LESSONS LEARNED: MY TIME IN THAILAND
By ForMEr TeACHer Q
“It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably
with darkness, silence, and solitude. I found it in the glare of
mid-afternoon, in the clangour of a metropolis...”
-H.P. Lovecraft, Cool Air
October - December, 1995
A day late and a bhat short, as usual. I arrived at
the Don Muang airport in
Bangkok
the day AFTER a spectacular total eclipse. Had I made it there just 24 hours
sooner, I could have gotten drunk and run around shouting “Make noise, make
noise, scare away the dragon eating the sun!”
Or maybe it was a good thing I missed it. I showed
up in Thailand in
pretty bad shape, on the heels of a traumatic dissolution of two relationships
with separate girlfriends, and the nearly traumatic dissolution of my self after
a suicide attempt brought on by the overcontemplation of my lack of financial
resources and having run out of Prozac, plus homelessness in San Francisco.
Bangkok was a breath of fresh
filthy air to my soul. I missed English Teacher X somehow at the airport and
took a taxi to the backpacker enclave of Khao San Road, found a room in a guest
house behind the post-office, and settled in.
English Teacher X took me to the school a couple of
days later. On the 7th floor of a shoddily-constructed shopping mall an hour's
bus ride out in the suburbs were classrooms, and a main office was on the ground
floor, where students were evaluated and money changed hands. I was hired on
the strength of his recommendation. I guess.
Maybe they just needed another warm body, and there I was,
wearing a tie, an English-speaking American.
I'll never forget my first moment as an English
teacher. The pleasant British Manager N led me down a hallway to a classroom
full of wide-eyed unsmiling little brown people, handed me a green Level 5
teacher's book and a dry-erase marker, said “Good on yer!” and left me there.
For an instant, I
was overcome with panic and wanted to run. . .but I'd already run, and here I
was. There was nothing but for me to give it my best shot. Uncapping
my dry-erase marker, I wrote my name on the board, and away we went on our
shared learning journey.
And truly, I did learn a lot teaching English, at
least as much as my students did--I tried to have them teach me Thai as I taught
them English; I think they liked that. Also, I hated to see them bored so I
went on all kinds of tangents from the dull material to keep them entertained.
This policy backfired one day when I was asked to substitute for English Teacher
M's noon-4pm mid-level class.
After his class the next day, he approached me
angrily in the teacher's lounge.
“Bloody hell, mate! Wha'd ye fockin' do to me
class? Now they 'spect me to dance like a bleedin' trained bear meself!”
It was then I realized that I was putting myself out
perhaps more than I should; certainly more than a lot of the other teachers, who
didn't give a damn whether their students were entertained or not, liked them or
not, etc. I'd fancied myself as a cultural ambassador, whereas most of the
ragtag assortment that I jokingly referred to as “The Faculty” were merely
trying to keep themselves in booze and whores and out of extradition to their
home countries. A few were competent, dedicated professionals: a rare,
endangered fraction of The Faculty.
Not that I was a stellar exemplar myself. I
regularly showed up for class (at
10am) drunk and well-sedated,
but it made it easier on me, and probably on the students. And though I was at
the school from a full shift from 10am to 8pm, I only had two classes, one from
10am until noon, the next from 6-8pm, then my “extra” Business English class of
two goofy Chinese brothers and their sister from 8-9:30, for which I think I got
an extra $75 or so a month.
That's six hours a day, four days a week, wandering
around a mall. On weekends, you taught from 9-5, but this was two three-hour
classes of young children, in which you mostly just sang songs with them as a
baby-sitter while the parents took a break from them.
This wasn't how I'd envisioned my life, in this far
exotic land: spending most of my day eating at a food court and playing games
in the arcade...you were supposed to be available in or near the school to
substitute in case another teacher was a sick call-in or a no show. Didn't
happen very often, and the staff would usually find somebody else...preferable
actually, since you didn't get any more money for teaching an extra class during the day. Once
I realized it was better not to be available (anyway, if they really wanted you,
they knew you were someplace in the mall), I started spending the afternoons
splashing around at the waterpark on the outdoor terrace of third floor, playing
“Monster” with the Thai kids. That was a lot more emotionally gratifying than
teaching. Plus, the drinking and the pills helped fill these long afternoons
until my uninspired lower-level evening class and my painful late
Business English class.
I like to think I was doing well after a couple of
months, getting acclimatized and settling into my new job, when The Dark Night
of The Bus occurred. After getting hammered at the bar near the school with The
Faculty one night after class, I decide to call it an evening and head home.
The bus routes
were a constant enigma to me, and whatever line I'd gotten onto this time was
one that involved a transfer in the middle of nowhere. So I waited for an
hour at the stop, getting grumpy until I see a bus coming and I had to cross
the road to catch it. I'd been warned about the bus-drivers, but I thought
surely he'd stop to pick a fare in this deserted area at
3am.
He didn't. In fact, I think he intended to run me
down.
On wobbly legs I tried to dodge the bus, but failed,
and the bumper hit me in the back and threw me to the sidewalk.
Fortunately, no major damage or bones broken, just
some very painful bruising and contusions. Enter Cheap Over-The-Counter
Codeine, Stage Left.
And English Teacher Q begins another downhill spiral.
In December, the school vacation coincided with my
Malaysian visa
run, so I got an extra four days off tacked on to the
two-weeks
I intended to spend in the sunny islands of
South Thailand.
I made arrangements for English Teachers X & M to
meet me on Ko
Phi Phi once their vacation begins.
I wisely decided to take lots of benzodiazepenes,
pain-killers,
and other assorted hard narcotics along with me so I wouldn't
run
out. Unwisely, I'd forgotten I'd be going to
Malaysia. Islamic
dictatorships tend to be less tolerant than Buddhist kingdoms.
I remember the train was delayed for an hour on the
tracks in the
jungle--found out the train had hit and killed an old woman
on the
tracks. “This is no doubt a lucky omen,” I thought. Then,
the
train arrives at the Malaysian border. A plywood sign
written in
spray-painted English under a skull & crossbones says “The
Penalty
for Possession of Drugs IS DEATH. Welcome to
Malaysia!”
I'm popping Xanax and Valium like aspirin, sweating
bullets. Fortunately,
the little fellow at the checkpoint wasn't interested in
rifling
through a sweaty foreigner's soiled undergarments and waved
me through.
Ah, Ko Phi Phi, jewel of the
South Andaman Sea...soft
white sand
beaches, clear and calm turquoise waters. Sure wish I could
remember
it. According to scrawled notes in my journal, I stayed in a
hut
for $4 a night, and I got a job as a tout at a bar called Tin
Tin's
to lure tourists in, for which I would be paid in free beer.
I
was the only American on the island; the rest of the tourists
were
assorted Europeans: Brits, Germans, Dutch and Italians.
Historical records and ticket stubs indicate I was
there a week
or so. No one who was ever supposed to show up did. I woke
up
one morning in a lime-filled toilet pit behind the bar,
having fallen
in the night before trying to take a crap in a barrel after
drinking 30 to 35 Singha beers.
In the lives of even the least introspective people,
there occur
certain turning points where one searches one's soul and
feels compelled
to make changes. This was one of mine. I returned to my
hut, packed
by filthy ragged clothes and left by the first boat to the
mainland,
returning to
Bangkok after a night spent on
a bus listening to a
French couple chatter relentlessly. There's no such thing as
a
Romance language when you're stuck listening to it on an un-airconditioned
bus with lime-burns on your ass.
Within the week I was in
Jakarta, sweating out my various addictions
in a cheap flophouse in
Chinatown until I was able to
haul my trembling
gaunt carcass back to
America. I'd skipped out on
the school and
left owing $200 to English Teacher X, but I didn't know when
he'd
be back, and I wasn't sticking around to wait on him.
So, I was English Teacher Q. Lessons were taught.
Lessons were learned.