacher Q's room one morning and find the door open.  This is unusual, as English Teacher Q is obsessive-compulsive about door locks, among a few hundred other things.  He is inert, merely moans when I tell him to wake up.  I thump him a couple of times.  He barely responds.  I hit him harder.  "Wake up, fucker.  Have you been at the South American surgery pills again?"  "I got hit by a bus!" he finally says.  Apparently running to catch a bus drunk he'd managed to stumble into it while it was still moving and knock himself silly.  He is in a lot of pain.  Later he is taken to the hospital and x-rayed -- all his bones are in one piece, it seems, if not his psyche.  Even all the painkillers he has access to don't seem to help the agonizing back pain, however.  He can hardly walk.

I Am Threatened By Jewelry Mafia -- The French girl has found a new boyfriend, a vapid looking Thai monkeyboy with dreadlocks.  He sees me talking to her often and becomes irritated.  My utter lack of attempts to be courteous to him make things worse -- my constant frowning and brusque manners deeply offend a lot of Thai people.  Probably the French girl played it up in some way, too.  Later the other French girl says the Jewelry Mafia is thinking about giving me a kicking.  I consider taking a concrete block down the street to where they sell jewelry on the street and smashing it down on one's head in a pre-emptive strike.  I'm growing frazzled.  I begin giving the Jewelry mafia a huge lamprey grin whenever I see them, almost looking forward to getting my head beat in.  I take to carrying a butterfly knife.  Nothing ever comes of it.

Holiday:  For Christmas the gang decided to go down to Krabi on the west coast.  English Teacher Q has had to leave a few days before the rest of us to get a new visa in Malaysia.  We hit the beaches with great delight.  English Teacher Q is supposed to meet us or leave a message in some various places, but he never does.  English Teacher M and I are going to stay for the entire month of January in Ko Samui, the others are going back to Bangkok.  On the bus we meet a South African couple who mention that they'd met an American with a ponytail abysmally fucked up on pills and alcohol.  "Oh that sounds like our boy," says English Teacher M.

Quiet Ending:  I go back to Bangkok at the end of January to find that English Teacher Q has unceremoniously "done a runner" still owing me $200.  The gang is not sure why; though they'd heard something about an apocalyptic drunk on Ko Pi Pi that ended with him lying unconscious in a freshly-limed pit toilet with his flesh being burned.  He leaves a rather weak goodbye note for me saying that it was all just too much.  He's gone back to America, to the city near where we grew up-- which he hates-- and to his shrew girlfriend.   The French girl also has moved out of the hotel.  I see her a couple more times at food stands, looking more and more wan and haggard each time. 

Alone again. 

Finally.

BAcK TO MAin MEnU

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