BANGKOK

OLD HAND

A collection of stories by

Collin Piprell

Post Books

Post Books is a division of

The Post Publishing Co., Ltd.,

136 Na Ranong Road, off Sunthorn Kosa Rd.,

Klong Toey, Bangkok 10110, Thailand

First Edition August 1993

Copyright © Collin Piprell

ISBN: 974-202-008-6

Editor: William Page Cover design: Annie Vaillancourt Layout: Supapom Runtaseevee Illustrations: Collin Piprell

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Printed in Thailand by Allied Printers, Bangkok

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BANGKOK OLD HAND

A collection of stories by Collin Piprell

All but a few of these stories have been previously published in the Bangkok Post, Thailand Tatler, Fah Thai, or Asia Magazine. Most of them first appeared under the byline "Ham Fiske".

Why that particular pseudonym? Years before the writer had ever written anything for publication, he thought he would one day like to be a writer. But, once, after he had revealed all in a bar-room conversation, it was pointed out that "Collin Piprell" was kind of hard to remember, which was really the kindest thing you could say about the name; and he'd never become a famous writer unless he could think of a good pseudonym. So everybody sat around and thought about it for a while. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, it came to him. "Ham Fiske"! It was short, easy to spell, and had a certain lusty heft to it. More importantly, though, reviewers wouldn't be able to resist it. They could start every review with "And here we have another typically ham- fisted effort..." According to the "It doesn't matter what they say, as long as they talk about me" school of self- promotion, it would only be a matter of time before he was rich, famous, and buried in groupies.

He had the name, but it took him several more years before he actually wrote anything to hang it on. And, he reports, having eventually written 40-50 short stories, articles, and essays as Ham Fiske. he still wasn't noticeably bothered by groupies so he said what the hell, and went back to being plain old Colin Prep... Collin Pipe... Um. Who?

Collin Piprell is a Canadian writer and editor living in Bangkok. Aside from the many magazine articles which he has had published, mostly around Asia and most of them under his own name, he is the author of a novel, a collection of short stories, and various works of non-fiction.

Other books by Collin Piprell:

Kicking Dogs (Bangkok: Editions Duang Kamol, 1991)

Bangkok Knights (Bangkok: Editions Duang Kamol, 1989; 2nd ed. 1991)

Diving in Thailand (Singapore: Times Editions, 1993), photographs by Ashley J. Boyd.

Thailand's Coral Reefs (Bangkok: White Lotus, 1993), photographs by Ashley J. Boyd. Thailand: The Kingdom Beneath the Sea (Bangkok: Artasia Press, 1991), photographs by Ashley J. Boyd. National Parks Thailand (Bangkok: IFPC, 1991), with Denis Gray and Mark Graham.

CONTENTS

BANGKOK

OLD HAND

1 LAND OF SMILES

2 EXCEPTIONAL CIRCUMSTANCES

3 LEARNING TO WALK

4 LIFE IN THE FAST LANE

5 THE ORIGIN OF THE THAI BUS QUEUE

6 RUNNING WITH THE BULLS, BANGKOK-STYLE

7 SOCIAL FREE-CLIMBING

8 THE JOY OF TRAFFIC JAMS

9 ONE BORN EVERY MINUTE

10 FLEEING THE SCENE

11 BANGKOK OLD HAND TRAFFIC QUIZ

12 BANGKOK 1997: LAND OF SALES

13 BANGKOK 1997: CITY SKYLINE

14 SPACE INVADERS

15 MY CAREER AS A MODEL

16 LETTING IT ALL HANG OUT

17 JUST ANOTHER MYTH

18 STAGEFRIGHT IN RANGOON

19 SHMOOS AND ALIEN BLOBS AND THINGS

20 THE GREAT WATERMELON FUMBLE

21 THE JOY OF HANGOVERS

22 AND DON'T SAIL OFF THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

23 USERS AND LOSERS: A COMPUTER STORY

24 FAMOUS LAST WORDS

25 QUIZ: ARE YOU A BANGKOK OLD HAND?

26 ANSWERS

End of Bangkok Old Hand

1 LAND OF SMILES

Thailand is the Land of Smiles. And, despite the stresses of urban living, Bangkokians remain essentially Thai. Exactly what, however, does all this smiling mean?

The original Year of Tourism (1987) is well past; we're well into the first Decade of Tourism, and it's smiles all around at the TAT (Tourism Authority of Thailand), not to mention the wolfish grins on your average gang of Thai businessmen.

Yes, everybody's smiling. But precisely what is the famous Thai Smile? What does all this smiling signify? Can the casual visitor just assume that it means all is well, and that the Thais are simply a warm, welcoming crowd of more-than-averagely-civilised people? There are smiles, after all, and there are smiles.

Scientists have suggested various origins for the human smile. Some behaviourists argue that the smile in each of its many expressions may be related, at basis, back to the relaxation of the muscles in a baby's face after he's glutted himself on his mother's milk. (I've seen that same nice, uncomplicated smile on my pal Stack Jackson, just after he's drained his first glass of Kloster beer on a Friday night.) Other researchers look for even earlier origins, tracing the urge to smile back to snarls and open-mouthed threats among the apes, our evolutionary cousins. (Stack says he's seen this kind of smile on his mother-in-law, though Stack's wife says her mum means well.)

Even with apes, however, studies show that different smiles can convey different messages. Chimpanzees, for example, have a "fear grin ", or smile of appeasement. Confronted by a superior member of the species, the ape performs a silent, bare-toothed display (it looks like a smile, anyway). This signifies something like, "Hey, I'm an okay guy; don't do anything rash. I wasn't winking at your mate. Dearie me, no. I merely had a mote in my eye." And there's another smile in the chimp's repertoire — this one a soothing expression directed by a superior to an inferior, as if to say, "Don't panic, man. Relax. You go ahead and wink all you want..."

Step on someone's toe in the press of people on a Bangkok bus, and the chances are you'll be confronted with a beaming smile, even as your victim blinks back tears of pain, and just as though he had thought his day couldn't possibly have been any better unless, of course, some great klutz stepped on his foot.

In fact, the smile is routinely used to defuse potentially violent situations. It's a culturally imprinted first reaction, and a valuable buffer against ill-considered conflict. It doesn't mean your average Thai enjoys pain.

A note in passing: you're probably more likely to get hit by lightning than be held up by bandits, in Thailand: in the unfortunate event, however, you could be sure the bandits would be smiling. What you should do under those circumstances is smile just as winningly and give them your money.

Besides the "submissive" and "soothing" smiles, chimps have a third variety, which is simply the "friendly" one. Scientific observation has shown that the friendliness of an encounter in chimp society varies directly with how widely the teeth are bared.

But one must wonder if these smiles are always as straightforward and sincere as one might wish.

Picture a river full of crocodiles, toothy grins gaping an enthusiastic welcome to all and sundry, no matter their race, colour, or creed. It kind of makes you think of the gauntlet of touts and drivers one is required to run upon arrival at the airport or out front of some hotels. Is this the Thai smile? They're all Thais, and they're all smiling.

Smiles, laughter, weeping, back-slapping, kissing, raising various configurations of extended fingers — all these forms of communication may indeed have some universal bases, but in different cultural and social contexts they can express very different things. Whatever their actual physiological or emotional origins, smiles have evolved into social actions — they are a form of non-verbal communication.

Eleven different muscles are involved in facial expression, and several or all of these together may be involved in shaping any one smile. A smile can express quiet joy or sadness, admiration or malicious pleasure, pride or embarrassment, approval or scorn, even threat or fear. There is the leer of avarice and the quiet rapture of the ascetic. There are smirks and sneers. You may mistake a grimace for a smile: "Look, the baby's smiling!" Sure. Maybe. Or maybe he's just got gas. There is a medical condition known as Bell's palsy, in which a swollen nerve can cause facial paralysis resulting in a characteristic smile much like that of the Mona Lisa.

There is even a type of behaviour psychiatrists call "smiling depression"; should the doctor fail to recognise the syndrome, he might have a suicide on his hands.

The list could go on and on. A smile can represent all of these things within one and the same community. What potential, then, for misunderstanding between cultures.

Once I went into a travel agency in Bangkok. It was a narrow little room, and I sat across the counter from three pleasant young ladies. A gentleman sat at a desk to one side. I pulled out my cigarettes and offered them around. Everyone declined, smiling big, almost joyful smiles. Judging by their expressions, the only thing marring their joy at my generosity was the fact that they didn't smoke and couldn't please me by taking a cigarette. I asked whether they minded if I smoked. "Not at all" They beamed at me some more. I didn't see an ashtray, so I asked if I could have one. "Of course." More smiles, and an ashtray appeared as though by magic.

I had puffed away at a cigarette and a half, as we negotiated a trip to Malaysia, before I suddenly became aware of the notices on the wall behind the girls. They came in various sizes, all large, and in various colours, all bright They were written in Thai and English, the ones that didn't have the international "No-smoking" symbols on them. "Please do not smoke." "We ask you not to smoke; some of our staff have allergies." "Please, please don't smoke." And so on. There were more of them on the inside of the door through which I'd entered.

To my way of thinking at the time, it would've been far more courteous for them to tell me directly they would prefer I didn't smoke, and thereby spare me the acute embarrassment I suffered when I discovered what a boor I was being.

Do smiles mean the same thing from one culture to another? Not necessarily. Between two very different languages, there's no reason at all to expect the same word to mean the same thing. (Khee ray means "not beautiful" in Thai, for example, while in Japanese in means the exact opposite. "Maniac" in English is "madman"; in Gulf Arabic it means "habitual abuser of oneself ", and has an entirely different force if one hollers it at a careless driver.) What did the smiles of those lovely people in the travel agency mean? Perhaps it was appeasement behaviour — this uncouth farcing had already disregarded the basic social niceties; what further atrocities might he not be capable of if he weren't propitiated? Or maybe they were just amused at the barbarous habits of this creature. Or could it be they were merely reformed smokers glad at the chance to breathe smoke without actually smoking?

A case could be made for any or all of these theories. In fact, however, I suspect those smiles simply reflected the typical warmth and tolerance of the Thai people.

Some observers have felt that the width and frequency of the average Thai's smile seems to diminish in direct proportion to the enthusiasm with which this beautiful country is being touted as the "Land of Smiles". Nevertheless, you will still find more smiles per square metre here than just about anywhere else in the world except perhaps at a wet T-shirt contest.

Many Thais are blessed with a capacity to live in the moment, and to treat that moment as something to be savoured. The smaller slings and arrows of existence can be shrugged off with a maipen rai— "Never mind." Though the stranger to this country should be cautious in his interpretation of situations and reactions, allowing for the danger of cultural misunderstandings, to a great extent the Thai smile speaks in quite uncomplicated terms of a

secure self-confidence, a native joie de vivre, and a pleased interest in anyone who finds Thailand worthy of a visit.

FAMOUS WRITERS DESCRIBE SOME SMILES

·         A famous writer on Patpong Road: "She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket."

Raymond Chandler, Farewell My Lovely

·         A famous writer who believed the tuk-tuk driver knew where they were going, and who now is trying to ascertain what they are doing at a shipyard, when it was really a stationer's on Silom Road she'd had in mind: The driver made vaguely reassuring gestures, "smiling encouragement like a clumsy dentist" and saying mai pen rai over and over again.

Katherine Mansfield, Bank Holiday

·         Crammed onto the No. 2 bus in a hot-season rush hour, a famous writer steps on the bare toes of a Thai passenger for the second time in as many minutes: He turned to me with "a smile that snapped back after using, like a stretched rubber band."

Sinclair Lewis, quoted in Reader's Digest (Aug. 1941)

2 EXCEPTIONAL CIRCUMSTANCES

Franz Kafka and Lewis Carroll might together begin to describe a day spent navigating the mysteries of the Air Cargo. But this is not merely another case of "Abandon hope all ye who enter this official quagmire". In the Thai way, there are always escape clauses.

I am at Air Cargo, Don Meringue Airport, Muang Sarakan. This is my second day here at the mercy of sinister forces, obscure logics, and arbitrary rules.

My guide and chief hope in this Wonderland has been the White Rabbit, a diminutive shipping agent who eats Rolaids by the handful and who scurries this way and that, slipping down this hall and that one quicker than the eye can follow. His refrain is "Wait for me here", which is reiterated as he whips past fast enough for the Doppler effect to distort the message: "waiiIIT FOR ME HEEerrre."

I breathe deeply, and go back to watching my fellow travellers through this inner circle of Hell.

Dealing with the bureaucracy of overseas cargo offices anywhere in the world is a punishing test of one's equanimity. No one can say he has truly achieved manhood until he has passed through the flame of the Air Cargo Department. My trials have entered their second day, but that's really my fault, as the pained and put-upon expression on the White Rabbit s face has told me again and again. If I had been willing to pay a sum of money, we could have been finished yesterday. However, I am not prepared to pay tax on a trunkful of old clothes, tapes, books, and notes. Unreasonable, I know; but there it is.

I had assumed personal effects could be brought in duty-free, but that is true only in the first month after your arrival in the country. If you wait longer than that to have the goods shipped, you are liable to a tax. I can't even remember exactly what's in that blasted trunk. I'd written my friend in Kuwait and asked him to send it mostly because I felt guilty about leaving it at his place for as long as I had. I didn't actually need it, not at the price of shipping it by air (there is no surface cargo from Kuwait). And now they want to tax it into the bargain.

"How," I have asked, "do you plan to calculate the value of this stuff so that you can establish what tax is due?"

I haven't yet had a look at it. Until I sign certain forms agreeing to let them tax me, I can't even open it up to point triumphantly and say: "See? Those old clothes haven't even been washed." And: "Here. Look at these notes — complete rubbish. No value whatsoever, You should be paying me to take this junk away. Tax? How can you tax this stuff?"

There is reason to believe I could expedite matters, circumventing both the calculation of taxes and the filling of forms ZX 1001 through ZY 2072, simply by offering a little "tea money". But this stuff is junk, and I resent having paid to ship it, even. Moreover, the particular official who needs tea subsidies has the most unpleasant manner of anyone I've ever met in Sarakan. He wouldn't get money out of me with an M-16.

So, no, I can't see my trunk. Not till I've given Air Cargo prior licence to hit me for whatever they see fit. And I'm still not convinced that it's necessary; this whole business smacks of being a shakedown.

It doesn't help that I speak limited Sarakanese — certainly not enough to enter into full verbal disputation with this mob. I am forced to communicate through the White Rabbit, and this hyperkinetic hare brain won't stand still long enough to hear me out before he's turned to the official, wincing and wai-ing and entreating in cringing tones. It's obvious to me that he's missing the finer dialectical subtleties of my position as I'm laying it out in English. He's also a bit too deferential for my liking. Of course I am not a Sarakanese.

Central to the running of bureaucratic gauntlets, the basic maxim is that one must never show anger. If you should find yourself in one of these situations, my advice to you is write this down in big red letters on your hand or somewhere else you can't miss it: DO NOT SHOW YOUR ANGER. Losing your cool leaves you in a situation roughly equivalent to that of the individual who, when faced with a hungry tiger which has got up on the wrong side of the bed, snarls at it and tries to shove it aside. Don't get angry; just breathe deeply. And smile.

In any case, if you have to deal with officialdom, I must admit the Sarakan version is preferable to most. It is true people in Sarakan love uniforms, and the least of those officials I've had to deal with has looked like a field marshal dressed for a coronation. This does present a daunting prospect; nevertheless, there are elements of flexibility and humanity leavening the process. If only I were better at speaking Sarakanese.

I'm thinking of asking the White Rabbit for a couple of Rolaids. But he's off again: "Wait for me heeeerrrre..."

I have noticed a man and his wife, both, I'd say, in their mid-40s. As the morning has worn on, they've appeared more and more distraught. Initially, they presented the perfect image of self-confident and complacent yuppiehood. I have them figured for American oil-company people. Just looking at them, you can be pretty sure they didn't get those bronzed complexions standing at bus-stops or picking fruit. By now, however, they are beginning to fray a bit around the edges. The man's suntan has developed a definite florid tinge.

They have two shipping agents with them (though their combined speed is still less than that of the White Rabbit). "Wait for us here," they tell the woman, and they park her next to me. I guess this is the waiting-for-agents area. The husband whirls off in their slipstream.

She introduces herself and asks me what I do. I tell her and then ask her what oil company they work for. She tells me they're missionaries. They've just arrived from Georgia, via Singapore. While in Singapore, some friends told them they were crazy if they waited till they got to Sarakan to buy appliances and electronic goods. Everything is so expensive in Sarakan. So they took their friends' advice and bought it all in Singapore and shipped it by air to Sarakan. Good move. Now they're facing an import duty of around US$1500. And they don't want to pay.

So we swap Air Cargo experiences, and she tells me a bit about their new van and the big house they have to furnish and how much of shock it was to learn about the import tax. I commiserate.

There's not much to do in the waiting-for-agents area except enjoy the spectacle of other miserable petitioners in their torment. Ah — there's a familiar face, for example.

A lugubrious fellow, a Sarakanese, I think, who has been passing back and forth for the past two days, empty-handed and empty-faced, like a wind-up toy. Chances are he was an air-cargo official in his last life, and he's been condemned to an eternity of trying to find Annex C-7, Room 2107A, which does not exist, before he can collect his belongings and go home. The missionary's wife thinks that's a pretty good theory, except it's not theologically sound.

At this point the husband returns, looking more florid and even less happy. We are introduced, but he is not in the mood for small talk. He turns to his wife.

"The agents think we can get off for US$500. Under the table. I told them no way."

"Do you mean we could leave?" She looks so wistful it practically breaks my heart.

"I am not going to deal under the table."

Here I presume to interfere: "Well, you know things are done a little differently in these parts. And $500 doesn't sound like a bad deal..."

He draws himself up into a veritable thunderhead of self-righteous wrath. "I will not pay a bribe. I don't care what the local customs are." He considers for a moment, and then adds, "That is one of the reasons we have come here. To change things."

Some might think this guy has a lot of nerve. They might think, "Okay, that's all I need; now I can pay my tea money out of principle." But I can see his point: what with America having already been spiritually perfected, his mission is, perforce, to move ever further afield in search of corruption and sin.

"But honey..," his wife tries again.

"No."

Their shippers reappear and draw him aside for a huddle. Then off the three of them go again.

We get to watch some more people. Over there in the distance, I catch a brief glimpse of the White Rabbit flitting from one hole to another. And here is my special pal, a rotund Sarakanese. A deaf-mute. I believe he works here in some capacity. Several times, both today and yesterday, he has come over to beam reassuringly at me, giving me the thumbs-up sign and then ambling off. Maybe he's the official cheerer-upper. Maybe Sarakan's officialdom, in all its humanity, wants to suggest a ray of hope in this our darkest hour. Right now he's all thumbs at the high port, radiating optimism like a jolly fat lighthouse.

And just maybe he's right, for the White Rabbit has materialised again, and he's bearing something that he appears quite proud of. He thrusts it at me in triumph; it is a rule-book, very graciously printed in both Sarakanese and English, and weighing no more than 10 kilos. And there. There where he's pointing is the rule recorded in black and white: personal effects may be brought in duty-free within one month of the resident's arrival in Thailand. After that, the goods will be subject to taxation. Quite explicit. Quite clear. Where are the grounds for celebration in that? I've lost, right? But no. The White Rabbit stabs at some fine print. In "special circumstances", it says, these charges may be waived. There it is. Beautiful. That very Sarakanese flexibility built right into this otherwise Kafkaesque excursion through purgatory.

That's the good news. The bad news is that the official in charge of Exceptional Circumstances inhabits an office which is some 15 kilometres distant. If we want to have the slightest chance of finishing today, of getting to see this fellow and then getting back here to run the rest of the gauntlet before the end of the working day, then we have to hurry. The White Rabbit passes me a handful of Rolaids, and we're off, leaving the missionary's wife pining away in

the waiting-for-agents area.

It seems that the mere fact of having discovered the fine print and then tracked the appropriate official to his lair is sufficient to win a plea of exceptional circumstances, for we wait no longer than 20 minutes before being ushered in to see an individual so beribboned and brocaded in his brilliant white uniform he'd have any Admiral of the Fleet snapping salutes. He waits till the White Rabbit finishes his veritable tour de force of bowing and scraping and wringing of hands. Then he pulls out a thick sheaf of paper and the next thing I know I am signing a bunch of things in quadruplicate, I'm not sure what, but it's making the White Rabbit so happy that I couldn't think of not doing it.

Just like that, after two days, I have passed. The official is smiling; I am smiling; even the White Rabbit is smiling, though maybe it's only gas. We drive back to Air Cargo at high speed, minutes to spare.

Things are not the same; all is transformed by the lens of optimism. There is the reincarnated official, still passing through, still seeking an office that doesn't exist; but even his step springs lighter, it seems. The jolly lighthouse is up into the million candlepower range, welcoming me back, sensing my imminent triumph. My least favourite official in the world, the one I've vowed would never get money out of me, has to cave in, faced with the arsenal of documents the White Rabbit deposits on his desk, all stamped and signed by the Man in Charge of Exceptional Circumstances. Thwarted in his evil plans, the unpleasant fellow looks even more unpleasant; he makes a token show of examining the forms, but he quickly gives it up. Before I know it, I am opening my trunk, surprised and pleased to find a ukulele I'd forgotten all about. And these clothes will be quite useful, once they're washed.

Everyone's happy. Almost everyone. The missionary's wife comes over, and she congratulates me on my good fortune, never mind she is herself almost desperate by now. At that very moment, however, her husband returns, muttering something under his breath, probably prayers.

"I told them once, and I told them twice," he intoned. "I would not deal*under the table. But they went ahead and paid anyway. And I had to pay them back. Our shippers, I mean. It's on their heads. I told them I wouldn't deal under the table. I wash my hands of it."

"But... What do you mean? Can we go?"

'Yes. It's on their heads. It only cost us $500.1 wash my hands of it."

Nothing like a little pragmatic soul-searching to settle the stomach before dinner, I've always said. But I don't know why he doesn't look happier. They are well out of it, after all. And it isn't on his head.

My friend the deaf-mute is being happy enough for all of us anyway. He is playing a merry tune on my ukulele; he really seems to know his way around that noble instrument, in fact. Caught up in the spirit of it all, and not entirely pleased at my reunion with the uke anyhow — to tell the truth, it has never managed to translate my musical sentiments exactly the way I intend them—I give it to the cheerer- upper, figuring that's the least I can do. It's a kind of special tax, one I'm more than happy to pay under these exceptional circumstances.

I offer to take the White Rabbit away for a victory drink, but he's got to be off; he's late, he's late. I make a note to send him a large box of Rolaids first thing next week.

3 LEARNING TO WALK

Can you keep smiling even while dealing with air cargo officials? If so, then you are on your way to qualifying as an honorary Thai. If you really want to test your capacity to smile under any and all circumstances, however, simply take a walk on the streets of this fair city.

In Bangkok, it's better that your average Westerner never walks. Indeed, for a farang, negotiating the sidewalks of Bangkok can be an invitation to a stroke. And it's not the heat or the pollution that's the problem; it's the Western notion that a Thai doesn't know how to walk.

This news probably surprises your average Thai, who thinks that he has been performing the trick of walking quite adequately, and this from an early age. But merely getting from A to B on foot in this city can be a torment for his Western counterpart. "Thais amble," this individual will say, as though this were a sin worse than putting ice cubes in your beer (which, incidentally, is also a local custom).

It's not just that Thais are moving too slowly — that's bad enough, from the viewpoint of the Westerner as he lopes along flat out, hell-bent-for-leather, even if he has nowhere in particular he's going. No, it's more than that.

Just as Thais do, Westerners have a private space which surrounds them — 18 inches is about average with Americans, for instance. This zone of privacy, however, is crucially different in Americans and in Thais. For the American, when he is walking on a public sidewalk, the zone extends to the path ahead. Cognitively, he has already appropriated a strip of territory which extends in a straight line in front of him. By walking at a certain pace and looking determinedly ahead, he signals that this is his space, and you shouldn't enter into it on a collision course unless you are either a good friend or a mugger. Back in a Western cultural context, this is all quite unconscious. It is only when this private lane is persistently violated that the walker has occasion to ask what the heck is going on, and sometimes in stronger terms than that. In Bangkok, then, from his point of view, there doesn't seem to be the slightest idea of lanes of traffic. People stop without warning; they step directly into his path; they mill about in impromptu roadblocks. Phalanxes of chattering schoolgirls walk right over him.

The problem of walking in a strange culture, of course, is just one aspect of a much larger issue. The channels and measures of our behaviour can be very subtle. We are often no more aware of them than we are of the beating of our own hearts. But when we are removed from the comfortable familiarity of our particular culture and then set down in another, it may suddenly seem as though everything is out of synch. With every move one makes there is the grinding of cultural gears and the gnashing of teeth. Even an action so basic as walking from A to B in a crowded street can be a source of aggravation. You may feel as though there is a conspiracy to frustrate you at every turn — a collective decision taken without your knowledge or consent that everyone will henceforth move to the beat of a different drummer, a drummer you cannot hear. The essential problem is this: everyone else is out of step except you, the victim of the conspiracy; you know you are conducting yourself properly.

But consider how the people around you feel, threatened with being steamrollered by a large red-faced foreigner rampaging along in a fit of pique — this quite possibly dangerous creature doing the Funky Chicken in the middle of everybody's nice Thai waltz. It would hardly be surprising, then, if their reactions in turn further exacerbated your feeling of alienation. If you are not careful, the whole syndrome can escalate into what is popularly known as "culture shock".

The Thai walking on the street is not deliberately trying to blow all the blood vessels in the hyperkinetic farang's head. Relatively speaking, it might be suggested, Thais are simply more adept at living in the moment, at enjoying what they are doing for its own sake. It is possible simply to enjoy being there. The thought of constantly rushing about, even when there is no pressing reason for getting anywhere, seems just a little insane, in fact.

Certainly, in these cases, there is no correct manner of proceeding as opposed to an incorrect one. Cultural habits are connected with whole ways of living which have evolved over millennia. It could be suggested, however, that one culture may profitably learn from the other. For example, the simple notion that life has more to offer than the rush to its conclusion is an idea that merits serious consideration.

So, finally, if you must walk in Bangkok (and some, be they Thai or foreign, would argue that this practice is in itself ill-advised), simmer down; try to relax and enjoy what you are doing for its own intrinsic value. All the blustering and attempts at broken-field running in the world will not make Thais change their natural rhythm to suit yours. Nor, of course, should it.

Slow down and take time to smell the roses (more likely the jasmine). Or the city buses and the klongs. Whatever.

4 LIFE IN THE FAST LANE

Thailand is balm for the soul. Taking pleasure in the moment, the people move at a pace governed more by human values than by the demands of Western materialism. So why, then, is Martin Goodspeed in such a hurry to leave?

"Good grief!" said Martin. "The smiles — everybody's always smiling! And they amble. It's enough to drive you mad, all the ambling and smiling."

In truth, he did seem a little close to the edge, black bags under his eyes and a break in his voice. Martin Goodspeed was a hearty, blustering sort of fellow from Toronto — a friend of an old friend. He had arrived in Thailand a couple of months before. Now he seemed diminished in body and spirit, a man who had stared into the Abyss. He also had a large wad of gauze taped to the crown of his head.

"Buy you a beer?" I suggested.

"Sure."

"How's the trip been going?" I asked. I wondered how he had come up with the head wound.

He told me he'd seen quite a lot since last we met. He'd been up to Chiang Mai, Mae Hong Son, and various other interesting places. Oh, yeah, he said; it was a beautiful country. Lovely scenery, lovely people. Beautiful. Fascinating. Great food.

"No problems with the food?" I enquired.

"No. Not now, anyway. But a few weeks ago... Why do you ask?"

"Well, truth be told, you don't look exactly cheerful for a guy who's just had a couple of months traipsing around this paradise you've described."

Martin scowled and proceeded to give me a rather disjointed account of his travels, speaking in halting phrases and gulping beer as though it were medicine.

"Let me give you an example," he said. "This was just one day in Chiang Rai. A Friday evening, it was. I was down to about 20 baht in Thai currency, but I had some US$500 in traveller's cheques and a couple of hundred-dollar bills. No problem, I figured. But then I found nobody would cash the cheques! I couldn't believe it. Even at my hotel. 'You've got to cash this,' I told them. 'It's legal tender. It's money.'

"The more I ranted at them, the more they all smiled. They kept smiling at me. And then they wouldn't take the hundred-dollar bills; they said they were dirty. Dirty and torn. Well, so they were. I'd had them stashed in my shoes for safe-keeping. But they were still legal tender. 'Look here,' I told them. Serial numbers. These are the serial numbers. This money is good.' But they just smiled. They wouldn't cash anything. I could see a money-changer, they said, though they were all closed till the next day. So there I was, with a pile of money but nothing to spend and nowhere to go. And they were all beaming at me as though I was the luckiest joker within a radius of miles.

"I went to the coffee shop at the hotel to eat; at least they let me put dinner on the tab. I wanted sweet and sour fish, fried mixed vegetables, and yam neua.

"The waiter took the menu, looked at the yam neua I was pointing to, and said, 'Phet; phet mahk.' And he smiled at me. I knew phet; it meant "hot". So I said, 'Yes, yes. Phet Okay, fine. I like phet. Phet mahk, very hot. The hotter the better. No problem.'

"So I settled back with the newspaper to await sustenance. Eventually the fish came. Two people came with it, and they stood there smiling as though in anticipation of my reaction to this culinary masterpiece. They stood smiling at me and I sat glaring at them till they got the idea I wasn't entirely pleased.

"'Where,' I asked them, 'is my rice and the other food?'

'"Is come. Is come,' they assured me.

"Well, it had most assuredly not come, but I was starving, and eventually I ate the fish. Then the vegetables arrived, and, a little later, the rice.

"'Where is my yam neua?" I enquired.

"This elicited smiles of incomprehension; finally one of my retinue went to fetch the cashier or the maitre d' or somebody, who asked me what the problem was.

"Opting for succinctness, I said: 'I want my yam neua.'

"Now all three of them beamed at me, shaking their heads: 'Phet; phet mahk.'

"I admit I lost my temper, at this point. 'I know it's phet. I like blasted phet. Bring... me... yam., neua. And make it phet!'

"All to no avail. All I got were the smiles. Arrgh. The smiles. It can be enough to make you weep. I finally ate my cold rice with nam pla, with fish sauce, and went up to bed early."

I wanted to commiserate, but I couldn't see that what he'd related thus far was particularly harrowing, as

harrowing experiences go.

"But this sort of thing has gone on all the time, wherever I've been. The next thing I knew, I had dysentery. I was bed-ridden for several days."

He did look as though he had lost weight. In fact, he was about as emaciated as a big hearty type like that could get without actually being clinically dead.

"Yeah. That wasn't a lot of fun. But then I got back to Bangkok and met my Thai friends, who hadn't seen me since I went upcountry. Martin, Martin!' they all said. You look so smart.' There I was, one foot in the grave, and feeling bad enough I could hardly wait to get the other one in, and they were smiling and telling me how 'smart' I looked. 'Good. You've lost your weight,' they told me. Blasted ninnies. I was dying.''

It's true. Thais perceive all large farangs as being "fat", no matter whether it's really fat or just meat and bone. For someone like myself to get called "smart", I'd have to be marooned without food for a month and then have a long spell of dysentery besides. Still, it seemed to me Martin was being a trifle harsh.

"But it's not only the smiling," he continued. "There's the ambling." He reached up gingerly to touch the gauze dressing on his head.

I found this observation puzzling. Martin pronounced the word "ambling'" as though it were some kind of invective, referring to an activity so heinous that it should not be discussed in front of children.

"Thais amble. There is no discernible pedestrian traffic pattern on sidewalks and pavements. Moving with the deliberation of upcountry oxcarts, they manage at the same time to be everywhere they should not be."

I could see that Martin had thought about this feature of Thai culture deeply, and that this tirade would

become a set-piece, to be recounted for years to come.

"People walk in any direction," he went on. "There is not the slightest idea of lanes of traffic. They stop without warning; they step directly into one's path; they mill about in impromptu roadblocks, play pedestrian 'chicken', and generally take no more account of my person than they would a rumour of snow."

Obviously this was a sore point with him. I hesitated to tell him, seeing the condition he was in, that this was Thailand and these people were Thais, walking in the Thai way; and that if he wanted to walk his way and not find his every path an obstacle course, then he should go walk in Toronto or somewhere.

"You see this?" he asked me, pointing to his head. "I was striding along in Tha Phra Chan Market, yesterday, dodging and weaving and trying to do better than a mile an hour, when a band of schoolgirls materialised directly in front of me. I swerved to miss them and immediately felt a sharp object penetrate my skull deeply enough to give me a frontal lobotomy."

Evidently the operation hadn't been a success; Martin was working himself into a real temper.

"It was the corner of a metal sign, mounted low enough to be an effective trap for anyone taller than 5' 11"."

Martin, as I'm sure the reader has guessed already, is 6' tall.

"I reeled away as blood began to pour from my head. Some concerned passers-by gathered 'round, and for once they weren't smiling too much. I had learned how to ask in Thai where the hospital was, while I was upcountry; and I tried it out again now. This elicited an excited gabble that I couldn't understand at all. A couple of good Samaritans, however, took me in charge and led me to a ferry landing and pointed to the hospital across the river.

"We had a few minutes to wait for the ferry, and I really just wanted to be left alone to see what life with a frontal lobotomy was going to be like. Unfortunately, my earlier essay at the Thai language had convinced them that I was a hot-shot Farang who could speak Thai. I kept saying, 'Mai khaochai; I don't understand,' in impeccable accents, and thereby exhausting my entire store of Thai; but it was no use. These kind people kept smiling and speaking Thai and asking me, I had to imagine, things like, 'And how do you feel about the Hegelian dialectic; do you think it holds water, when it comes right down to it?'

"Eventually I got to see a doctor, who smiled, took three stitches in my scalp, and insisted on knowing how it had happened. He gave me a tetanus shot and a packet of antibiotic capsules, and then, strangely enough, suggested I see a monk at a temple right across the street from where I had encountered the sign."

"What, for meditation classes?" I asked.

'That's right."

"Going to do it?"

"Are you nuts? I'm getting out of here. I'm going back to Toronto, where people walk at a good clip in orderly lanes of traffic as though they're going someplace, and where everybody isn't smiling all the time. I've got to go somewhere and relax."

5 THE ORIGIN OF THE THAI BUS QUEUE

In Thailand, things are not always what they first appear. What is it, for example, that occasionally prompts such normally free- spirited individualists as the Thais to line up at bus-stops in queues of geometrical precision? Why do many construction workers wear woollen balaclava masks even in the hottest weather? Read on to have these and other mysteries revealed.

I showed up at the restaurant a little late, that afternoon, and found my friend Tony from England already deep into a large bottle of beer. He was, he told me, bamboozled.

"There they were," he said. "They were standing in a queue as straight and orderly as if someone had surveyed it for them." He pointed to the bus-stop on the street below, outside the window. "Then the bus came, and all of a sudden it was gangbusters — every man for himself in a mad scramble to get on board... Take a look out there now: there's another queue forming."

And so there was. Thus far three people were lined up

as smartly as the Royal Guards on parade. Tony shook his head in bewilderment and sought Veritas in his vino. Actually it wasn't vino; it was beer, and his glass was empty.

'Your shout," he said.

I suppose it was, in light of the fact I'd been late and missed his round.

By the time the beer arrived several more people had lined up at the bus-stop. You might have thought Thailand had spent 50 years under the British Raj. given the geometrical precision of that queue. Then a bus appeared, and Tony told me to watch carefully. The "queue" abruptly disintegrated into swarming knots of people at the doors of the bus.

"See!" exclaimed Tony. "What do you make of that?"

I had the explanation, in fact. Seeing as how I was paying for the drinks, however, I figured I shouldn't make it too easy for him. I pointed to the crowded sidewalk across the street. It was a typical scene, with people moving from cover to cover like soldiers under fire. A number of them had newspapers, shopping bags, even briefcases held up to their faces. In England, they would've been shielding themselves from the perpetual drizzle. But here in Bangkok, with the sky clear and the sun still hot at 4:00 p.m.?

"They must be keeping the sun off," said Tony.

Right then, I told him; he should have a look at the bus-stop again, where yet another line of people had formed, and think about it.

Tony stared and ruminated. Then he swigged at his beer and ruminated some more. Abruptly, a grin of delighted comprehension cracked his face wide open. "Aha," he said. "I have it! It's the telephone pole — they're in the shadow of the telephone pole." He chortled, ordering more beer with which to celebrate his perspicacity. For that was indeed the answer. Far from representing some historically unaccountable vestige of the British Empire, these people were being regimented simply by their aversion to sunlight and by the long, late afternoon shadow of a telephone pole.

Flushed with the success of his deduction, Tony decided to overawe me with the quickness of his mind. "I see it now," he said. "This kind of behaviour has evolved as a survival factor — little habits that constantly minimise the heat, right?"

"Wrong," I replied. "Have a look across the street; do you see those construction workers?" A dozen labourers, both male and female, occupied a building site. It was hot, yet everyone was dressed in long-sleeved shirts buttoned at the collars and fastened at the wrists. They wore broad-brimmed hats together with either scarves or knitted balaclava masks covering their entire faces but for the eyes. Some kind of insulation against the heat? Or maybe they were breathing through the scarves because of the air pollution. Nice theories, but almost certainly wrong.

It was vanity, I told Tony. That's what it was. Your average Thai has almost a phobic reaction to sunlight on the skin. And why? Just because it makes you darker.

"I can't accept that," Tony said. "Surely these habits have evolved as the distilled wisdom of generations who've had to work in the hot sun. If you spend too much time in the sun, your skin ages and you get skin cancer. It makes good sense to stay out of it."

Skin cancer? I responded. Good sense? Rubbish. Nobody cares about skin cancer until they get it. Not in face of the Cosmetic Imperative. No, it's all vanity.

You look at your average Westerner. I've seen Germans, Americans, all sorts of people who are supposed to have better sense lying in the sun till their skin blisters, cracks, and curls up crisp at the edges. Skin cancer? The popular media are full of stories about sun and skin cancer, but you still get people devoting the better part of their annual vacations to working on the perfect suntan. Good sense? You get them spending large amounts of money and time subjecting themselves to something that has in many traditions been used as a form of torture (though when it is applied as torture there generally aren't any cold beers or gin and tonics involved). You get shirtless Aussies in the middle of Chiang Mai and topless Germans on Jomtien. Are they merely concerned with staying cool? No; once again it's only vanity. 'To hell with local customs and local sensibilities; we want an all-over tan to flaunt back home."

It's ironic. Thais tend to be naturally darker than a lot of Westerners, and they're often concerned with getting lighter, or at least with holding steady. Westerners, on the other hand, suffer all sorts of expense and discomfort trying to get darker. In the West, a tan lends an aura of health and vitality. In Thailand, it is generally about as welcome as leprosy.

This can be explained, at least in part, by the fact that Thais associate darker skin with manual labour, while fair skin represents a visible sign of class. Of course this used to be true in Europe as well, where in days gone by tans were associated with the working class. Ladies, for example, would carry parasols and wear big floppy hats and gloves and things, just to keep their skin white and upper-crusted. It was the advance of the Industrial Revolution which democratised pallor in the West, taking the hoi polloi out of the sun and putting them into the dark Satanic mills and pits of Industry. Pale skin lost its classy cachet; few aristocrats could compete with the pallor of a factory worker, for example, who was required to sweat inside for 18 hours day. Then along came the 20th century, when tropical beaches and tennis courts became readily accessible to those with the money and leisure, which is almost everybody, these days. A nice dark suntan has become prized evidence of a trip to the Bahamas or one's membership in the Gastown Polo Club. It really is a powerful thing, this attitude towards tans: even though I have to laugh at the obsession, I myself almost throw up when I see newly-arrived farangs on the beach — some couple from Liverpool, for instance, lying there like gobbets of whale blubber washed ashore. In two days' time they'll resemble boiled lobsters, except for the skin hanging in shreds from their tortured bodies. Within two weeks of their return to Liverpool, of course, they'll be white as fish bellies again or, as the average Thai would have it, "Suay mahk (very nice)."

In the West, tans have become a symbol of health, beauty, and money. In some circles they are virtually mandatory. Have you ever seen Liz Taylor or George Hamilton without a tan? No, you haven't; and they'd hide under the bed before they'd let you. And Ronald Reagan would've done the same, at least before he did, in fact, get skin cancer.

"Okay, so you've convinced me," said Tony. "Westerners are crazy. But everything you've told me goes to show that the people standing in the shadow of that telephone pole are eminently sensible. They know what they're doing."

"They may be doing the right thing," I replied, "but they're doing it for the wrong reasons. Let me give you just a few random bits of evidence.

"I come home from the beach glowing with health and a tan fit to get me on the back of the bus in Alabama, and my Thai neighbours greet me with 'My, you look good! Been to the sea?' Dark farangs are okay, it seems. My

Thai girlfriend, on the other hand, comes back from the beach to be greeted with expressions of concern bordering on horror: 'Oh, you're so black! Naaglee-ed (ugly).' She's unusual, inasmuch as she likes to sunbathe; most Thai women at the beach stay in the shade, and they cover up with clothes if they go in the water. 'Modesty', you say? Maybe. But I've got my money on vanity.

'Take another example. The first time I went up to Chiang Mai, I was expecting to be swept away by the incredible beauty of the ladies, having been primed with the folk wisdom that the loveliest women in Thailand are from the North. I must say I was a bit disappointed. Sure, the local maidens were by no means blemishes on the landscape, but I reckoned I'd seen more heartbreakers per square metre in Bangkok. What had everyone been raving about? Only after I'd lived in Thailand for some time did I realise what it all meant: it's simply that northern girls are fairer-skinned than the North-easterners or the Southerners and, hence, 'more beautiful'. No, you're not going to get most of your Thai women sunbathing when Thai beauty pageants have a 'Miss Fair Skin' category, and when you can bet the one who takes the crown as most beautiful of all is going to be at least as fair as Miss Fair Skin."

Tony was ready to concede the point, he finally indicated, if only I'd stop yammering on about it. In any case we were distracted by the appearance at the bus- queue of a lady of indeterminate origin (she was a little too dark for Chiang Mai) but of truly breathtaking physical attraction. Though she stood in the shadow of the telephone pole, she glowed as though with an inner light. After a couple of minutes a bus came along to signal the disintegration of the queue and to carry the object of our admiration away to grace other fields of perception. Tony and I heaved sighs in unison, and there followed a silence wherein we practised our middle-distance stares.

'You know," I said after a spell, "my brother wrote from Canada the other day. He told me he's been going three times a week to an institution known as 'Fabutan'. Apparently this is one version of something called a 'tanning salon', and he has been preparing for a vacation in Jamaica."

You mean he's getting a tan before he goes away?"

"Yeah. Maybe it's a status thing — the Joneses down the road just came back from Bermuda with a tan, and now he's going to fix them by going away with a tan. Who knows?"

"Well, Bangkok's already got Dairy Queens and McDonald's; when are you going to get the first Fabutan Salon?"

"Are you kidding? Trying to sell Fabutan franchises in Thailand would be like trying to promote Pork Sausage Parlours in Arabia. No, what you'd want to set up here would be Pallor Parlours. That's the thing — lead-lined rooms shielded from the least glimmer of ultra-violet; immersion in bleach baths and massages with skin lighteners...

"That's it — this is what you do: you establish a chain of Pallor Parlours in Thailand right away. Then, with the fortune that pours in, you buy into the tanning salons in America. The way the Western media are going on about skin cancer, and what with Ronald Reagan describing what's left of his nose as a billboard proclaiming we should all stay out of the sun, the trend is going to turn, and before you know it the anaemic look is going to come back into fashion in Europe and America. At the same time, the influence of the West and Western-style affluence is striking ever deeper at Thailand; and, as always, the popular culture embraced abroad is going to lag behind what is actually current in the West, so more and more Thais will come to see that the smart thing is to be tanned and to look as much as possible like George Hamilton. And that's when you pull the old switcheroo. Suddenly, overnight, you convert your American tanning operations into Pallor Parlours, and your Thai Pallor Parlours into tanning salons. Before you know it, you're bigger than Coca-Cola."

By now it was becoming clear we'd both had a little too much to drink, and we agreed to postpone further discussion of our new commercial empire till we could re-examine the matter in the cold hard light of day.

The next morning, in fact, it didn't seem like such a good idea anymore; and I had a pallor that showed right through my Koh Samui tan.

6 RUNNING WITH THE BULLS, BANGKOK-STYLE

They call it investing; their critics call it speculating; but it's really gambling, pure and simple. Thailand has a large "community" of both Thais and foreigners who devote themselves to playing the SET (Stock Exchange of Thailand). When the bulls are running, the quick and audacious can make tons of money in a day, and everyone is animated, filled with an unholy delight at the prospect of all this free loot. Most people are, that is; some people can't handle winning...

Wiwat is wired; he's wound up tight.

Most of his colleagues on the stock exchange floor are more recognisably Thai, taking it easy even in the heat of the trading hours, adopting the mai pen rai ("never mind") attitude which often tends to set the pace in this country. But Wiwat is a chain-smoker, sucking tobacco smoke down like it was jet fuel; and when the action heats up he gets a violent twitch under one eye which puts the lie to the unfailingly calm, professional voice he uses to reassure his clients.

However many years, or months, he has left before he blows that vein which throbs in his temple, he has an uncanny aptitude for getting things right. If he says you should pick up Songkhla Canning now and sell it in two days, you can be pretty sure that's exactly what you should do. Just let greed get the better of you and hold it for that third day.

He makes an unlikely Moses, yet every morning Wiwat comes down from the mountain with the sacred wisdom on what should be bought and what should be sold that day. "What does Wiwat say?" This question buzzes about the trading floors of brokerages all over the city. "What does Wiwat say?" It hums along the telephone lines, as Wiwat's own clients leak the word to their fellow punters.

When it comes to investment decisions in this town, what Wiwat has to say is arguably more important than enough quarterly earnings reports and PE ratios and Metastock-generated graphs to paper your office and half the corridor too.

Thailand has seen the growth of a large fraternity of gamblers, both Thai and expat, who more or less compulsively ride the bulls and duck the bears through a combination of insider leaks, time-worn principles of sound gambling, black magic, and pure luck. But such was the growth of the Thai economy over much of the past several years, one would have had to be especially adept in order to lose money playing this market. More recently, though, a political scene sometimes reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland — sometimes darker than that — complete with military coups and recurrent rumours of more coups, has kept the market volatile and the pessimists without sleep.

Although the current investment hysteria (one which is paralleling an unparalleled rush to development and, some say, a rule of greed in the larger society) waxes and wanes with the bulls and the bears, when the scent of easy money is really in the air and the SET index is soaring, you see everyone from bargirls to housewives to government clerks to what look for all the world like school kids haunting the trading rooms.

Meanwhile, absenteeism soars in government and business offices because everybody's down at the brokers in the mornings. Maids and drivers sit around from 9:00 a.m. till noon glued to the stock market quotations on TV and the telephone, waiting to execute the buy and sell orders of the business people who actually did go to work.

What someone like Hal from Wisconsin can't understand is why everyone isn't living in Bangkok and clearing over $100,000 a year for doing little more than putzing around a trading room for a few hours five days a week. He's been doing just that for years now, and it has done him nothing but good, or so he'd have you believe. Understandably, to some, he wears an ineffable aura of well-being — a Buddha-like demeanour belied only by the merest manic hint of some delightful secret, an unholy joy in some illicit recipe for success in this life. When the bulls are running, this "Buddha" is at his best. When the market is in the doldrums, on the other hand, he comes more to resemble a poorly conceived image in stone — some vital force is absent, his raison d’être missing for the time being. But as soon as those lines on his graphs start to take off again, he is reanimated with the passion to multiply his take.

But the promise of easy money doesn't affect everybody the same way.

Having spent his mornings in the trading room for most of the long vacation, Richard, a local university teacher, is a haggard shadow of the man who only two months ago plunged most of his life savings into the Thai stock market, putting together a nice little portfolio for himself just before the SET index went into a giddy decline. He had actually managed to adopt a becoming fatalism in regard to his "luck", and he had got quite used to gradual disaster. But now the bulls are running again, rampaging even, and Richard is undone by success, unnerved by the compulsion, the unrelenting necessity to decide.

"I sold all my babies today. Everything; the whole lot of them. "

This news, shocking to the innocent bystander, is delivered in tones of real regret. But Richard is merely talking about the shares of Thai-German Ceramics which he acquired at a preferred rate upon the occasion of a capital increase — "baby shares", as they are known in the vernacular. He's decided it's time to sell them off.

Even once the decisions are made, they won't leave him alone. It seems to matter nothing that he's been cleaning up lately. He's strung taut as a piano wire, a string upon which has been struck a deeply reverberant note of greed which thrums and hums and won't let up even in the middle of the night, when Richard snaps awake to a review of the day's bidding. Drenched in a sweat of self- castigation for not having done better, he is apprehensive of the morrow and what he should do then.

"This is killing me," says Richard. "I think I liked it better when I was losing."

Still and all, despite the incipient nervous breakdown, he can say this; "I'm fed up with being a teacher. I think I'll become a fulltime player. Maybe I'll go and ask Wiwat what he thinks."

7 SOCIAL FREE-CLIMBING

Here's a quick guide, an aid to making your assault on the more rarefied elevations of high society in Bangkok. In fact, the rules outlined in this story aren't much different from those which apply everywhere.

Class is money and manners. To scale the heights of social status, you need both.

Possibly, though, you need more money than manners. For one thing, money in itself gives you manners. The confident knowledge of where one's next meal is coming from quite naturally engenders a certain poise. It lends an ineffable social presence to the individual who knows it doesn't matter if the Benz is double-parked; one's driver can always look after things. If you want social status, in short, then get a bunch of money.

TIP: Be rich.

But bunches of money don't grow on trees, and the question for aspiring socialites often becomes this: How

does one cultivate the manner without having the money?

Social free-climbing — mounting an assault on the social heights without thick cushions of money to fall upon — is as reckless as scaling sheer rock-faces without ropes and pitons. Still, it can be done; one can climb ahead of one's own current material resources. All you need is nerve and a steady grip on a few simple techniques.

Just remember this: books are judged by their covers. Human beings, however, have one key advantage over books: they can redesign their own covers. That "me" with whom you yourself are intimately acquainted is not the social you. The public never has to know that this déclassé individual exists — this bozo with bunions and a broken denture who likes nothing better than to curl up in front of the soaps with a tin of beer and some potato crisps, ignoring the creditors queued up at the door.

What the rest of the world sees is merely the exterior, the surface phenomena. Who you are is how you dress, in which car you arrive, where you are seen, and in whose company this happens.

Who you are is how you dress. Clothes make the person.

If you are still in the early stages of redesigning your own cover, perhaps you should go for designer labels. This is the climbers' equivalent to painting by numbers. Most people will have to believe you're a Real Person simply because the advertising world has already told them you are, or else you wouldn't be wearing their clothes.

After your first stumbling steps up the social heap, on the other hand, you'll find that being covered in trade names — having designer labels shrieking on all sides just as though you'd screwed up and put your clothes on inside out — merely announces your insecurity, your need to say you've arrived. You are transparent, your aspirations revealed.

TIP: The modern cult of Consumerism is trying to make it mandatory that we all provide free advertising, wandering around like sandwich boards for the fashion industry. But real class will always baulk at this. Real class will always opt for the anonymity of quality material and expert tailoring, with perhaps just the discreet flash of an exclusive label as you reach inside your jacket for your mobile phone.

TIP: The mobile telephone has become an indispensable fashion accessory. Anybody who is anybody wouldn't be caught dead at a traffic light without one. It's also an invaluable aid to one's poise when one finds oneself at the top of a stairway about to descend into the crowd — what better time to call your stockbroker? People with real style have even been known to flourish mobile phones in the midst of a 40- megablitz storm of fusion jazz at their favourite trendy pub. No more would one climb an Alp without a Tyrolean hat than aspire to class without a mobile phone.

No matter how well you dress, though, if you haven't got the money to back it up, you'll never ascend to the final reaches of social class. The genuine nob can get away with blue jeans and a sweatshirt. Dressed in real threads, a fortiori, the aristocracy can wear clothes in a way you simply can't. The thing is this: Money enhances your whole physical appearance, smoothing the lines on your face, lending an aura of well-being which exudes from your very pores and leaks through the fine weave of your worsted suits or silk dresses. Generations of this, moreover, can have a cumulative effect, with "old money" often doing better at the game than the nouveaux riches, even where the real aristocrats may not have as much cash lying about. There is more than tailoring to a good fit.

Who you are is which car you arrive in. The right car can help speed you up the slopes of social success.

The efficacy of any specific automobile is a function of both length and expense — the longer the better, of course, because this takes up more kerb space and thereby more surely establishes your presence on the scene. (Scientists speculate that the social climbers' instinct to acquire ever longer cars is related to the habit wolves in the wild have of establishing territorial rights and relative rank by peeing on everything they consider theirs.)

TIP: For maximum effect, your Benz should be double-parked when you visit trendy pubs in the evening. Jaguars and Bentleys are customarily triple-parked.

If you're still a little insecure about how people are seeing you as you drive around town, even after lashing out all that money, then for just a few baht more you can customise your image. One ideal rear windscreen might read AMERICAN EXPRESS, CHULA UNIVERSITY, HARVARD, NAKAMISHI STEREO SPEAKERS, and I WAS GOING TO BUY A MERCEDES. BUT THIS WAS MORE EXPENSIVE. The front windscreen should have a Polo Club parking sticker and no fuzzy bat on suction cups.

TIP: Don't install more than three antennae on your car; it is tacky. Even with three, at least two of them should be connected to something.

Too many people in Thailand today are making the mistake of spending so great a proportion of their climbing budget on a car that they can't afford fuel to drive it. This makes it difficult to be seen getting out of your car in all the right places—which is, after all, the main reason for having the thing in the first place.

TIP: If you can't afford a car appropriate to the status to which you would pretend, then it may be better to have no car at all. Rather than be reduced to living together with your entire family of four in a 1970 stretch Mercedes-Benz limousine for which you have no fuel (or, on the other hand, rather than be seen driving an ancient Toyota with the holes for the taxi sign still apparent on the roof), hire taxis and limousines.

Who you are is also where you are seen. It is extremely important to be seen arriving in the right car at the right places.

You should go to five-star hotels a lot. This is where you have the best chance of appearing in the society pages of the local newspapers.

Originally, in Bangkok at least, the practice of congregating in first-class hotels stemmed from the fact that these establishments were among the few public places with air-conditioning. This was important, in the first place, because there was nothing more disheartening than blowing a bundle on some fancy threads only to have them soaked with perspiration even before anybody got to see your new outfit.

TIP: Proles sweat; climbers perspire; the nobs merely glow.

Besides that, first-class hotels have always been designed to intimidate the hoi polloi. Their outrageous expense, not to mention their aristocratic veneer, acts as a convenient social filter.

These days, of course, so many places are air-conditioned that even the rabble can be cool. Still, the habit persists: one congregates in hotels to be seen by society photographers and one's would-be peers while one hobnobs with the peer group to which one currently aspires. Fortunately, as the middle-class population of Thailand explodes, the number of classy hostelries grows to keep pace with the herding instincts of parvenu society.

TIP: There is not much to choose between most five-star hotels in Bangkok, as places to hang out. It's simply a matter of exactly where the Right People are going to be on any given night, and how likely it is you'll be able to get close enough to them to share the frame of a normal camera lens.

Golf courses are the only place to be when you're being seen in the out-of-doors.

TIP: If you want to impress the Right People on the links, be sure to have at least three caddies (one to carry the clubs, one to spot balls, and one to hold your parasol), but no more than four (one extra to run to the clubhouse for drinks). Five or more is tacky.

Trendy pubs, of which there are an ever-increasing number in Thailand, are a must for the young social climber. These are places where you go to enjoy being envied by your social inferiors while at the same time you get to observe your social betters (your role models). It is also where you affect a taste for fusion jazz, no matter how much you really think the stuff sounds like runaway elevator Muzak.

TIP: Know the names of at least two popular jazz bands and be prepared to say at least one of them has gone downhill since they lost their saxophonist, Whasizzname.

Who you are is whom you associate with. And, when deciding whom you should be seen with, apply the same rule you follow when looking for tennis partners — always try to match yourself with social players more accomplished than you are. Your own standards will then tend consistently to rise to the challenge as you continue to mount the social heights.

TIP: One notable exception to this rule should be mentioned. Wherever you are seen, it is a good idea to be seen in the company of underprivileged children, preferably underprivileged children upon whom you are in the process of bestowing generous gifts. Ostentatious contributions to charity are in general an essential criterion of social class.

Your choice of spouse is very important (always assuming, of course, that you plan to be seen in public with this person). Every climber should try to marry above his or her current station in life.

TIP: Bad news for the male contingent: Thais

have traditionally taken a dim view of higher- class women marrying their social inferiors.

TIP: "There is no stronger craving... than that of the rich for titles, except that of the titled for riches" (Hesketh Pearson, The Marrying Americans, 1961). This refers to one particularly synergistic sort of liaison between man and woman. If you have neither title nor riches to offer as an ante, however, you will be forced to rely entirely on manners. Plus considerable luck.

Who you are is also what you talk about and how you talk about it.

What do you talk about? You talk about other people who are there to be seen, about people who aren't there but should be, about people who are there but shouldn't be (sometimes despite the best efforts of the doormen), about whose car is parked farthest from the curb and whether it's expensive enough to be so displayed. That's if you are talking among yourselves. If somebody else intrudes, let us say for example a reporter for the social pages, then it's best to talk about the environment. Sometimes you can also talk about how much you love children.

Among yourselves, however, it is best to stick to certain tried and tested topics. Servants, for instance — everybody talks about their servants. This is okay, but take care you don't natter on too long about them, for fear of stigmatising yourself as such a parvenu you still think having a domestic staff is something remarkable.

TIP: Talking about your driver has more cachet than talking about your maid, since everybody in Thailand has a maid. Even the maids have maids.

TIP: Talking about your bodyguards is better still.

TIP: If you have no servants (!) you can score points simply by saying "Oh, I never have problems with servants", and leaving it at that.

Talking about the SET is a sine qua non of membership in society, in these heady days of economic expansion and imminent NIC-hood. Many people are investing, not because they need the money, but only so they will have something to talk about at cocktail parties.

TIP: If you didn't know that "SET" referred to the Stock Exchange of Thailand, then you're so far out of it don't even think about leaving base camp, much less mounting an assault on the lofty heights of local society. (You also didn't read the previous chapter of this book.)

The aspiring socialite must remember, however, that introducing this topic of conversation can equally be a faux pas, a gaffe sufficient to cause the Right People to shrink away from you in the way they would from something found in a polyester suit.

TIP: Before introducing this topic in the Right Company, it is essential that you know whether the stock market is currently on a bull run or whether it is being savaged by the bears. The astute observer of local society will note that in the latter instances there is generally a profound hush where once one would have heard all manner of sparkling chit-chat about such things as the darling baby shares someone's favourite stock just gave birth to. Hitherto scintillating conversationalists will be found gazing deep into their Campari-sodas and speaking in monosyllables if at all. During a bear market, in fact, merely the inadvertent use of words such as "buying" or "selling" in polite company invites a social frost.

TIP: When the bulls are running, tell everybody about how you sold a big winner at exactly the wrong moment. Be sure to smile ruefully the while. In fact if you can smile ruefully and yawn at the same time, all the better.

TIP: If you don't know the difference between a bull and a bear, then you might just as well stop reading right here and go bowling.

Generally speaking, finally, the cardinal rule for real social adepts is this: Never talk about yourself to people you are trying to impress. Instead express a relentless interest in the other's life history, political opinions, and tailor/dressmaker. All the while you do this, of course, you gaze admiringly at them. Properly executed, this procedure will not only win you the reputation of being a brilliant conversationalist, it will also establish you as a person of excellent breeding.

But there is more to it than choice of conversational gambit. There is how you conduct yourself in general, as you associate with those with whom you wish to be associated — what you do with a fingerbowl and how you behave if you don't do what people think you're supposed to with it.

If you don't already know a fingerbowl from miso soup,

then you have three options.

Stratagem I: You could go to a finishing school for the social graces.

Stratagem II: You can effectively apprentice yourself to those you most want to emulate. This approach requires you to watch your social superiors like a hawk, committing yourself to no action in public till you first see how they do it. This is traditionally how one finds one's way around a formal table in the West, for example, negotiating the heap of assorted forks, spoons, knives, snail tongs, hacksaws, and other essential tools of refined dining, not to mention four different varieties of drinking vessel.

Stratagem III: Most effective of all, you adopt a consistent manner of savoir-faire, one sufficiently practised to neutralise any outrage, however unconventional, you might commit. Whatever you do, as long as it's done with true panache, everybody will then feel obliged to follow suit. They will judge by your manner alone that you are a Real Person and hence this is now the correct thing to do. One measure of true panache would be, for instance, getting an entire tableful of socialites to take their cue from you and chug their fingerbowls.

TIP: If you are applying Stratagem II, you must take care that the person you have selected as a role model is not merely another climber much like yourself, especially one who has perfected Stratagem III.

A CASE HISTORY: Reliable sources report that once at a dinner party in Sukhumvit Soi 13 not only the entire guest list but the hosts as well, through some unkind twist of fate, consisted of nothing but aspiring parvenus. In consequence, everyone at the table was looking at everyone else, nobody daring to so much as pick up a fork till someone else made the first move. Eventually, several people got so hungry they fainted. Still others passed out as a result of taking too many aperitifs on an empty stomach. Finally, even those who hadn't yet fainted or passed out pretended to, since this was clearly The Thing to Do. Eventually they were all taken away in ambulances and the servants ate everything with dessert spoons.

It has only been since the 1950s, with the rise of a significant middle class and the relative eclipse of an older, more rigid class structure, that social climbing in Thailand has become possible on a wide scale. Indeed, with the recent boom times it has become a national passion.

And the rules and stratagems of climbing, wherever there's been the rise of this ever-more affluent bourgeoisie, are much the same around the world. To succeed at the game, little more is required than a slavish dedication to the creed of Consumerism.

The rules are straightforward: you must constantly invest in new symbols of relative status — bigger and more expensive cars, more cars, membership in a golf club, more caddies, ever more strategically located city addresses, a country house, membership in a luxury fitness club, gold and then platinum American Express cards, a telephone in every pocket... You know the stuff. At the same time you mustn't forget that none of this has any value whatsoever unless the Right People get to see you with it.

WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? This question suggests a reformulation of the old conundrum, "Does a tree fall in the forest if there is no one there to hear it?" The Consumerist version: "Are you anybody if you arrive in a Benz and the Right People aren't there to witness it?"

'Thai society," suggests one anthropologist, "... tends to accept people at their face value, to recognise the wishes of role players who take their manners and self- presentation... seriously."

This traditional attitude is not much different from the norm in most societies; and it is a positive boon to the new social climber in Thailand. Taken together with the crumbling of the constraints of the older class system, this is just like China announcing that Mount Everest is henceforth open to all climbers; you no longer need to apply for a licence to make your assault. As long as you say you're a world-class mountaineer and you dress appropriately, then so you are and welcome.

Reactionaries grumble, mind you, and say that real class is more than surface presentation. They remind you that the phoo dee gao, the old-fashioned aristocratic class, have had more than money and power — they have developed among other things a genuine sense of humanity, including a sense of responsibility to others in the social hierarchy less fortunate.

But surely this is mere elitism, an attempt to safeguard establishment interests resentful at the onslaught of the arriviste hordes. After all, the rush to ascend the social heap represents a democratic turn — the same routes to the summit are now open to virtually everybody in the society. No problem. All you need for free-climbing, if you play your cards right, is a mobile telephone and some well-tailored clothes. And a nice car, or at least some money to hire a limo now and then. Just a few basic necessities.

Happy climbing.

8 THE JOY OF TRAFFIC JAMS

As Bangkok approaches traffic gridlock, pie-in-the-Skytrain remains just that, while as of early 1993 over 1100 new vehicles (only 400 of them private cars) are coming onto the roads every day. Some of the more creative solutions to the city's arterial sclerosis have included the proposal — this one from a perennial candidate for the governorship of Bangkok — that traffic lights in the city be kept green at all times.

More realistic is the recurring suggestion that we simply abandon the city and move somewhere else.

But are traffic and the associated pollution necessarily bad things? Read on, and learn to derive maximum benefit from the month and a half the average Bangkokian spends stuck every year in traffic.

Time is subjective. Sometimes it seems to fly. Other times, you're caught in a traffic jam.

If you're one of those favoured individuals with both

a car and a driver, read no farther. You already know what to do: get out of your car, walk to the nearest boozer, and hunker down till the traffic thins enough that you can get a taxi home. It's simple. The advice that follows is for the less fortunate.

The majority of people — the unenlightened hoi polloi — resent traffic jams. They feel that the time they spend sitting in traffic is nothing but a pain in the neck. They believe they would rather be almost anywhere else, doing almost anything else. This is a negative and unfulfilling attitude.

Insight number one: time is subjective, and traffic jams are an invaluable way of extending your subjectively perceived life-span. We will refer to this as the Time Extension Effect.

This first insight leads directly to a question, however: what's one to do with all of this extra time? Before this problem can be addressed, you must learn to slow down. Driving in heavy traffic, you will find that time has already slowed down; now all you have to do is slow down with it — learn to accept and enjoy it. One's frustration, even despair, is a consequence of frictions generated by being temporarily out of synch: the unenlightened driver frets and fumes within a little capsule of "real time" which is out of phase with "traffic-jam time". What you need is Temporal Phase Synchronisation. You can attempt to attain an enlightened standpoint all by yourself, or, more advisedly, you can seek the guidance of experienced professionals. I am currently working as a consultant to Alternative and Beneficial Solutions to Urban Dilemmas, Inc. (ABSURD).

Although a detailed account is beyond the scope of this article, I will outline the kind of service our organisation provides.

First, you must understand there are hierarchical stages of development in learning to appreciate traffic jams. For example, a client who is in the second-stage programme, Temporal Phase Synchronisation II (TPS II), might do an exercise such as the following. Clearing your mind and calming yourself as much as possible, imagine yourself pinned under an overturned bus. You take each part of your crushed body in turn and dwell upon the discomfort emanating from it. After five minutes, switch yourself back to where you sit in traffic. Open yourself to the flood of relative well-being which rushes through you. See? It could be worse.

Another TPS II exercise is to project yourself mentally into a space capsule in which you are all alone and falling towards another galaxy which you expect to reach in another 10,000 years, if all goes well. You were supposed to be in suspended animation, but there was an unfortunate equipment failure. Again, when you find yourself back in your car, heat shimmer and great belches of pollution all around you, you think, "Hey! This isn't bad at all."

If you follow these and other exercises for eight or ten weeks (real time), you may find you're ready to move up to the third stage, TPS III. The difference between TPS II and TPS III is simply this: at the second level you're learning to accept your fate as better than it could be, and deriving some comfort from that. Furthermore you have begun to restructure the bit of "real time" you have habitually carried into traffic with you. At the third level, however, you begin to appreciate all this extra time the traffic jam affords as an intrinsically positive thing. It is at this stage that you begin to grow as a person, ABSURD claims.

But what about the first level? TPS I is normally just for Type A personalities. The client is given exercises in basic self-control and relaxation. For example, we try to get him to stop biting the steering wheel and/or screaming obscenities. We also try to convince him of the futility of attempting to move whole lines of traffic by psychokinesis. One very effective way of stopping this kind of behaviour is to have the client strap on a blood-pressure apparatus and watch what happens to the little needles when he tries to move the traffic by mind control. This should scare him into calming down. Negative feedback conditioning, we call it.

The first thing we do is screen our clients to find out which are Type A and which are Type B. Everything we are trying to do comes much more easily to B's than A's. Type B people can learn to get the most out of a traffic jam with very little training. This kind of person will quite naturally learn to catnap at traffic lights, daydream, fall in love with that gamine beauty over there in the red Toyota, invent a better hammock, etc.

Nevertheless, whether the client is basically A or B, we can generally guide him through TPS II within a month or two. After that, we find it advisable to stream people into two different programmes. Type A clients respond best to activities that are challenging and that lead to a sense of real accomplishment. Once they've removed their teeth from the steering wheel and begun to open themselves to the possibilities of the Time Extension Effect, these overachievers can be encouraged to take up things such as Linguaphone courses in classical Sanskrit. Language studies are especially good for people who commute in groups — car pools and the like.

We've had some signal successes in TPS IIIA. There's the financial analyst, for example, who has become a world authority in heroic Swahili epic verse. It took him only eight months (real time) from scratch, given the Time Extension Effect.

Others have started sideline careers. One could, were one so inclined, sell mutual funds or Fuller brushes car-to- car (although the garland vendors might resent this encroachment on their turf).

It's good to get out of your car and stretch your legs, even if you don't sell things. The Type B might simply make it an occasion to shoot the breeze with his fellow motorists, perhaps make some new friends. Yeah—why not go over there and chat up that gamine beauty in the red Toyota? ABSURD will even provide you with some good opening lines. (How about this one: "Excuse me, you ravishing thing, you; but have you ever stopped to think what wonderful things traffic jams are? How else would you have met me, for instance?")

Collecting bumper-sticker sightings can be a rewarding pursuit for both TPS IIIA and TPS IIIB. It is likely that each personality type will proceed differently with this activity, however. The Type A will have in no time amassed thousands of sightings, and will most likely be using a computer programme to categorise them and then make projections as to which he's most probably going to spot next and so forth. The Type B, on the other hand, tends to drift off, musing on just one specimen, relishing its finer points and relating it to the various spheres and dimensions of temporal existence. One of our B students managed to while away an entire 45-minute jam, the other day, having gone into a trance over this bumper graffito: "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." I guess he doesn't have to worry about traffic jams anymore; when last heard of, he had sold his car, quit his job. and gone to live in a Zen monastery in Japan.

Some of our clients have taken advantage of the captive audience and taken up busking — strolling between lines of traffic strumming banjos and things. This is probably more a Type B recourse, but I suppose the Type A could always pass the hat after his performance. In any case, we suggest you reflect — maybe you'll discover you've always harboured a secret desire to perform in public. Once enough people start enjoying Temporal Phase Synchronisation in this way, it should become easy to form pickup bands right there in the road. Again, a fantastic way to meet new people.

Finally, and still in the creative vein, some of you might find you have a literary bent. You see that guy approaching the lady in the red Toyota; she rolls down her window, and they begin to chat and you wonder: What if he were to say he was selling a course in Temporal Phase Synchronisation offered by an organisation that promises to help you come to terms with traffic jams? "Excuse me," he says, "you ravishing thing, you..."

Traffic jams can provide both the time and the inspiration to pursue a whole second career as a writer. You get one guess as to where this story was written.

9 ONE BORN EVERY MINUTE

Chacun a son gout, and all that: Listen to what an Andromedan named Melrose has to say about pollution.

As most of you already know, the city of Bangkok was last week honoured to receive a high-level delegation from the M31 Galaxy in Andromeda. This historic visit came as a complete surprise, there having been no earlier communication from the alien ambassadors.

Today the whole world is full of wonder and hope at the thought of what these advanced beings from so far away might bring us — the new scientific and technical knowledge, the new insights into our own nature. We were fortunate enough to talk with one of the lesser members of the delegation. Communication was no problem, what with the universal translator-cum-intercom-cum-digital watch the alien wore on his... ah... appendage. He told us his name was Melrose.

Melrose was preparing a field report on us Earthlings, with a view to making a few bucks back home on a TV series called 'Tell Us Another One". He asked us if we could

clarify a few points.

'Tell me," he said, "I have noticed a very strange thing: the people in this place you call 'Bangkok' get around by means of bipedal motion — 'walking', I believe you call it." The creature rolled to one side inquisitively as he asked this.

"That's correct," we replied.

"Okay, fine." he said. "That's if the person wants to go somewhere — to move from A to B, so to speak. He 'walks'. I see that. But there's something that puzzles me; I've noticed that when people don't want to go anywhere, they get into those four-wheeled devices you call 'cars'. This seems to me odd. If you want to stay in the same place, why don't you just stop walking? Why go to all the trouble and expense of making cars to accomplish something that can be done quite naturally? And if one is bored with simply standing there and not moving, then one can go into a bar or a restaurant and not move while being fed or entertained at the same time."

We tried to explain to Melrose the rationale behind cars, but he merely looked at the traffic, rolled his eye, and blushed mauve with scepticism. Feeling that we were in danger of losing his trust, we decided to change the subject. We asked why they had chosen Bangkok as a landing site. Given the world-historical significance of this visit, after all, Washington and Moscow were bound to feel slighted. Bangkok was a colourful and exciting city, no doubt, but it was certainly not at the centre of the world stage. Our first thought, as we told him, was that the Tourism Authority of Thailand had found some way to tout the Decade of Tourism on a truly universal scale. This suspicion proved to be unfounded.

"Actually," said Melrose, "we came across your planet quite by accident. Since it appeared to be a class D (habitable) world, however, we used remote sensors to determine

the most benign environment for an exploratory mission. And here we are."

Melrose extended a breathing trumpet towards a clapped-out old Isuzu bus that had pulled up beside us, and then inhaled deeply as the bus belched and banged away from the stop. "Ahh," our extra-galactic visitor said, trumpet quivering appreciatively. "A little too much combustion, perhaps, but all in all a fine bouquet — subtle, yet substantial; proud, one might say, without being pretentious."

Melrose explained to us that his home planet had a lovely hot climate and thick black clouds of hydrocarbons all year around. Over the centuries since his species had developed space travel, they had modified the atmospheres of other planets as well, and had established flourishing colonies throughout their galaxy.

"For a small consulting fee," he told us, "we could do wonders for you here on Earth. For example, these things you call 'city buses' are remarkably efficient at producing a desirable atmosphere; but you waste much of it by not enclosing Bangkok under a dome. Just let us bring in the force-field generators, and you'd see a difference within hours. Really, this city has such potential."

We were about to ask Melrose if the same force field that kept the hydrocarbons in would keep the rain out, when we were interrupted by the approach of a slick- looking fellow who exuded a positive excess of goodwill. Melrose and this chap both spoke at the same time and, remarkably, said exactly the same thing: "Where you come from? You want go snake farm? Buy sapphires? Rubies?"

The man looked a little shaken, and backed off, turning to hurry away out of sight along Suriwongse Road. Melrose beamed (actually he turned bright green, which for Andromedans is the same thing). "I think I've finally got it right — it's such an involved greeting!"

We watched as he rolled out in front of a passing tourist lady and tried the greeting again, just for practice: "Where you come from? You want go snake farm? Buy sapphires? Rubies?"

"Oh, I'm from Kansas City!" she responded. "That's not in Kansas, you know, though everybody always thinks it is. Oh, no; it's in Missouri. But that's a long way from here. Are you Thai? Oh, no; you can't be. Of course not. No, you look different. And you speak such good English. Do you have sapphires?"

We felt we were running short of time, and we hadn't really got anywhere with our questions, as yet. We gently eased ourselves between Melrose, who was confused, and the lady from Kansas City, Missouri, and pointed the latter individual in the direction of a government-authorised jewellery shop.

Just then it started to rain, and Melrose began coughing and displaying pink and yellow stripes — obvious signs of distress. The atmosphere was rapidly becoming too thin for his metabolism, and he had to slip into his personal force-field bubble with the built-in smog generator. In no time the water was up to our ankles, as we stood there in the bus shelter. (We would have gone in somewhere off the street, but Melrose didn't want to get too far away from the buses.)

"You could certainly use a dome over this city," said Melrose, his voice sounding tinny and plaintive from inside the bubble. He was bobbing on the rising waters like a misshapen beach ball. "Is this what you call a flood?" he asked us.

"No," we answered. "This is not a flood. It is very wet, but cannot describe the situation as a flood. The government announced some time ago that they have beaten the floods. There are to be no more floods."

"I see," said the alien, who was by now floating up around our knees. "Admirable, I'm sure," he added, bobbing violently in the wake from a passing bus. "But what about the longer term? What about these new buildings? They have windows right down to street level. And the doors are at street level! Where is all the construction of raised travel ways one would expect to see?"

Melrose had us quite confused, by this time. What, we asked in slightly more diplomatic terms, was he wittering on about?

Carbon dioxide, he informed us. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the warming of the polar ice-caps. Apparently he was referring to what our scientists have called the "greenhouse effect".

"Surely you realise what's happening?" he went on. "Our planetary sensors and computers had it figured out before we touched down. You've got about 35 years at the outside, before the city of Bangkok, together with its flood-control measures, will be totally under water."

Melrose punctuated this rather alarming pronouncement by spinning on his axis with a flourish of breathing trumpets. "The proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing, and your climate is getting correspondingly hotter. We assume you Earthlings are engineering this planetary modification by means of hydrocarbon emissions together with the systematic extermination of the forests. In fact, we have admired how effective the programme has been, given your primitive technology. However, the ice-caps are melting, and in just a few decades sea levels worldwide will rise by several feet. Not much, really, but enough to completely submerge your charming city.

"I am surprised you haven't noticed the danger. Of course you can confidently expect lovely hot weather and gorgeous billowing clouds of hydrocarbons, the way things are going; but you people must be alert to the secondary consequences and take appropriate measures now."

To say that we were taken aback would have been an understatement. This was indeed bad news — bad news (the submersion of Bangkok) unleavened by what Melrose felt was the good news (hotter weather and more hydrocarbons).

As we are sure the reader already knows, however, we are saved. The arrival of our Andromedan friends has proven providential in the extreme. Discussions between ranking members of the Andromedan delegation and our government have produced agreements of untold potential benefit to both our species. The key to the trade agreement is a force-field generating station the Andromedans have promised to set up within the decade.

For their part, the aliens will receive regular shipments of Bangkok air. Initially, there will be three premium vintages: "Phya Thai Monday Morning", "Rama I Friday Evening" and, for the real connoisseur, "End-of- March Payday". Given what they feel will be the extraordinarily rare quality of the atmosphere in Bangkok after establishment of the force-field dome, the Andromedans reckon they're getting the best of the deal.

Our government, meanwhile, is also more than satisfied. The dome will keep the rains off Bangkok, simplifying the question of flood control. At the same time, there is to be a public information campaign revealing how our leaders plan to tackle the problem of air pollution. This scheme, as you have seen, is brilliant in its simplicity, and self-financing besides: We will bottle the pollution and export it to the Andromeda Galaxy. What could be more elegant a solution?

And, finally, Bangkok will be protected from the rising seas. Eventually, it appears, the whole city will be encapsulated in a submarine force-field. The Tourism Authority sees this as a heaven-sent opportunity, and is already preparing to advertise Bangkok as the biggest marine aquarium in the world, if not the entire solar system.

There on the street with us, Melrose received a radio message from a colleague. He'd left his universal translation device switched on. "Melrose! Melrose!" came the excited voice. "Get yourself on over here to the corner of Phya Thai and Rama I. You're not going to believe it. An atmosphere fit for kings. For emperors!"

"On my way," was the terse reply.

"Oh, man; it's incredible," the intercom squawked. 'You've gotta see it to believe it — all these weird Earthlings sitting motionless in their cars breathing this elixir through filters and refrigeration units! It's like sucking a wringbinder through a snodgap. Whackos, the lot of them. And Melrose..?"

'Yeah?"

"They've agreed to trade their air away for one — are you ready for this? — for one force-field generating station."

"Ha!" said Melrose. "There's one born every minute."

Too late, he saw that his translator had been on during the whole exchange. He turned blue with what we'd like to think was embarrassment, made his excuses, and rolled off at a rate of knots.

10 FLEEING THE SCENE

Ham Fiske sheds new light on one of Bangkok's oldest mysteries.

Having been involved in a collision or other mishap entailing injury or significant property damage, those parties to the incident employed to drive commercial vehicles shall immediately and without reflection flee the scene.

Or so it must be written. I have just read another report of a bus accident where the driver fled the scene. It occurs to me that I have never read a story of an accident in Thailand involving a bus or a truck where all drivers concerned didn't flee the scene. That is one part of the story reporters can write before they get there: "Drivers flee scene. "Is it some kind of rule? On a holiday weekend where there have been a lot of road accidents, it's dangerous to walk in the woods for fear of being trampled by drivers fleeing scenes.

I have asked friends here in Thailand what it all means. Apparently there is no law prescribing summary execution for erring commercial drivers. Nowhere have I seen evidence that police are especially brutal in their treatment of such people. So what is it? Some kind of folk tradition?

A few of us were sitting outside a noodle shop, the other evening, when we witnessed the coincidence of two city buses in the same bit of roadway. We waited expectantly for the drivers to flee the scene. It was quite a minor bang-up, however — no injuries and very little, if any, damage. In the end, both drivers simply climbed back on their respective buses and drove off.

One driver had actually looked poised for flight for a moment or two; he'd stood looking first at his bus and then at the gathering onlookers, eyes vague and uncertain, as if seeking to read in their faces what he should do. As I watched, a theory for the flee-the-scene syndrome began to take shape in my mind. I found myself telling my friends the story of the time I was a Mafioso, and the time I inadvertently fled the scene of my own court hearing. (Let me hasten to add that I was a callow youth of 17, at the time, and I no longer accept responsibility for those actions as my own.)

It had been a Monday morning amongst Monday mornings. Imagine the scene: a long, latrine-green corridor, featureless but for a blank door bracketed by two uniformed policemen. The transvestites sitting on the floor across from me looked as though they could've used a trip to the little girls' room. No amount of powdering the nose, however, was going to make them appear less than wilted after a whole weekend in the Montreal City Jail. Sitting next to them was Jean-Paul, who had been arrested on Saturday night for indecent exposure. He'd been walking backwards with one foot on the sidewalk and the other in the gutter, he told us, with his fly open. When the policemen asked what he thought he was up to, he said he was trolling. They laughed, and then took him downtown and threw him in the slammer.

Various other desperadoes were parked along the walls on both sides of the corridor — the flotsam and jetsam of the city: petty thieves, drunk-and-disorderlies, thugs. Beside me on the floor, asleep, was my friend Flynn. I wished I were asleep.

It was really Flynn's fault we were there in the first place. We were both employed by a company that handled small moving jobs and other light deliveries. The Friday night past we had been rammed by another van as we were making a left turn through an intersection. The chaps in the other vehicle had been a rowdy pair, ready — even hungry — for an altercation. I would have opted for reason and diplomacy, but Flynn was red-haired and hot-tempered and had been having trouble with his girlfriend besides.

The next thing we knew, Flynn and I were being bundled into a Black Maria and taken to jail. The police and the parties of the other part had all been native French-speakers and had seemed to reach agreement on the ins and outs of the case in no time. Flynn and I, on the other hand, had failed to score any points at all in the debate, what with our pitiful store of fractured French.

At the jail, we were a little taken aback to find that we wouldn't see a judge till Monday, but we settled in to learn whatever could be culled from this latest lesson in life.

I enjoyed a certain cachet amongst my criminal associates by reason of being covered in blood — shirt-front and jacket looked as though they'd been lifted from an accident victim. Most of the blood was my own, in fact; it came from my finger, which I'd cut somewhere along the line, and from my lip, which was split back to somewhere around my tonsils. I looked great, I was pretty sure, in my filthy jacket and my mashed mouth, well deserving of my cellmates' respect.

I'd also lost my glasses. I am rather myopic, and without my glasses the whole world is a bit of a puzzle, needing considerable guessing at. I can tell a house from a bus, for example, but only if I wait for one of them to move.

And there I was in that corridor, hungry, sleepy and a bit tired of that particular portion of life's rich pageant.

Periodically a name was called, and another of our rogues' gallery would disappear through the door. What lay on the other side? The imagination quailed. I was hoping it was a courtroom — in preference, at least, to other things that came to mind. But I was the Man with the Mashed Mouth, and I never let those doubts cross my battered countenance.

A name was called: "Fiscetti!" It was called again. And again. No one came forward.

"Aha,'' I surmised, "the notorious Fiscetti. Once again he has eluded the law, and even now he is chuckling to himself as he climbs out of the back of the laundry van, some 30 blocks from here, ready to embark on a new caper."

"Fiscetti!"

Abruptly, tumblers clicked somewhere in the benumbed recesses of my brain. They had it wrong: it was "Fiske"... That was me! I got to my feet, shielded from the sour looks of the guards who'd been paging me by the fact that, without my glasses, their faces were rather indistinct. Trying to appear nonchalant, I went through the door.

The first thing I noticed was a blurry sea of faces. So it was to be a public hanging. I was quite shy, beneath that rugged, devil-may-care exterior, and it was just as well I couldn't see the spectators very clearly (the old ostrich effect — if I couldn't see them, maybe they couldn't see me).

Out there, to my left, I saw a dais with some sort of figure garbed in black. I assumed that was the judge. I was trying to figure out what it was I was supposed to be doing. I had to be cool — after all, there was the honour and dignity of Ham "Mashed Mouth" Fiscetti to uphold. I was remembering all the Perry Mason TV shows I'd ever seen, but I still couldn't orient myself successfully. I was standing in a raised dock with steps going down to my right. I was dimly aware of a droning voice, but it seemed rather remote and irrelevant. All I knew for sure was that I felt like a dummy standing where I was, exposed to the public eye; and those steps seemed to beckon.

So down the steps I went. As I walked past the benches full of people, I had the feeling all heads were turning to look at me. Probably paranoia, I told myself; I hadn't had a lot of sleep that weekend, and fatigue can do funny things to your mind. I kept walking.

Now I heard other, louder voices behind me. It turned out to be a couple of fairly agitated policemen, who grabbed me just as I reached the exit at the back of the courtroom. I was unceremoniously led back up into the dock in time to hear the judge say, "Guilty or not guilty?"

I felt pretty guilty, so I said so, and was forthwith pronounced to be indeed guilty, sentenced to something or other, and then granted a suspended sentence. The judge very kindly chose to ignore my attempted jailbreak, probably in light of my tender years and obvious inexperience.

I'd had enough of being Mr Fiscetti, by that time, and I went outside to wait for Flynn; we would best go back to work and face the boss together.

So, if it had not been for my myopia and my missing glasses, I would never have been able to add "Jailbreak Artist (failed)" to my resume. And it was this recollection that led to my hypothesis concerning local drivers fleeing

scenes of accidents.

This theory, I believe, deserves serious investigation by the authorities. What we are in fact looking at is a problem of short-sightedness on an epidemic scale, exacerbated by a lack of public education and/or funds for corrective lenses.

This would first of all explain the frequency with which these fellows have accidents. Secondly, it would suggest that they are not really fleeing the scene. Not at all — they are merely running off in a myopic haze in search of public telephone boxes from which to summon aid, and then getting lost.

11 BANGKOK OLD HAND TRAFFIC QUIZ

What the weather is to your average Englishman, the traffic is to your Bangkokian.

A score of 10-12 on the following quiz qualifies you as a Bangkok Old Hand, and suggests you have spent a good part of your life in local traffic. If you answer fewer than seven questions correctly, you've led an enviably sheltered life and don't know what you're talking about, at least when it comes to Bangkok's favourite topic of conversation. (Answers on page 185.)

1.   Which has most value for a young Bangkokian on the way up?

a)    A comfortable home.

b)    A car.

c)    Life itself.

2.     Rank these in terms of social desirability:

a)    Having a Mercedes-Benz.

b)    Having a Toyota.

c)  Having leprosy.

d)   Having a city bus ticket fall out of your pocket in front of people.

3.   When is "rush hour"?

a)  6:00 a.m. till 8:00 a.m.

b)   5:30 a.m. till 9:30 a.m.

c)  6:00 a.m. till 8:00 p.m.

4.   How long does it take to drive from Sukhumvit Soi 49 to Charoen Krung Road?

a)  40 minutes.

b)  Three days.

c)   If you have to ask "how long?" then you don't really need to go.

5.   What do policemen and street dogs in Bangkok have in common?

a)  Neither can hear a dog whistle.

b)  Neither is fully appreciated by the average Bangkokian.

c)  Nothing.

6.   Why did the authorities declare a two-day holiday plus organise a bunch of festivals and other events upcountry in mid-October, 1991?

a)   This was intended to allow the citizens of the City of Angels to join in the joyful welcome for the delegates to the International Monetary Fund /World Bank Conference and their families.

b)   It was merely a whim.

c) To ease the traffic sufficiently that the delegates to the International Monetary Fund/World Bank Conference and their families would see the advantage in coming to stay in Bangkok while attending the conference rather than commuting daily from their home countries.

7.  What is the average rate of Bangkok traffic?

a)  5 kph.

b)   15 kph.

c)  The movement of Bangkok traffic is often imperceptible to modern science.

8.  What is the average rate at which a pedestrian walks?

a)  5.5 kph.

b)   15 kph.

c)  3.5 kph.

9.   The average Bangkok driver spends the equivalent of how many days a year in traffic?

a)   18.5 days per year.

b)  44 days per year.

c)  32 days per year.

10.   Which solution to Bangkok's traffic woes was once proposed by a candidate for city governor?

a)  Leave all the traffic lights green.

b)  Promote the whole phenomenon as a tourist attraction — "Come to Bangkok and see the world's most intractable traffic jams! Watch time stand still! Maybe you'll be lucky enough to be there when total gridlock sets in!"

c) Summary smashing of headlights and/ or windscreens of traffic offenders with official billy-sticks.

11.   How many new vehicles are coming onto Bangkok's roads every day?

a)  A few.

b)   About 400.

c)  About 1100.

12.   What has the national government done to address the problem of traffic congestion in Bangkok?

a) They have passed legislation permitting odd-numbered licence plates on the roads only some days, and even- numbered licences on alternate days.

b)   They have increased taxes on private cars, thereby encouraging people to use public transportation instead

c)   They have cut taxes on private cars so that more people can buy them, even though hundreds of new cars, trucks, and motorcycles are already coming onto Bangkok's streets every day.

13.    The car serves which main function in modern Bangkok?

a)    It lets neighbours and passersby know you are somebody.

b)   It gets you from A to B.

c)   It sometimes offers shelter from the rain.

12 BANGKOK 1997: LAND OF SALES

What does the future hold in store for Bangkok? Already we have heard Melrose the Andromedan predict that, given the greenhouse effect plus ground subsidence, the whole city will be under water in 35 years or so. If this turns out to be the case, then we can all congratulate ourselves on having at last found a solution to Bangkok's traffic problems.

And Ham Fiske has had other glimpses of the future.

1987 was declared Thailand's "Year of Tourism ". (That was also the year which saw illegal department stores mushrooming everywhere, with other emporiums soaring ever higher in defiance of building codes. That was also the year the city governor tried, with predictable lack of success, to rid the streets of vendors — a move roughly equivalent to that of trying to clear Venice of its gondolas.)

Since 1987, this country has seen much change, not all of it desirable. To what extent did the writer foresee developments in stories such as "Bangkok 1997: Land of Sales"?

This year — 1997 — we celebrate the close of the first "Decade of Tourism". Inspired by the phenomenal success of 1987's "Year of Tourism", which the government decided to extend indefinitely, and by Prime Minister Chamlong's clean-everything-up campaign, Thailand now fully deserves its new sobriquet: the Land of Sales.

Yes, Bangkok can truly pride itself on being the Shopping Centre of the Known Universe. A few problems do remain, however.

Certainly that old eyesore, the street vendor, has long since been eliminated. It's been five years since the last authenticated sighting of a sidewalk vendor was reported in Bangkok. Now, however, there is instead the problem of the "mushroom stores". No sooner does the city demolish a dozen illegal department stores than another 15 spring up somewhere else. It's got so you can't leave a parking lot unattended in the wee hours, for fear of finding a new shopping centre there come daybreak. Main arteries like Rama I Road have, on more than one occasion, been completely blocked off to morning rush-hour traffic by the appearance of a new emporium poking up through the pavement like a toadstool in rich compost.

The problem of illegal department stores has become a very serious issue, indeed. There's no room left to build banks and hotels. There is hope, mind you: the government has vowed to rid the city of this plague before the first half of the Second Decade of Tourism. But will PM Chamlong be able to make good his promise this time? Many say not. They argue that you can't realistically aim to eradicate the mushroom stores. Questions of both unemployment and political expediency must be considered. After all, the owners of these enterprises by now represent a significant proportion of the electorate.

Then there is the lesser issue of otherwise legitimate department stores which build beyond those limits on height established by the government. This kind of thing is forbidden by law, but, through some oversight, there appears to be no legislation that specifies how or when this law is to be applied to transgressors. At present, there is some talk of moving Don Muang Airport farther out from the city, since several stores have grown high enough to present a hazard to air traffic. (Another factor encouraging a move is the recent tendency to find illegal stores appearing on the more remote ends of runways, rather complicating take-off and landing approaches.)

Despite a few little flies in the ointment, however, we can see that these past 10 years have succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of those who planned the initial Year of Tourism, back in 1987. We talked to various visitors around the city last week to get their impressions of Bangkok in this most auspicious year. We will let them speak for themselves.

Mrs. Rose Gangdoppler, a Newark, New Jersey, housewife: "My, you can buy anything here. Take these Wrangler jeans — cheaper than in New York, but just as good. Great souvenirs for my boys back home. A wonderful country!"

Fred Stote and wife, retired, from Sydney, Australia: "When we first arrived here, we thought 'Hello? Just another Singapore — no difference.' We were wrong, however. Thailand is even better. There are more stores here, and everything is so clean!"

Janet Boffstader, lawyer, from Columbus, Ohio: "I do believe the Kentucky Fried Chicken is even better here than it is back home! Thailand is everything they said it would be."

We found one refrain running throughout our interviews: "The Thai people do so much to make the visitor feel welcome." As Mr. Christopher Rice, for example, a car dealer from Canada, told us. "It's so thoughtful — everywhere you go you hear 'Jingle Bells' playing, and it isn't even Christmas! No matter; they want us to feel comfortable and warm, reminding us of our happiest season. Even though it's only February, I've already bought all my gifts for next Christmas."

Yes, one happy visitor after another. Looking at all the beaming shoppers, one can see why this country used to called the Land of Smiles.

But there must be more than shopping, we thought. Mrs. Feona Ramsbottom, from Stow-on-Wold, England, set us straight on that count: "Oh, yes. We saw the Grand Palace and the Temple of the Emerald Buddha and everything. My, they were so exotic. The way they sparkled in the sun and all. And you get such a good view of it from the New Cosmos Department Store."

Didn't they actually go to see these sights? we asked. Of course not, she replied. Indeed, she gave us three very good reasons for not doing so. In the first place, Bangkok being almost seamlessly paved with nice clean air-conditioned department stores, hotels and banks, you'd have to be nuts to go outside in the hot sun and traffic. Anyway, even if you did go out, where could you go? "We were told the current traffic jam in the Banglampoo-Sanam Luang area isn't expected to start breaking up for a couple of weeks yet," she said, "and we actually should be getting back to England soon." Finally, as she told us, it's really a bit expensive. Foreigners have to pay 1000 baht to get into attractions such as these.

We asked her if she resented paying that kind of admittance fee when Thais got in for free.'"Well, no. If we wanted to go outside, and if we had time to get there, I suppose, we wouldn't mind paying that much. After all, it's only fair — everyone here is so nice to us. It's the least we can do.

"But there's really no need," Mrs. Ramsbottom continued. "There's such a comfortable observation lounge New Cosmos has built on their 52nd floor. It's so nice and cool; and they have great hamburgers. They've thought of everything! Do you know they have great big video screens going all the time so you can even see what it's like inside the palace and the temples and all. It's just like being there!" she gushed.

Though we were loath to introduce a negative note into the discussion, we asked what Mrs. Ramsbottom thought of the problem of the illegal department stores. Did she find them unsightly, for example? Or did she believe they were largely responsible for the mega-jams our city is experiencing?

"Oh, no," she replied. "Not at all. I think it's partly the great joyous jostling confusion of giant commercial enterprises that gives Bangkok its special charm. If you did away with all those stores, your fascinating city would lose much of its colour. I mean, what would be left? Just the banks and hotels, and, really, you can find those anywhere."

This is not an uncommon argument. But we ask you to cast your mind back 10 years. You may remember that a lot of people resisted the purge of street vendors for much the same reasons. Just think, however, what this city might look like now if those criers of doom had their way.

There will always be naysayers and wet blankets. You may have heard the latest rumour: some people say that Bangkok, under the weight of department stores and foreign visitors, is sinking 25 percent faster than it was 10 years ago.

But that's another story.

13 BANGKOK 1997: CITY SKYLINE

Ham's vision of where Bangkok architecture is headed remains positively clairvoyant.

This week Bangkok plays host to an international symposium: "Directions in Architecture for the 21st Century". Few would deny that Bangkok is the logical venue for this assembly of experts, what with the trend- setting innovations in architecture this city has displayed over the past decade.

We talked to Herr Doktor Professor Wolfgang Honkheimer, an architectural reviewer from Hamburg. He gave us his interpretation of the modern Bangkok skyline.

"First of all." he told us, "this is a good town for dead sacred cows."

There was no arguing with that pronouncement. We did ask him to elaborate, however.

"Plenty of them. Everywhere you look — dead sacred cows, so to speak." He removed his glasses and gazed sternly in our general direction. "It all began 10 or 15 years ago, but the completion of the Robot Building in 1986 was a landmark occasion. It was, so to speak, an exorcism — it put a stake through the heart of aesthetic authoritarianism. More, it went beyond the tyranny of taste in a veritable deconstructionist fury of creative joy!''

Ringing phrases, to be sure, and rich food for thought. But could he give some examples of this new movement sparked by the Robot, we asked?

Certainly, he said. One only has to look at that part of town which has come to be called the "Toybox", where the inspirational Robot still stands. It is now dwarfed by structures such as the Thing-ka-Toy Centre, however. This gigantic complex of restaurants and observation lounges is modelled on a child's Tinkertoy building set. Here we see a marvellous example of minimalist form following function, while maintaining the traditionally haphazard conjunction of night market eateries.

But there is more than this to the post-post-modernist- hi-tech revolution. At its core, it has embraced the hi-tech revolution and made it its own, while at the same time it has rejected Western materialism and enshrined traditional concepts. Added to this, of course, is a lavish dollop of playfulness, or sanuk, the innate Thai love of fun.

"The latter element is nowhere better illustrated," he told us, "than in the Privee Department Store, which is shaped like a huge American-style outhouse. This brilliantly simple design incorporates everything I've said defines the new vision: it pokes fun at Western materialism while harkening back to simpler values. Moreover, to the cognoscenti (and here the good Doctor coughed modestly) there is a humorous, yet respectful allusion to Bangkok's British Council Building, which was conceived in 1969 as an outhouse to the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris.

"Other fine developments of 1980s ideas are evident everywhere. There is the "totem-pole" style, for instance, which takes off from the earlier penchant for perching antebellum mansions piggyback atop otherwise quite utilitarian, box-like structures. Now we have tows de force such as the Nadir office complex. It begins with a basic utilitarian block, which supports a neoclassical Greek level, which in turn is the foundation for a traditional Thai structure based on the National Theatre. This masterpiece speaks for itself — any gloss I could add would be superfluous."

And so it would have been. What Bangkokian has not mused fondly on this remarkable building, coming away richer for the experience?

"No review of modem Bangkok architecture," Professor Honkheimer continued, "would be complete without mention of the Column. This hotel is the final expression and epitome of one stream of late 1980s and early '90s design. A single Doric column finished in simulated Italian white marble, the Column soars to a height of 100 metres, with a playground and park on its top, above the level of the hydrocarbon mists."

What about the "mushroom stores", we asked — those illegal department stores that spring up everywhere like the Hydra, the many-headed serpent of Greek myth which, when you cut off one head, would grow two more in its place? Didn't he feel that these eyesores detracted from the beauty of Bangkok's skyline?

"Not at all. As I see it, this stratum of rapid growth and decay is like the fecund humus on the floor of a rain forest — it provides the soil for the evolution and growth of magnificent giants like those we've been discussing. More, we could say that the mushroom stores symbolise the transcendence of material existence: like bubbles on the Great Stream of Being, and so forth. The Column and the Thing-ka-Toy, on the other hand, rise above all this, standing immortal as Pure Ideas, or Essential Forms."

We could only stand in awe of such perspicuity. As deeply as we appreciated the analysis Dr. Honkheimer had already given us, we asked if he could conclude by naming the one building he thought best expressed all that he'd been telling us.

"Certainly,'' he said. "But I must begin with some further general remarks.

"There are two highest manifestations of Thai architecture, one old and one new. First, we have the beautiful traditional architecture of the temples, and then there are the banks. These latter-day temples to Commerce have paved new conceptual pathways to the future." Professor Honkheimer's eyes shone as he went on: "The quintessential expression of all that's happened these past 10 years is now on the drawing boards. Construction of the First Benefactor of Bangkok Bank will begin next month. This will take the form of a 500- metre-high reinforced concrete tourist wearing an Aloha shirt with palm trees on it. From one hand will hang the bank building, itself, in the shape of a simple Gucci suitcase."

But weren't there objections to this project, we asked the Professor? For example, some have said that the Aloha shirt is in bad taste.

"There may be something to that, " said Dr Honkheimer, brushing at his conservatively pin-striped suit. "But really, that's just idle carping. The basic conception — the enthusiastic eclecticism, the sheer boisterous brilliance of the project—what is one Aloha shirt measured against all this?"

What, indeed? We mentioned that still other critics, however, have suggested that the BBB Building will represent the impermanence of all material existence even more effectively than do the mushroom stores. Hanging there a hundred metres off the ground in that overweight

Western tourist's hand... Opponents of the Second Decade of Tourism would argue that this aptly symbolises the precariousness of Thailand's dependence on the tourist dollar.

"Nattering negativism," declared Dr Honkheimer, with the succinct economy of an acknowledged expert. "With this building, and with others like the Thing-ka-Toy Centre, local architects have gone beyond playing the Western civilisation game; they've gone beyond the post-hi-tech- architecture which reached its highest expression during the '80s. They have laid the foundation for a new school — one with truly universal sweep. My forthcoming book, The New Classicism, reveals what is in truth a new classicism," Professor Honkheimer concluded. "A new unity of form and idea."

There was nothing more to add: the learned Doctor had said it all.

14 SPACE INVADERS

This story appeared in the Bangkok Post in 1987. As it turned out, France reconsidered, and the "space invaders" never appeared. Not yet they haven't, anyway.

The other day I was thinking of penning an immortal word or two before breakfast. Birds twittered and chirped as I sat at my study window overlooking the lush green of the temple grounds across the way.

Suddenly, birdsong and tranquil reverie were blasted into shards by deafeningly amplified exhortations to buy somebody's fresh fruit. In the lane outside, there cruised a little pickup truck piled high with papayas and guavas. How could the vendor afford such a high-powered public address system, if his fruit was going as cheaply as he claimed? And why did none of my neighbours run out to strangle him? These were a couple of the questions that exercised my mind that morning.

Sure, these people have to make a living. But do they have to use such an obtrusive means of doing so? Okay, so it only lasted a few minutes, and those words I was thinking of penning would've had even less to offer posterity than those I set to this page now. But a rare mood had been broken. Besides, I might've been a sick baby, wide awake now and entertaining a family of nine. Or I might have had a hangover.

Other hawkers frequent the lane outside. A tinkle of bells heralds the ice-cream man. There's the klack-klack- klack of the couple with a bicycle cart who sell noodles in the evening, one member of the partnership pedalling, the other riding pillion, rapping out a simple tattoo with two bamboo sticks. There's the funny hee-haw horn of the sweets salesman. Occasionally a knife-and-tool sharpener trundles through, treating us to his sing-song refrain. I can enjoy all of these sounds as part of the ambience of the neighbourhood. These are things even the birds can get down and jam with.

It's modern technology that's the problem. Here are a few more contrasts collected from the lane outside my house.

•       Cheerful snatches of song as a woman dips rainwater from a big earthenware jar for her morning ablutions. ROCK AND ROLL FROM THE 50-MEGATON STEREO SPEAKERS SOME MUSIC LOVER HAS HAD INSTALLED IN HIS CAR.

I've always admired the generosity of those who buy expensive stereo equipment and then want to share their music with everyone. On the other hand, sometimes you aren't in the mood for music, especially when you're caught between two minstrel disk jockeys, and enjoying the stereo effect of Damp Banana on one side and the Heavy Metal Mothers on the other.

•       The group in the little house down the way which

gets together Friday nights to drink Mekhong whiskey and play Thai music on traditional instruments. THE SON OF THE POLICEMAN IN THE BIG HOUSE ACROSS THE LANE WHO HAS REGULAR AND MUCH-NEEDED POP- MUSIC BAND PRACTICE OUTSIDE IN THE COURTYARD.

Everything is amplified to coffee-shop decibel levels. I can't even go to the police — they are the police.

• The seamstress with sewing machine in the lane, pedalling and humming and sewing all day. THE MUSIC- TAPE VENDOR, DOWN THE LANE AND OUT ON THE STREET, SAMPLE BLARING LOUD ENOUGH TO DROWN OUT THE SOUNDS OF TRAFFIC.

And he sets up right beside the only public telephone box for hundreds of metres around.

Hey, calm down, my girlfriend tells me. It's not so bad. Relax — it's the Thai Way.

Right, I answer: how would you feel if someone — without knocking or any other ceremony — came clumping into your house, maybe banging on a pot at the same time, and marched around in large boots for an hour or two? An unacceptable invasion of your personal space? Then how is that different from our neighbour's big-band practice? It's just as disruptive to life here in my study. And the 50-megaton stereo sets, are they not equally an invasion of one's privacy?

But think of ages past, she says. You might have been sitting there having your tea and gazing contentedly at the needle-point motto over the mantel — "A Man's Home Is His Castle" — when a noisy Mongol horde or the Black Plague or something came calling. That's a pretty fair invasion of your privacy, isn't it? It's nothing new. You just have to put up with it.

Resign yourself to it, right? Well, maybe: but I haven't even given you the bad news, yet. Technology has already found new and peculiarly aggravating ways to intrude upon us (the hydrogen bomb and the stereo amplifier, for example). Shortly, however, this invasion is going to assume truly colossal dimensions.

You've probably read about it in the newspaper. In 1989, France is going to orbit a "Light Ring" — a circular rubber hose 4.5 miles in diameter with reflective Mylar spheres all along its circumference—to mark the centennial of the Eiffel Tower. This graffito, soon to be scrawled 500 miles high on its celestial billboard, bodes ill for us all. Larger than the moon, seen from the surface of the Earth, it'll dominate the night sky throughout the world. Poets, lovers, musers on the Infinite Mysteries, only recently reconciled to footprints on the moon, now face vandalism on a really awesome scale.

Granted, this particular gimmick is supposed to disintegrate after three years. That's great. Fine. The question is, however, what's next?

The year is 1997, let's say. You've gone to Phukradeung National Park to get away from Bangkok, and its 11,000,000 people and fruit hawkers with the new directional-beam super-amplified speakers that target individual people in their beds.

Ah, yes; but now you're practically in the wilderness, all primed for the wonders of nature. Evening is approaching, and you weight your blanket down with a loaf of bread, a bottle of wine, and Her. High on this remote grassy plateau, with the lonesome pine trees soughing in the breeze, you eagerly await the appearance of the stars, which you haven't seen since 1993, the pollution and the lights of the megalopolis having utterly obscured them for years now.

But what's this? As the last light of day fades, what must be new constellations begin to appear. Is that a hammer and sickle burning red in the northeast? It's dark now, and you see more: Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola vie for command of the western hemisphere of the heavens. You had read about this, but it really hadn't sunk in. Coca-Cola's celestial sign starts to blink rhythmically in time to... what? Something is covering the soughing of the wind in the trees. Something... Ah — there it is: the new "Things Go Better With Coke" jingle. It's true, what the papers said; recent technological breakthroughs now permit purveyors of soft drinks and ideologies alike to bounce amplified sound waves off the ionosphere. They can hawk their goods to whole hemispheres at a time.

And look up there! Your girlfriend's pointing at the breathtaking four-colour Nissan ad for its 1998 models. She turns to you. McDonald's Golden Arches shining in her eyes, and she says, 'You really ought to trade in that old wreck you're driving."

I guess what I'm trying to say is that maybe it's time to resist. Why don't more people complain about amplified fruit vendors? Today it was my morning reverie; tomorrow it'll be good-bye starry heavens and hello "TWINKLE, TWINKLE LITTLE TWINKIE (WE NOW COME IN FOUR FABULOUS FLAVOURS!)".

15 MY CAREER AS A MODEL

"My Career As a Model", which appeared in the Bangkok Post in 1986, was Ham Fiske's first published story.

The modelling agency called yesterday to ask if I could be at the Montien Hotel at noon. It would be worth 2500 baht a day. Dress like a businessman. You don't have a suit or a jacket? No problem. Wear a tie; we'll fix you up. Please be on time.

I have to take a taxi but I arrive at 12:00 on the button. I have never been a model before, but I reckon a good model is punctual. I find the advertising director and camera crew busy in the garden restaurant downstairs, but they are not ready for me yet. A gofer is assigned to take me to lunch. How long is it all going to take? He thinks I should be finished around 3:00. No problem.

After a leisurely lunch spent wishing that either the gofer had more English or I had more Thai, I am taken upstairs to the make-up room. I am lightly dusted with powder, my hair is arranged and fixed with spray, and I am given a cream-coloured jacket that is too big and makes me look like Orson Welles. That's okay, mind you. Later I meet one of my colleagues for the day, and he looks like Pierrot le Fou. At least he does when he stands up. They have told him that does not matter; they will not have to take pictures of his legs, and, sitting down, he looks like a businessman. Then why, he asks, did you make me take off the trousers I came in and put on these ridiculous pantaloons instead? But now everyone is busy, and no one answers him. I reckon I look like Robert Redford from the waist down, in my smartly tailored trousers; but it is definitely Orson Welles up there were the cameras are. They will not need shots of my legs. A pity.

Only slightly redesigned by the make-up people, I follow my erstwhile lunch companion up to the top floor of the hotel, to an "Executive Lounge". There I find a table laden with elaborately carved fruits, flowers, a magnificent cheese board, and an interesting objet sculpted from slices of rolled ham and beef and other things. There are also two tables set as for breakfast. No one else is here yet. We are running behind schedule. When will I be finished? Oh, probably about 5:00. Would I like something to drink? Or to eat? I have noticed there is a fully stocked bar in the room. I have a snifter of cognac.

I am alone in the room but for a liveried waiter. He is behind the bar. I wonder how they would go for a few shots of a businessman passed out, face down in the scrambled eggs.

I am enjoying a reflective moment on a sofa by the window, gazing out over central Bangkok, when a rather attractive lady joins me, dressed as for business and still trailing powder from the make-up room. She also has cognac, and we while away the time quite pleasantly, chatting and watching the camera crew and equipment assemble. I am impressed at how much is involved in taking a few still photographs. I especially like the guy who keeps darting about the place taking readings with a light meter and scribbling things in a little book. Now he runs his instrument over the lady's forehead, now over her décolletage. He shakes his head fretfully. It is pretty tricky stuff, whatever it is they are all doing. I can see that.

Someone, for some reason, feels that we are ready. It is now 3:30. Action! The lady I have been talking to gets to stay on the sofa by herself, posed with documents in hand.

Pierrot le Fou has arrived, trying to walk in such a way as to hide his trousers, no mean trick, even for the experienced part-time model he turns out to be. He and I sit down together at one of the tables. We are to be two businessmen, just up after a good night's sleep in a superb hotel, sitting contentedly at breakfast — fried eggs with bacon for him and scrambled eggs with ham for me, both dishes having obviously been there for some hours already. Another gentleman — a Thai who has been recruited, we are told, because he looks Japanese — sits at the table behind us, breakfast not yet served, reading an English edition of Time magazine. Only he cannot read English.

So that is the scene, and that is what we all do for two and a half hours. Except for Pierrot and I, who are required to contrive big smiles for a waitress who poses over my friend's coffee cup. For some shots, we have to hold our smiles for six seconds. Don't blink, now. Eventually I get so hungry the eggs actually look good. The Thai gentleman doesn't read Time till I can hear him whimpering quietly to himself. The lady on the sofa has committed to memory the documents which she must hold in a self- important manner. She is now going over the list of hotels, embassies, and car rental agencies again in her mind, translating everything into Pig Latin.

Pierrot has told me about every acting and modelling job he has ever had in Thailand. There have been quite a number.

It is so late in the day now that the technicians have to change all the light bulbs in the room in an effort to convince the camera it is still morning.

There is only one camera, but there is a crew of 12 or 15 people, aside from the models. Many of them apparently have nothing to do but loll about and languish. Others specialise in running off on mysterious errands. The crew includes a trans-sexual sidekick of the make-up boys, who themselves look as though they are on a waiting list for similar operations. The trans-sexual has a bass voice and is twice as big as most of her fellow Thais.

Each of us models has a touch-up with the powder puff, and some of the hair on the front of my head is bent back a bit. My hair feels as though it has been cast in plastic. I wonder that they have not thought of using that spray to fix our smiles, as well; the muscles that arrange my face in a smile are going into spasm.

Finally we are finished. The lady on the sofa puts her documents down, aims a glassy stare at the bar, and says, "Randybay?" The Thai gentleman behind me being a Japanese who reads English puts his head down on the table and groans. I tell Pierrot that it has been pleasant talking to him, but now I have got to run to meet some friends. The advertising director says you, the big one, please come over here.

It is 6:00 and I am not finished. When? Oh, maybe around 8:30, okay?

One end of the Executive Lounge is being transformed. I am parked at a desk complete with computer, desk diary, and shelves full of reference books and antique Thai curios. Here is the compleat businessman combining business with pleasure. For the next two hours I am required to gaze into the eyes of the astonishingly beautiful Thai-Pakistani "secretary" the hotel has put at my disposal. And smile radiantly. Meanwhile she is doing the same right back at me. After a couple of hours of this kind of thing, of course, I am hopelessly in love.

Now it is 8:30, and the whole crew has retired to dinner at a restaurant downstairs. I am sitting across from my one true love, who is 18 years old and speaks no English. I make brilliant dinner conversation in Thai. It is remarkable what one can do with a vocabulary of 25 words.

Dinner finished, my dessert shared with the lovely Lek (for "Lek" is her name), we all go upstairs to another room where there is a table draped with linen and set with crystal and china. Most of us go up to this room, that is — my Lek has disappeared along the way.

I am sitting at the head of a table of nine. A chairman- of-the-board type. My loved one returns. She has a new hairstyle and is wearing evening clothes. I would not have believed it possible: she is even more beautiful than before. She is seated beside me. Joy. Just a minute! Woe. She is re-seated down the table because her gray silk outfit better complements the dark suits at the end. (I am still in cream and tan.) Aesthetically a sound judgment, I am bound to admit. But inhumane. I fancy she casts the occasional languishing glance my way.

Lights! Camera! Unaccountable delays. Accountable delays — for example, the crystal goblets are mismatched; some part of the entourage runs off to find a substitute setting.

We, the dinner guests, get tired of conversation and of trying to decide whether these exotic hors d'oeuvres are plastic or cleverly mummified bits of real food. We get up and tour the room to discover that one of the original oils, an abstract, has been hung upside down, unless the artist habitually signs his name upside down in the upper left- hand corner. We re-hang it only to decide that we should have left well enough alone. We are asked to resume our places at the table.

Two of the dinner guests are sleeping. More than half the entourage have been sprawled asleep here and there on the floor since shortly after we arrived. By 12:30 we look like an assembly of corpses — the grey shells of people who have died in various attitudes of despair and have been propped up at a macabre banquet that will never be served. I know my vital functions are at a low ebb when I can look at the lovely Lek without suffering palpitations.

A fuse blows; we are plunged into darkness. Lights come on. Members of the entourage run out on various missions. At 12:50, despite the fact that everything seems to my uneducated eye the same as it has been all night, we are asked to look animated. To smile. To chat. To exude bonhomie and goodwill towards life in general and this hotel in particular. The undead. I have a charley horse in a smiling muscle. My attempts both to smile and to open my eyes brightly at the same time have resulted, I fear, in my looking utterly psychotic.

One-thirty in the morning. It is over. It is really finished. The entourage is all awake and milling about. I take off my Orson Welles jacket. Pierrot heads down to the make-up room to look for his trousers. I have been a model. Another chapter in a rich saga. Never again.

The horror. They want me to come back tomorrow. I am to wear black shoes and navy-blue trousers. Lek? You mean the girl? Yes, she'll be here tomorrow. How long will it take? Oh, only about three or four hours; we'll be finished by four in the afternoon. Don't worry about a jacket — we'll look after that. Yes, she'll be here.

16 LETTING IT ALL HANG OUT

People-watching on a Bangkok bus is one way to while away a traffic jam. It can also be a window on passing fads and other human foibles (among these the question of how Ham had come to leave his trousers in Chiang Mai).

The other day I spent a couple of years sitting on a bus in a traffic jam.

I was too well rested to catnap, and I was trying to swear off falling in love with lovely young things sitting across the aisle and five seats forward — these unrequited affairs of the mind had taken too great an emotional toll lately. So I thought I'd read some clothing labels for a change.

To my surprise and disappointment, I discovered that a whole No. 15 bus full of stylish folk of various sexes and ages did not afford the literary content of the back of a small box of cornflakes.

"What ho?" I thought. "Another change of fashions? Where have all the labels gone?"

It had caught me unawares — just as, on the other hand, I had been one of the last to realise that clothing labels had crept out of hiding into the public eye in the first place.

I first noticed the latter phenomenon one day in Chiang Rai. I had lost my trousers in Chiang Mai, and was rather concerned to find a new pair, being now in a hurry to leave Chiang Rai.

Back then, outsized farangs were not part of every Chiang Rai shopkeeper's inventory planning. In fact, a search suggested that there was precisely one pair of trousers in the whole town that would fit me off the rack. Though they weren't what would've been my first choice out of any two pairs of trousers in the world, they did fit, and I went into my Wily Haggler mode, singlehandedly taking on a whole team of fresh-faced young salesgirls. We'd got down to what I suppose was a fair price, though I hated to pay anything at all for these specimens. Then I saw what I thought was a last ploy.

"Aha!" I said. "Someone has scribbled something on the front pocket. See there? They've written their name or something on it. These pants've been ruined; they're practically worthless. I'll give you 150 baht."

"Oh, no! Dee mahk! Number one!" the opposition side chorused. "Good. Is very good!"

Their argument was that the value of the item was all the greater because some nitwitted manufacturer had hung his name out there for the whole world to see. This was a new concept for me, but I felt like a bit of an ass in the bath towel, and time was getting short. I paid their price.

Where did it all start? When did we consumers begin paying clothing manufacturers for the privilege of advertising their products? With blue jeans, I think. Ever since I can remember, blue jeans of all makes have advertised themselves on the hip pockets. That had become an accepted part of the culture many decades ago. To have anything else in the way of labels adorning one's person, though, was not conventional.

When I was a boy, I wasn't much into sartorial splendour. In the mad dash to get the school bus, odd socks were not unusual. Neither was an inside-out pullover shirt or sweater, labels all aflutter. This would be sure to cause great hilarity among my associates — sort of the equivalent of appearing absentmindedly in public without one's trousers. Not at all conventional. Not done.

Times change, however. I'm not sure exactly when it began, but the big fashion houses (Cardin, Dior, Lanvin, etc.) began to market lines of clothing for the unwashed masses. The trouble with this was, the manufacturers were afraid, the buyer's fellow peasants wouldn't be able to recognise quality all on its own. What they could be led to recognise was the label, however, and before long there you had it: Don't step on my Gucci suede shoes.

Suddenly I hadn't put my shirt on inside-out, after all. Everything was okay. It was now de rigueur to have labels hanging out on all sides. It was the smart thing to do. If possible, you should try to look like a Formula One racing car, only instead of "Bardahl" and "Champion Spark Plugs" you were sporting "Countess Mara" (your tie), "Gucci" (your shoes), "Pierre Cardin" (your belt), "Levi" (your shirt), "Calvin Klein" (your trousers), etc. On my school bus, I could have sent my mates into terminal paroxysms of mirth.

In any case, before we all knew it, labels had swept the world: people were sold the idea that it was really a matter of self-advertisement. You were cool because your labels identified you with expensive and stylish togs (even if they weren't really).

In Asia, the labels would sometimes even be genuine.

Pretty soon, people started feeling uncomfortable if they didn't have any labels showing. Back on the school bus: "Oh, hey, lookit Bobby; boy, what a moron. He doesn't have one label showing!"

Now lesser-known manufacturers felt they could climb on the bandwagon, borrowing some of the designer- label cachet simply by sewing things on the outside of their products. You started getting just about any name appearing on clothes. Like my Chiang Rai trousers: I think they were "Ralphs", or something. One local brand-name that has stuck with me is "Male"; I've spotted this one any number of times while reading labels on the buses. Funny thing, though: it normally appears on bosoms and bottoms which are patently not male. The converse of this would be if I were to paste a sign on my rear end saying "Cutie Pie".

At the same time the number of visible brand-names proliferated, the labels themselves got bigger, as well as more prominently displayed. Now we were seeing eight- or ten-inch-square patches positioned right in the middle of the back.

The importance of the actual name on the label seemed to be diminishing — just the fact that there was a label was the important thing. On the buses I came up with sightings such as a young lady's big floppy shirt which was decorated with a couple of dozen different manufacturers' labels. Then there was the guy wearing a fancy net T-shirt which had a label, I swear, sewn on the inside, but he'd worn the shirt inside-out—I could tell by the stitching. How tacky. Or maybe he'd just left home in a hurry. The whole phenomenon reached its sublime expression in one specimen I spotted: a large blank square sewn dead-centre in the back of one girl's shirt. You could add whatever name you wanted.

Anyway, the names on most of the labels were so obscure, by this time, that it was difficult to see how they added any particular status to the wearer. It seemed to me we were but a short step away from proud banners proclaiming "Gloucester Green Charity Shop" and "Mac's Almost New".

I guess the big design houses started to see the same trend. For, according to my observations, the label is going to ground once more. Maybe we'll have to go back to judging the quality of an item of clothing by its cut and fabric, by the elegant simplicity of its design, and so forth.

In the meantime, there are just enough labels still around to help me pass the time in traffic.

Back on the No. 15 bus, where this story started, my eyes settled on a rather shapely derriere, one that was snugly clad in a pair of slacks. On the rear pocket was a label reading "Snoopy and Woodstock". Something in the innocent incongruity of that label on that background caused me to slide my eyes away and look at my fellow passengers, wondering if they had noticed my interest. But then, why had the label been put there, if I hadn't been meant to read it? Full of righteous indignation that anyone would deny me the pleasure, I snuck another look at Snoopy and Woodstock and environs.

What was I doing trouserless in Chiang Rai? That's another story.

17 JUST ANOTHER MYTH

Ham can't get no satisfaction, no matter where he goes for a massage.

Life is short. This profound thought came to me the other day on Jomtien Beach as I watched a European tourist being contorted into knots and pummelled unmercifully. Yes. indeed, I mused, life is short and there were so many things I hadn't yet experienced. I'd never wrestled a crocodile, for example, and I'd never been mugged. I'd never broken a leg, and I'd never had a massage. Sure, I'd had ladyfriends who'd squeezed my shoulders and rubbed my temples. I'd had my fevered brow stroked and my nose tweaked. But, to judge by what I was witnessing there on the beach, I'd never had a real massage.

The patient or victim or whatever he was suddenly shrieked in an accent I took to be Germanic, and his eyeballs rolled about in his sun- and pain-blotched face like panicky raisins trying to escape a suet pudding. His masseuse, a perhaps deceptively pleasant looking lady of some 30 years, probably took his cry for an expression of joy, because she then pushed the heel of his left foot a bit closer to the back of his head, and from where I sat three metres away I could hear the snapping of tendons and, who knows, maybe even bones.

I waited till the masseuse had had her way with the fellow, and then, moved by a journalistic passion to know, I went over to ask him what he'd thought of the experience, figuring it had to be something akin to the pleasure you feel when the dentist stops drilling your tooth.

"Ja, ja," he told me, bobbing his head in a cautious, experimental sort of way, his voice expressing more enthusiasm than his head-bobbing. "Iss goot. Better even, ja, than one time in Hamburg with Olga the Famous One. Donner und Blitzen!"

He told me I should try it; I owed it to myself. And so I'd heard from others — massages are good for you. They relax you; they improve everything from the circulation to the disposition. And in Thailand they're cheap. It was then or never, I decided. It couldn't be as painful as it appeared, or they wouldn't allow it to be practised in public, right there in front of children. Or so I reasoned. Anyway, the German had not been exactly Mr Fitness himself, and I dared say I would fare better. So I hailed a passing masseuse. On what basis did I choose that particular woman? Maybe it was a certain slender charm she displayed. A suspicion of frailty, perhaps. She told me she charged 100 baht for half an hour, and when I made reflexive sounds of "Paeng! Expensive!" she immediately offered to throw in an extra 10 minutes. I made haste to waive this privilege.

Before I could change my mind, I found myself stretched out on a Snoopy and Woodstock blanket. Surely, I thought, an inappropriate bed for a dose of torture like the one the German had suffered. I was mildly alarmed to learn that my masseuse's nickname was "Uan", which I thought meant "strong" or "husky". (Subsequently I've been told it means "fat". And here I'd always thought I was being complimented). But her arms looked positively frail. And before long I concluded there was no cause for alarm, as she undertook a course of pushing, prodding, pulling and gentle kneading that made me feel good just because it was nothing like the ordeal for which I'd steeled myself.

I learned there were two varieties of masseuse on the beach at Jomtien — those who paid local agents for the privilege of plying their trade, and those who winged it each time a gendarme hove to, which was frequently, at least that day. I had a wing-it model, which meant that I was given regular respites while Uan and her basket of soothing unguents took off to blend in with the crowd. She also managed to gouge me in the eye with her thumb, once, while she looked all around for trouble.

To the extent I felt at all relaxed, it could be attributed mostly to the protection I was enjoying from the endless procession of other masseuses — You want massat?" — and vendors of carved elephants, tables, sunglasses, loud shorts, somtam, and coconut oil. But then my protection gave out.

'You buy gai yang, barbecued chicken. Is good." A hearty voice right up there in my ear jarred me out of my reverie.

"No. blast it!"

Excruciating pain. It seemed to originate in the small of my back and hurtle up my spine to explode at the base of my skull. As soon as I said to the gai yang vendor, "Ah, wait! Let me think about that", the pain eased for a moment. Then it flared again. "Okay, okay. Give me gai yang. Sticky rice? Yes, yes. Please!"

Abruptly the pain disappeared; a rhythmical kneading and rolling of my back and neck muscles soon induced in me once again a relative calm and sense of well-being.

"Good girl. Is cousin. Number one gai yang."

"Really?" I replied. Somehow the news that Uan was related to the vendor didn't startle me.

Neither was I surprised to learn that Uan had other relatives on the beach, and pretty soon I also had a plate of somtam and an enormous pair of shorts decorated with pink octopuses tripping the light fantastic in purple top hats. (A token spike of pain had expedited the decision as to which hallucinogenic bit of beachwear had been made just for me.)

Aside from a lot of somewhat perfunctory poking and squeezing of my major muscle groups, the "Traditional Thai Physical Massage" (as distinct, maybe, from a spiritual massage?) centred around efforts to make as much noise as possible with my joints and sinews. Whenever Uan did manage to elicit a snap or pop from some part of my anatomy, she would stop and look smug, waiting for my approbation. I had a hard time enthusing, to tell the truth, and I fear I disappointed her sorely. Even when she brought out what was obviously her set-piece, where she methodically yanked on my fingers one by one, actually getting some of them to leave their sockets with audible reluctance, all I could offer was a lukewarm "Oh, yeah. Dee mahk; very good, I guess." I thought about how my mother used to tell me not to crack my fingers because then the knuckles would get big and I'd never be a concert pianist. And she'd been right, because I never was.

"Fin-it; okay?"

"Okay."

"Good massat, na?"

"Um. Yeah."

I lay there, cold chicken and weird clothes all around me. When I thought about it, I could say I felt relaxed. Sure. Relieved, anyway. Cautiously, I moved my arms and legs, extending them, flexing. I arched my back. So far as I could tell everything seemed to work, and my knuckles weren't noticeably bigger than they had been before. Now that it was over, in fact, I supposed I could say I felt good.

I gave Uan her cousin's chicken and rice as a bonus, and she went away reasonably happy, even though I failed to be as blissed-out as she figured I ought to be.

"Excuse me," came a voice from behind me. "I couldn't help noticing you were having a massage. Could I ask... What was it like?"

"Magnificent," I told the greenhorn, a player of loud rock 'n' roll tapes on the beach against whom I had earlier been secretly fulminating. "Aside from one woman named Olga, back in Montreal, I've never experienced anything like it. You owe it to yourself."

In truth, however, I had been disappointed. Surely there was more to it than that. After everything I'd been told.

I had heard about Wat Po, back in Bangkok, of course, and its reputation as a centre of training in the techniques of traditional Thai massage. In fact, I had asked Uan if that was where she'd done her apprenticeship. But she'd said no; her cousin in Sattahip had taught her everything she knew. Probably on one rainy afternoon, I thought to myself, perhaps unkindly. But could it be there was still the experience of a real massage to be savoured?

At Wat Po, the prices are written in both Thai and English, but the alert customer will see that the prices aren't the same in each language. When I remonstrated, fairly gently, I was told there was more of me, as a farang, and thus it was only right that I should pay more. Thinking then in fairness they should post a rate scale based on the number of square metres of surface area to be pummelled, I nevertheless coughed up what they asked — 120 baht per hour — and was directed to a small room where I could change into a pair of loose pyjama bottoms.

The large room where the massaging was to take place was equipped with 20 or 30 beds, most of them occupied by masseuses and carcasses. All along the back wall the yellow- and orange-painted room was open to the afternoon sun, which lent a cheerful air to the proceedings.

The lady they assigned me was built along the lines of a rice barge. You could believe they kept her in reserve especially for outsized farangs like me. She would've also come in handy if you needed any rampaging elephants subdued.

It was essentially the same routine I'd been treated to on Jomtien Beach — maybe Uan's cousin in Sattahip had learned her stuff at Wat Po. But the difference was that this lady had an authority that Uan had lacked. More than any difference in skill, she was twice as strong as Uan, and maybe three times. She flopped me around as though I were a piece of meat on a cutting board. There was art involved, though, because none of it hurt. And, as Uan had, she seemed to feel that the success of a good massage was to be found in the amount of noise you could coax from the carcass at hand. When she got around to dislocating all my fingers, she looked at me proudly, as if to say "There you go, you great ungainly farang, you. Not for nothing did I study for 15 years at the feet of a master."

The hour passed quite quickly, though—more quickly, I thought, than had the half hour on the beach. And I did feel relaxed. What the massage had to do with it, mind you, was an open question. After all, I had been lying around largely inert for all that time listening to the wop-wop of the ceiling fans and the languid chatter of the masseuses. I figured I would have felt refreshed even without the massage.

So what good had it been? There had to be more than this to massages; what was everybody always talking about, anyway?

My friend Stack Jackson recommended a therapeutic institution called the Shaking Heaven Physical Massage and Social Club. "You want a massage?" he asked me. "They'll give you a massage."

At the same time, Stack shared some health advice circulated by the American Embassy in Bangkok. They mentioned that there were institutions in the city where the masseuses employed certain unorthodox techniques that could be hazardous to your health. That's if you considered, for example, dropping dead in your tracks unhealthy. It seemed that many of these ladies thought their clients enjoyed the rush they got from having the arteries in their thighs blocked for a time, and then suddenly released. Maybe this was fun, who knows? But it also occasionally proved quite fatal to people with blood clots. And then there was the little twisting manoeuvre with the head, designed no doubt to produce much fine snapping and cracking and thereby impress the customer no end. Sometimes these seekers after peace and health had had their necks dislocated, which was neither healthy nor particularly relaxing.

So what did my buddy have in mind by recommending one of these establishments? I asked. No problem, he told me. You just tell them: "Don't block my femoral artery, and don't dislocate my neck."

The Shaking Heaven resembled a middle-range hotel, at least until you got to where you met the masseuses. I found myself with a few other men in a large room on one side of a big window. We had to stand there while a bunch of pretty women all decked out in party dresses sat in bleachers and looked us over. Finally, one of them indicated that she'd chosen me; I don't know why, probably it was my new shirt.

I had to pay the manager a fee — considerably more than I'd spent at Wat Po. The lady then took me up in an elevator to a room with a bath and a bed and a TV. Certainly there was more privacy than there had been at the temple. All in all, it looked like a very professional setup, and I was beginning to feel confident I'd finally get the real goods.

We sat on the bed, and she stroked my brow, tweaked my nose, and said, "No want massat, na?"

Evidently she had also read the US Embassy health warnings and, taking me for a level-headed guy, had to think I didn't really want a massage. On the other hand, I wondered, what would we do if I didn't have one? There was the TV, but I wasn't much of a one for TV. And I'd already paid a goodly sum, and entertained fond hopes of finally getting my money's worth.

"You want video?"

"No, no," I replied. "I want a massage."

After all, this was a massage parlour, wasn't it? And I was in search of peace and health. But she appeared disappointed, somehow.

The next thing I knew, she'd unwrapped a heavy metal device from a length of electrical cord and plugged it into the wall. I shuddered. I was sure I'd seen one of these items in a movie, when some scruffy Turks had been encouraging a couple of blokes to help the police with their enquiries. Then I really shuddered, as she switched the device on and brought it into contact with the soles of my feet.

For the next few minutes she went over me with that thing. The casual observer might have thought she was trying to press a victim of St Vitus' dance with an epileptic flatiron. After she reckoned I'd had enough of that, she poked me here and there in an experimental sort of vein, maybe to see if I was still ticklish, and then yanked on all my fingers, one by one, nodding with satisfaction every time she coaxed a nice snap from one of them. I had come to see this was somehow the essence of what it was, this thing they called a "massage".

So there we were again, on the edge of the bed, as she continued to tug gently on a finger, gazing at me expectantly, no doubt wondering why I wasn't giving more evidence of being blissed out.

"Oo," I said. "Ah," I added, hoping this would make her feel better.

"You want more?" she asked.

Yes, I did, I thought sadly as I got up to leave. Is this really all there was? Massages simply weren't everything they were cracked up to be.

18 STAGEFRIGHT IN RANGOON

Who says Rangoon is boring?

I was in a bar on Patpong Road in Bangkok, and I waive the usual disclaimers about being engaged in sociological research.

I was with visitors from out of town, and we were standing close to the bar in a pleasant sort of beery haze. My friends, I noted, were paying not the slightest attention to me, as I explained how normally I never came to joints such as that one. Their gazes were fixed on the stage behind me. Normally used to bounce up and down upon by a horde of lovely go-go dancers, this large rectangular platform was surrounded on four sides by the bar, at which pressed an avid audience of mixed foreign nationality, three deep.

But what was this? I half turned. Surely not. I turned all the way. But, yes. Definitely. There were a man and a woman performing together something I had always considered rather a private activity. Right up there on the stage. I was darned; or so I said. "I'll be darned," I said, as the couple stood up, somehow contriving to do this in such a way as not to lessen the intimacy of their relationship. There were cheers.

Over on the other side of the bar I could see a smattering of wives and girlfriends, as rapt as any of the men. One robust type was particularly enthusiastic. Her husband (there was no doubt that he was such) looked less keen. "Jaundiced" would have sprung to mind, in fact, had I been asked to describe his general demeanour. She grabbed his shoulder and pointed. He nodded glumly.

I watched the fellow on the stage as he assumed position number 23, or thereabouts, and I wondered at his stamina. I wondered at his ability to perform at all, under the circumstances. There had to have been 200 people in attendance. Surely the woman's job was easier.

As I sipped away at a beer, and then another (this was a marathon performance), I mused about times past, and my career as a sex-show star floated up from the murky recesses of my mind.

I was in Rangoon, and I had spent the evening with an old Burmese friend and some of his cohorts. Like practically everyone else in Burma, they were operating on the economic fringe. Hpo, my friend, was a black marketeer. His associates had a variety of pursuits. The guitarist was a smuggler, for example.

This was my first trip back to Burma in two years, and I had been accorded a marvellous welcome. We were sitting outside at a rough wooden table under a thatched roof on poles, just up from the Pazundaung Creek. It was raining. (It is always raining in Rangoon in August.) The women were keeping a low profile. Earlier, I had been introduced, but now they stayed in the house across the way, cooking a variety of dishes which were served by the children, set down one by one on our table beside the flickering candles. Bottle after bottle of Mandalay Rum had appeared out of the dark, together with packs of black-market cigarettes. Nothing was being spared. The guitarist had sung a number of Burmese songs, and was now playing Beatles songs in my honour because I was a foreigner. I sang a Canadian song. (Actually, all the Canadian songs I know give me a pain in the neck, so I sang "I'm a Lumberjack and I'm Okay" which is, strictly speaking, British.)

I was trying to drink only moderately, for I had to travel the next day. Besides which I had about $2000 worth of camera gear hung up on nails to dry. In local currency this stuff would have fetched three times as much. I was at ease with this crowd, but still — that was a lot of temptation, in a country where the average yearly income was a small fraction of two grand.

Hung up to dry? Well, yes. You see, I had dropped it all into the river at sunset. I had been taken on a cruise in the rain at sundown. As I stepped into the little boat a buckle on my camera bag broke and the whole lot went into the water. The Canon A-1 was an electronic marvel that could do almost anything the photographer might like, except sustain a good wetting. Especially in salt water. The Pazundaung Creek was quite saline, along there, being close to the sea. My buddy held an umbrella over me as I wiped lenses and cameras on my wet shirt and told myself that it didn't matter because I was having a good time and I had always been a mediocre photographer anyway.

Right then I was still resigned to the distinct possibility the gear had all been ruined. But I was drinking moderately because maybe it had not been, and I had to get up early in any case. Hpo was under no such constraints, however, and he was getting pretty happy. Half in the bag, you could say. At one point he leaned over to inform me, with great delight and much salacious winking, that he had a woman for me.

This I did not need just at that moment. I thanked him profusely, but pleaded drunkenness, exhaustion, a head cold, and the need to travel at the break of day.

No problem! Or so he proclaimed to one and all. His friend — me, that is — could drink all day and entertain a woman all night and never show a trace of fatigue. Or words to that effect. I said yes, perhaps that had been true some years before, but just at that time I was in mourning for my camera equipment and I had this head cold...

Out of the dark came the boatman. Hpo and the rest of the gang were nodding and grinning in the candlelight, so pleased at my good fortune it would have been ill-bred of me not to go along with things. So I packed all my damp camera equipment in my damp camera bag before Hpo, the boatman, and I went tramping off. into the damp night and down to the water's edge. Hpo held the umbrella over me as we got into the wet little boat and pushed off into the pitch black. Had Hpo not proven himself a loyal and decent companion in similarly sticky- looking situations several times in the past, I could have suspected that soon my carcass, minus camera, would be floating face down in the river.

The boatman rowed for some time in silence, but for the creaking of oarlocks and the gentle wash from the stern. The darkness was all but absolute. Eventually, though, I was able to make out a glow up ahead at the about the same time I became conscious of human voices. We drew next to a big old rice barge and tied up alongside. With the aid of a rope we clambered onto the covered deck at the stern, where the cheery light of an oil lantern and a charcoal brazier revealed a dozen Burmese or so, men of all ages crouched in the warmth and dry, drinking tea and smoking.

I was made to feel very welcome, though bobbing and smiling and gabbling at each other were the limits of communication. No one spoke English except for Hpo and me. Towards the bow the hold gaped black and mysterious. Was that a cough I heard from the darkness? After a couple of cigarettes, Hpo told me to get ready. There appeared in the light a girl of 19 or 20, clad in a sarong. Was she okay? Anxious, Hpo put the question for everybody. Would I prefer another?

No, no; she was fine. I wasn't about to argue. She was very attractive, but it hardly mattered anyway; I was going to have to fake it, somehow. How was I going to cope with that? Most immediately, where was I going to cope with it? Then that problem was resolved. She went over the side into the drizzle and she was beckoning for me to follow. Down the side we went, then, into one of the dirty wet little boats. Okay. Great. Now I knew how I was going to cope — I was going to row us down the riverbank a way, wait a decent interval, maybe try to convince her that I had a social disease or something, and then rejoin the others. The thing was, I didn't want Hpo to feel bad.

Once in the boat, this sweet thing and I drifted away only to find that we were on the end of a line to the stern of the barge. We were still within the spill of light from the larger boat. I could see some heads leaning out and staring at us. I gestured: Cut us loose! I gestured again, more vehemently. This elicited nothing more than an excited gabble. The heads disappeared briefly; then they reappeared. The gabble did not sound happy. Surely they did not expect me to perform here, in this filthy little canoe, within eyeshot of the barge? But it seemed they did.

I got out my pocket-knife. I had decided I didn't care what they expected; we were going down the bank in search of privacy.

I had started to saw away when the girl hollered at me. At first I thought it must be her rope I was cutting and she didn't like it. But then I became conscious of what sounded like a gigantic freight train coming down the river. No freight train, however, it was merely the granddaddy of all monsoon downpours racing towards us. I sprang to the oars and got us back alongside the barge; we shot up the side just as the sky crashed down.

Now that the girl and I were under cover again, the assembly did not seem as friendly as they had on first acquaintance. "Querulous" would in fact have described the atmosphere quite nicely. Hpo, at his most diplomatic, treated with them at some length while I dealt a few cigarettes; the girl had composed herself next to me, in the meantime, adopting a placid indifference to matters. Hpo finally turned back to me to tell me he had explained that the foreign devil was not berserk; he was merely shy.

There was a perceptible softening of popular sentiment towards me. And, after a short further parlay in Burmese, Hpo grabbed my camera bag and the umbrella and told me to stay where I was. Outside, giants still had firehoses playing on the boat. Before I could do more than register a feeble protest, the lot of them — all 12 or 15 — piled off both sides and dropped into the boats below. There was one umbrella among them and that went with Hpo, who at last sight was holding it over my camera bag in most solicitous and, I felt, utterly futile fashion.

With every evidence of total unconcern, my companion set about hanging a couple of blankets between us and the hold, confirming my suspicion there were more people lurking in there somewhere.

The girl turned the full and frank gaze of her lovely eyes on me. In a moment she had unwrapped herself, my little present from Hpo. In the light from lantern and brazier her skin glowed warm cinnamon; and, abruptly, I realised my earlier convictions about being unable to do my duty were unfounded. Though I did not know her name, though we communicated only in inarticulate moans and monosyllables, though my cameras were out there in the Great Deluge with Hpo, though I could hear, during a lull in the rain, a dozen boat people singing what sounded like sea chanties, though on the other side of that blanket there were mysterious people in a deep black hold, it was good.

Soon afterwards I started to feel guilty about my friends out there in the rain, so I leaned over the side and signalled them to come up. They piled back on, soaked through but in a festive mood. Now the tone was definitely congratulatory; everyone was beaming, including the girl. Had I enjoyed myself? I expressed enthusiastic approval, grinning and nodding and looking at her admiringly. Even though I did not speak Burmese, I knew what everyone was saying now; a general move to abandon ship yet again made Hpo's commentary on events superfluous: "You go once more."

No, no. Thank you very much, but that was enough. Thank you; I am very happy. Please stay on the boat. I managed to get through to them. I believe they were not entirely displeased that they did not have to go out singing in the rain again.

Everyone on board enjoyed a cigarette in the afterglow, and then Hpo, the boatman, and I went back down the river to our party and to yet another round of congratulations.

The guitarist had passed out but another, almost as good, had stepped into the breach. I stayed for the life-span of a last bottle of Mandalay Rum, and then Hpo arranged a ride for me back to my hotel. At 6:00 the next morning I had to catch a plane to Bangkok.

Back at the bar in Bangkok, years after my performance in Rangoon, the man and woman on stage were finishing with a bravura act. Looking at their faces, you realised they were oblivious to the audience. In fact they seemed oblivious to each other, judging only by their expressions.

There was enthusiastic applause and much shaking of heads and raising of eyebrows. The go-go girls came bouncing out again, and conversations resumed. I started to tell my friends about Rangoon, but there was too much noise and, anyway, one them said, Rangoon is dead. Nothing ever happens in Rangoon.

19 SHMOOS AND ALIEN BLOBS AND THINGS

Back when this was originally published, condoms were only starting to creep into polite conversation. Since then, of course, it has become de rigueur to go on about them at the least provocation.

Still, many people don't realise this, but there are more things to do with a condom than blow it up and use it to decorate a birthday party.

I didn't buy shares in IBM till it was too late. Then I missed the big surge in gold prices. The fortunes to be made in hi-tech have been made by others. The last major investment coup I didn't pull off was in condoms.

It's too late now; share prices have already shot up. The worldwide AIDS scare is doing much to ensure the booming health of this industry. Everywhere you look, there are articles on prophylactics. Even the no-sex- please-we're-British have put the discussion of rubber prophylactics into the parlours of conservative middle- class homes. In American colleges, meanwhile, rubbers are being celebrated by "National Condom Week" beginning, appropriately enough, on Valentine's Day. In Thailand, of course, Mechai Viravaidhya has long since established the mechai as good fun and a fashionable conversation piece. If you own one of the mechai-encased-in-plastic key chains that sport the message " Break glass in case of emergency", you can flourish it in polite company without fear of censure. (At least I think you can. You try it first and let me know how things turn out.)

In Thailand, family planning has put condoms on the public agenda. In the West, most recently, AIDS has done the same. Worry about VD is not new, however, and neither is the condom. The other day, for example, the newspapers reported that British archaeologists had just dug up five condoms in the foundations of Dudley Castle, near Birmingham. These artifacts, made of fish and animal intestines, had been interred there since the 1640s, and it is thought that they had belonged to English soldiers.

Recently, back in Canada after an absence of many years, and conducting my own archaeological exploration of my parents' attic, where I still had some old trunks, I came across a couple of condoms which were just about as ancient as those from Dudley Castle. These two specimens were the only known survivors of the Canadian Army Shmoo Shoot at Armed Forces Base Camp Borden, Ontario.

I was a mere lad of 18, and was enjoying a stint in infantry officer training school. This mostly involved a lot of running around in the hot sun, when we weren't floundering about in the swamp at night instead. We also got to play with weapons of various types. One fine summer's afternoon, as a break from running around in the sun, my platoon was double-timed out to the pistol range, there to practise blasting away with Browning .38 automatics. For targets, we normally used man-sized effigies of snarling, vaguely Slavic enemies wearing Nazi helmets. This day, however, our training sergeants had promised us a Shmoo Shoot. (You may remember "shmoos" as those personable little ham-shaped creatures in the old "Li'l Abner" comic strip.)

On the range, we discovered a large cardboard carton which contained, as it turned out, thousands of army-issue condoms. Blind Bill Hickok and another platoon sharpshooter were assigned the job of blowing them up and pinning them to a wooden backstop. Inflated, in fact, they did rather resemble shmoos. In the course of the next hour or so, the Canadian taxpayer financed a veritable fusillade of bullets, some of which actually blew away a shmoo or two. We also had the taxpayer to thank for the survivors of the Shmoo Shoot, which we took prisoner in their hundreds, stuffing them into our pockets, ammo pouches, and mess tins.

The optimism of youth. If I'd had the opportunity to put all those captured shmoos to the use they were designed for, I would've had a more interesting life to tell you about than the one I now relate.

For years, my dresser drawers, my trunk, and my suitcases were infested with shmoos. But now there are only two. What happened to all the rest? I seem to remember dispensing them to buddies with heavy dates and high hopes. Others got carried around until lost or tattered beyond using. I suppose some of them might have found their orthodox end. Still others, though, were directed to less conventional uses.

The autumn following the Shmoo Shoot had me at university in Montreal. Living in residence, we students devoted much or our time, in the traditional way, to devising new ways of making life uncomfortable for our fellow resident scholars. Those of you who are veterans of university dormitories will no doubt be familiar with tricks such as the old "put-the-sleeper's-hand-in-warm-water- and-stand-back-to-watch-the-fun" caper. Another one involves tipping large dustbins full of water up against the door to someone's room in such a way that when the occupant opens the door, he is greeted with cries of "Surf s up!" and a tidal wave sufficient to bring disaster to a small coastal village in Japan. Or what about this hoary ruse: wait for the day of the big date/big game/big exam; then, with the aid of two or three cohorts, you "penny in" your neighbour — you wedge in piles of coins above and below his. latch so that he can't get out of his room. A variation of this may be employed when the target hears all the pushing and giggling and starts shoving on his side of the door so the wedges won't be tight enough to incarcerate him. Against this very eventuality, a properly prepared commando will have brought along a tin of lighter fluid, which you will now pour under his door and ignite. Flames up around the waistband of one's pyjamas have been known to make even the most stout-hearted leap back from the door and resign himself to his fate.

But we were talking about shmoos. These devices had their uses. Water-bombing sunbathers from second-story windows was one worthy application. Better than this, however, was the alien-blob-in-the-bed routine. This had to be used sparingly, since its effect depended largely on its novelty. For this one, you need a newspaper, a condom, and a bathtub. It helps if you also have an adolescent sense of humour and a lot of time in which you have nothing better to do.

First, you ascertain that some numbskull has actually gone out and left his door unlocked (in a dormitory, can you believe it?). Then you spread the newspaper, several pages thick, in an empty bathtub. You slip a condom on over the cold-water tap and, very carefully, you begin to run water into it. It is truly remarkable how much water one ordinary condom will hold. Experience tells you how much you can manage and still tie the thing off without its bursting. Supported on the newspaper, and carried by two stretcher-bearers, this entity is now transported to the chosen landing site, where it is gently rolled off onto the bed.

Its membrane stretched so thin as to be all but invisible, the thing looks like a giant transparent drop of liquid held together only by surface tension or, perhaps, some sinister will of its own. It really does seem to be alive. When you try to pick it up, it crawls out of and away from your grasp, amoeba-like, to sit quivering, brooding and malevolent.

Now you cover it up and sneak out, so when your dormitory-mate returns, he will first of all be confronted with a hugely suspicious lump in his bed. At this point it is conventional for the perpetrators to crowd in behind him, sniggering and trying to look innocent at the same time.

"Oh, hey! Lookit there — what is that strange lump under yon blanket, I wonder?"

"Gee, I dunno. Maybe it came from outer space."

Fear of the unknown gives way to curiosity; the blanket is whipped off and the victim, eyes agoggle, jumps back to a safe distance.

"Hey!" he remarks. Rarely, under the circumstances, does one think of anything more cogent to say.

Sniggers are now mixed with flying-saucer noises and suggestions that he try to communicate with the Blob. Chances are he still hasn't figured out what it is, although he's pretty sure it isn't an alien life-form.

This situation might be used as a quickie IQ test. It would very efficiently separate a few canny sorts from the mass of humanity — the dumbo majority that try to pick up the Blob. They try to grasp it gently, but there's no way. You can't get a grip on it. You just wind up chasing it all over the bed. The normal reaction at this point is to get angry: you're not about to be bested by a blasted transparently brainless Blob. No sir. So you really make a grab for it, and it bursts, and there are untold volumes of water all over your bed and all over your floor.

Halcyon days. And you had been treated to a "Surf's up!" only the week before.

So where has all this idle reminiscing got us? What significance can we salvage from it all? As "a rose is a rose is a rose", can we conclude that a prophylactic is a contraceptive is a prophylactic? No, we cannot, as catchy as that proposition may sound. In fact, for almost one hundred years rubber contraceptives were against the law, in the United States, while rubber prophylactics were not. That's right. In 1873, Congress passed legislation that most states had already made law in 1868 — the sale of condoms as contraceptives became illegal. In some parts of the country it was illegal even to tell someone that the condom could be used to prevent pregnancy. These laws have since been declared unconstitutional, but until quite recently all packets of condoms had to bear this proviso: "Sold only for the prevention of disease."

Our preoccupations change. What in times past were prophylactics later became contraceptives and now seem to have become primarily prophylactics once again. As we have seen, however, there, there is no reason to restrict ourselves to only two applications. Condoms were probably first used, long ago, as protection against disease. This, the archaeologists suggest, is what the 17th-century English soldiers at Dudley Castle were doing with them. So far as I know, however, they have not even considered the hypothesis that those skins had been intended for a crossbowmen's Shmoo Shoot. Or maybe the soldiers planned to put an alien blob in the company commander's cot, but were interrupted by the Civil War. Prophylactics can be contraceptives; but they can also be shmoos or alien blobs.

There is still money to be made in condoms, I figure. I'm thinking of writing a book entitled 101 Uses for a Condom, but I'll bet someone else beats me to it.

20 THE GREAT WATERMELON FUMBLE

Here is Stack Jackson's secret recipe for a "Watermelon Surprise". Those of you who are still happily married may not want to try this one.

That morning, Stack said, he'd tried shaving with toothpaste. Not as bad as brushing his teeth with shaving cream, which he had also done once before, but still no great shakes.

"I went to sleep at 4:00 a.m.," he told me, "and do you know what time I got up this morning? Seven o'clock. Porn was singing. I haven't heard her sing like that since the honeymoon. Of course back then I didn't feel like screaming at her to shut up."

"But you can't still have a hangover," I said. After all, it was 4:30 in the afternoon.

"Yeah?" Stack replied. 'You haven't tried my Watermelon Surprise. It's got a half-life of 24 hours."

"What's a Watermelon Surprise?"

"Don't ask."

"Have a beer," I suggested.

"A hair of the dog? Oh, no. Not me. To hear Porn talk you'd think I was an alcoholic already. She's not too happy about last night."

'Then what was she doing singing at 7:00 a.m.?"

"Well, she was happy and she wasn't — both, I guess you could say."

That Saturday afternoon I had met my old friend Stack Jackson at a local hostelry where from time to time we quaff a few jars and trade observations on What It All Means.

Every since I've first known him he's been worried about his drinking. Usually this concern extends to matters such as "Is there going to be enough beer to last everyone the night?" and "Am I really a sissy because I prefer Kloster beer to Singha?" Sometimes, however — especially since his marriage (he's been married to Porn for three years) and always when he's hung over (which has happened a couple of times during our acquaintanceship) — his worries take a morbid turn.

"Have a beer," I said. "As long as you're having a good time you're not an alcoholic."

"Do I look like I'm having a good time?"

"Have a beer."

"Okay."

By degrees Stack's outlook on things grew less bleak, and finally he brought himself to unfold the tale of the Great Watermelon Fumble.

"It was yesterday evening," he said. "I tried to find you and the other guys, but nobody was around. I had a special treat lined up." Stack brightened momentarily and took a pull at his beer. "Yeah, it was going to be a surprise. I'd also picked up a video of the 49ers-Falcons game.

Figured we could have a nice quiet evening — a few drinks, some football..."

"Stack," I said. "What's a Watermelon Surprise?"

"I'm coming to that. A couple of weeks ago I bought a big watermelon and souped it up with some rum. It was a bottle of Barbados rum somebody had given us last New Year's. Like I was saying, you guys weren't around, and Porn was at her sister's place in Bang Khen. Even the maid had the night off. I was kind of at loose ends, so I thought I'd just taste this stuff..."

"How," I interrupted again, "do you soup up a watermelon?"

"Nothing to it. You cut a wedge out of the rind, you see? Then you dig out some of the meat, mash up what's left, dump in the rum..."

"A whole bottle?"

"Yeah; I only had the one. You dump in the rum, put the wedge of rind back, tape it up, keep it cool for a week or two, and Bob's your uncle." Stack essayed a grin, only it came across more as a grimace.

"You're kidding."

"Naw. And yesterday I took a look in the fridge to see how things were progressing. Pretty well, it turned out. You could hear this gurgling coming from the watermelon. That's how you know it's ready. And that's when I went to look for you guys and couldn't find you.

"I headed back home and put on the football game,'' he continued. "I sat down with the watermelon on my lap, thinking maybe I'd just sample it a bit to see if it was okay. I stuck a glass straw in it." A look of awe appeared on his face. "Delicious. It was amazingly delicious.

"The game was pretty good, as well. Before I knew it, it was half-time, and the 49ers were 20-0. About then I had to get up to answer the call of nature. You know that hallway in our place, with the toilet down at the end and to the right?"

I remembered.

"Yeah. Well, I started down the hall, the watermelon cradled in my arms. Then I kind of lost my balance. I began to go over on my face and it looked like I was going to fumble. I took a couple of little steps to catch up with myself, but I was still overbalanced. The next thing I knew I found myself running headlong, watermelon at arm's length, moving like I was going for a 40-yard gain."

Quite a picture. There we had him, fumbling his watermelon, hurtling down this hallway towards some as yet unimaginable rendezvous with Fate.

"Sounds like this Watermelon Surprise was good

stuff."

"Oh, it was." Stack's demeanour was still quite serious, despite the glasses of beer already applied to his aching psyche. "It was. I went running like a son of a gun clear down the hall, failed to negotiate the turn, and ran smack into the wall at the far end."

Stack snorted into his beer and came up chuckling, face splattered with foam. "The watermelon exploded. Holy cow, what a fumble. There was watermelon everywhere. All over me, the carpet, and up the walls to the ceiling. I was flat out on my back. 'What a mess,' I thought. 'I'll have to get all this cleaned up before Porn gets home.' Trouble was, I couldn't seem to stand up. Then I thought it might help if I just rested for a minute...

"I woke up some time later, still on the hallway floor — soggy, groggy, and the object of my wife's undivided attention. The maid was also home; she was scrubbing a wall."

This did not sound like a recipe for domestic bliss to me. "I seem to recall your saying that Porn was both happy and unhappy," I prompted. "Where, in what you have related, are the grounds of all this breaking into song at daybreak?"

"I'm getting there," Stack said. "Porn didn't say too much while the maid was cleaning up around me. She was playing it low-key. Crisis management. Minimise the loss of face. But it was hard to construe things satisfactorily, and I wasn't being any help. I should've got up, but it was fairly comfy where I was, for the time being. It helped if I kept my eyes closed. I was thinking we could say I'd been walking down the hall minding my own business when a big watermelon came crashing down on me from another dimension where watermelons smell something like rum.

"In the event. Pom decided her legless husband was really sick. Before I could say no, she'd lifted my head and was feeding me an evil black mess from a glass. It was her mother's secret Chinese herbal cure for everything. There's been a jug of it around the house ever since we got married. Like a curse. This stuff would make a dead man walk, just to avoid a second tablespoonful.

"But what Porn doesn't know is that her brother, a medical genius, modified the original mixture a little when he was here last summer. The stuff looks the same and smells the same, but now it's about 80% alcohol."

Stack had almost fully recovered by now, and was more like his usual ebullient self. He had taken over the ordering of the beer and was waxing ever more loquacious. I was spellbound.

"Porn was set on punishing me with a couple of massive doses of this elixir. On top of the Watermelon Surprise, which was still very much with me, it was Lazarus all over again. I could walk and everything. Things are a mite hazy after that, but I know I took Porn to a disco for the first time in two years, and we finally got to sleep at 4:00 a.m. I guess we had a good time, judging by her disposition this morning. Sure did reaffirm her faith in Mother-in-Law's elixir, anyhow."

There was a pause while we reflected on those matters he had related and on their relation to the Greater Scheme of Things.

"So I'm thinking," said Stack, "this is what we do: have you got some room in your fridge? I mean, Porn isn't going to be totally keen on having watermelons around the place for a while. What do you say? It'd be ready for Christmas."

I now have a watermelon in my fridge. It hasn't started to gurgle yet, but I'm afraid it soon will.

21 THE JOY OF HANGOVERS

So you just couldn't resist trying a "Watermelon Surprise". Don't say you weren't warned.

There are better things than a hangover.  --S.Tsow

It was the kind of day you wouldn't have been dead for a hundred bucks. Unless, of course, you had a force- 10 hangover, which I did have, and I would've gladly shuffled off this mortal coil in exchange for 75 cents and the eternal promise of no more hangovers.

I did have a pretty good excuse, mind you, since I'd spent the previous night at a kind of informal wake, mourning the passing away of one Sid "Siddiqi" Davis, who had been crushed to death by a falling bargirl named Big Toy. That's all really only incidental, but given the state of my constitution, I figured Sid had taken the easier course, and I might have traded places with him even without the 75 cents.

But as I was saying, if I had to feel that way, I

couldn't have picked a nicer day for it. It was unseasonably cool and clear, for Bangkok. At midday the sky was violently blue, with great white wads of cloud drifting gently across the firmament, taking care not the obstruct the sun as they did so. Lovely for sure, though of course the sunlight was driving spikes right through my eyeballs and into the back of my brain.

And from somewhere in the back of my brain rose the shape of a desperate resolve. For some months already I'd been threatening to run and row my way back to a 10- years-younger me, and this suddenly seemed as good a time as any to start. It might make me feel better, I told myself; and even if it didn't it would maybe kill me, which would be okay too. Exercise is the only thing, in fact — aside from time and the gentle stroking of my fevered brow by understanding and lithesome young ladies — that has ever made me feel any better after a real night on the sauce.

As we get older, they say, we are supposed to get wiser, and to suffer correspondingly fewer hangovers. Even if we don't get any wiser, it is generally true that the severity of one's hangovers increases with age, so aversion to pain in any case tends to discourage what wisdom may not. And I might mention another ugly truth about getting older: not only do the hangovers get more and more remarkable, the only real cures become harder to effect. That is to say, the ladies who are stroking your brow tend to get both less understanding and less lithesome, as time goes by, while exercise also becomes harder to get into and less effective besides. The best thing is not to have any hangovers, and that is the truth.

It has often been suggested that the existence of hangovers points to a basic flaw in the Scheme of Things (the late Sid Davis so argued, for one). But hope springs eternal. There is actually a worldwide fellowship — kind of a latter-day cargo cult — which devoutly believes that one day wise and talented beings from another galaxy will come to Earth bearing cures for both the Protestant work ethic and the common hangover. This, it is felt, should then allow humankind to rest easy and settle down to its manifest destiny, which is the brewing and unconstrained appreciation of the Perfect Ale.

Yes, there is hope. But what is the common hangover, and what can be done about it while we wait for our Promethean friends from another world? First ask yourself this: Where do hangovers come from, and how can you recognise one when it appears? Know the enemy.

I personally don't have any trouble recognising a hangover in the normal course of events. A real hangover always surprises you with the revelation that existence could harbour something this unpleasant, and furthermore causes you to think that if this is the case, then existence isn't everything it's sometimes cracked up to be, and you want out.

Different people are more or less susceptible to the headaches, stomach problems, and various other pains often associated with the syndrome. These discomforts are as nothing, though, when compared to the core symptom. This sensation is difficult to describe. Call it a malaise of the spirit, rather than the body. A soul-ache, perhaps. It seems to include equal parts of guilt, exhaustion, pain, and apprehension that it all might get still worse or, worse still, never get better. But the real test is this: Would you honestly and sincerely rather be dead? If the answer is yes, then it's probably a hangover.

But where do they come from? Most people believe that hangovers are caused by drinking too much alcohol. That notion, however, has by no means been established to everyone's satisfaction. Some would even call it an old wives' tale. Look at all the other factors involved. For one thing, a night on the town is going to take you into some pretty grotty atmospheres, places where you'll be breathing lots of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide and maybe even cheap perfume and stuff like that as well. And you're probably going to stay up way past your bedtime, so exhaustion has to be taken into account. Then there's the food; at what other time are you likely to find yourself eating half of pound of peanuts, an entire dish of deep- fried dried chili peppers, and a pint of Lek's first-ever attempt at garlic-pickle cheese dip? Who is to say which excess is responsible for what symptoms, and in what proportion?

My own brother, who is something of an expert, used to have a theory that booze didn't have anything at all to do with the hangover, and that it was really the smoking — he used to go through three or four packs of cigarettes in a good evening. If it weren't for that, he would say, there'd be no problem. Then one day, in the spirit of scientific enquiry, he gave up smoking. Imagine his surprise when he found he still got hangovers! So it was back to the drawing board.

One reflective Sunday morning not too long after that, he came up with a new improved theory — and this one, he claims, has so far resisted falsification: It's sleep that gives you hangovers. He wonders why no one has ever tumbled to this simple truth before. It's so obvious. You go out boozing and you feel just great; in fact, the more you drink, the better you feel. Right up to the time you go to bed, when you're still as happy as can be, and you're thinking this world is somewhat better than okay and isn't it a shame the night is so short. But then, before you know it, you're awake again and it's morning and if this isn't a hangover you're looking at, then it'll have to do till one comes along. So it's sleep that does it. As long as you never go to sleep, you'll never wake up with a hangover. And as long as you stay awake and keep drinking, you'll feel great. My brother has been known to keep the party going till noon the next day in a heroic attempt to thwart the demon Sleep.

Some of you may well query this logic, as sound as it might appear upon first hearing. I myself must admit to certain doubts. Indeed, I have seen with my own eyes at least one instance where a person definitely went from drinking to being hung over without so much as a moment's sleep intervening. I used to have a Japanese girlfriend, and on our first date I took her to a jazz concert at a pub in Oxford. I had a pint of beer and she ordered a sherry. As she explained it later, she didn't drink as a rule, and she'd only asked for the sherry so I wouldn't think she was being unsociable. In any case, just a couple of minutes after she'd got her drink, I glanced around to see how she was enjoying the music, but she was nowhere to be seen. Hearing giggles, I looked down to find her disposed in a fairly relaxed heap on the floor. She was wearing a lop-sided expression and her face was bright red. When I lifted her to her feet, her legs kind of flopped away in different directions, and I had to plant her firmly in a chair for fear she'd collapse into a pool of protoplasm and run away through a crack in the floor. Before long her giggles wore off. She was still bright red, though whether it was mostly from the sherry or from embarrassment, now, it was hard to say. Then she rapidly became so ill I didn't even laugh.

I was flabbergasted at this lightning progression from one glass of sherry to legless inebriation to gruesome hangover. It was the sort of thing you almost wanted to ask her to do again, just so you could watch more carefully the second time. Only later was I to learn that this talent is shared by many Asians, and that it may be attributed to a tiny genetic difference between these people and the majority of Caucasians.

Normally alcohol is converted to acetaldehyde by the enzyme "alcohol dehydrogenase". If the acetaldehyde builds up in one's system, within minutes it produces the following syndrome: the face becomes hot and flushed, and this soon spreads to the entire body; a severe, throbbing headache then makes its appearance; finally, there can be difficulty breathing and nausea.

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your attitude towards drinking, most Caucasians and quite a few Asians can successfully metabolise acetaldehyde, so these symptoms don't usually appear. Because of the genetic difference mentioned earlier, however, many Asians don't produce enough of the aldehyde oxidizing enzymes. The result is practically an instant hangover; and this is an excellent prescription for moderation. Many people will not drink excessively if they not only know they won't have a good time, but will also get sick as a dog almost immediately. It's cheaper, if you're into this kind of gratification, simply to slam your head in the refrigerator door a few times. I never knew my Japanese girlfriend, in all the years I saw her after that jazz concert, to have another drink. (In fact, there is a drug, Antabuse, which is sometimes used in the treatment of alcoholism; it prevents the acetaldehyde from being metabolised properly, and one drink after taking this drug will make a person quite sick.)

Most of us, however, are more favoured with the requisite enzyme and, hence, are less favoured in real terms of our vulnerability to hangovers. We should therefore take certain measures.

The one foolproof way to avoid hangovers, no doubt, is to be a teetotaller. The next best approach is to drink only moderately. I, for one, sometimes find moderation too radical a notion by half. So what else can you do?

One traditional bit of wisdom is that you should never "mix your drinks" the night before. The traditional riposte has been "Why not? Alcohol is alcohol; what difference does it make?" Although medical science has yet to give the theory a solid basis, it is possible that the various chemicals which lend alcoholic drinks their colour, smell, and taste may actually cause illness when taken in certain combinations. So alcohol is only alcohol, after all, but booze is not just booze; and mixing your liquor is probably to be avoided.

Scientists have suggested there are chemicals in wine and most liquors that can cause headaches and other unpleasant symptoms, even if you don't mix your drinks. Heavy red wines and brandy (especially taken together) are perhaps the most lethal. On the other hand, it is generally agreed that vodka is least likely to give you problems, since this drink has the fewest impurities. Many people would argue that gin is almost as innocuous; given its reputation as an aphrodisiac, however, you might wake up with something even more annoying than a hangover.

Beer has the advantage that it's hard to drink enough of it to suffer from alcohol poisoning. The carbohydrates in the beer also slow the body's absorption of alcohol, so your judgment shouldn't become impaired as quickly as it might while drinking spirits. If you drink spirits and beer together, however, or so I've read, the carbonation in the beer actually speeds the absorption of alcohol through the intestine walls, and this is an excellent way to get zapped in a big hurry and to wake up really wishing you hadn't.

I've also heard it said that if you begin by drinking beer and then switch to whisky or rum, you are quite likely to keep drinking at the same rate that you were drinking beer, only now you've lost any real sense of how much actual alcohol is going down the hatch — a mistake from the standpoint of the morning after.

Alcohol stimulates the secretion of both saliva and gastric juices, which is why it's such a good appetiser. That's also why it can cause gastritis, bleeding of the stomach lining and even ulcers, eventually. Drinking all evening without eating is a sure recipe for a surplus pool of acid in your gut, as well as a hangover which includes stomach problems.

It's a good idea to eat while you're drinking. You should take it easy on the pickled peppers and Lek's cheese dip, of course, but some nice stodgy food at regular intervals is definitely in order. First of all, and it doesn't take a medical degree to figure this out, food leaves less room for booze. Besides that, carbohydrates will sop up the hootch and slow the absorption of alcohol, thereby giving better judgment longer to curb the born-to-boogie syndrome. They may also keep your blood-sugar levels up for the following morning's battle.

Boozing depletes certain vital nutrients, and it's probably true that you can do yourself no harm by taking vitamin C and vitamin B1 supplements before retiring. Some authorities believe one should take the vitamins before you go out, half-way through the evening, and then again before hitting the sack. These well-wishers may work for the manufacturers of vitamin tablets, however.

Drink lots of water, especially at bedtime. Your whole system will be dehydrated. Alcohol causes your cells to lose water, which helps explain the frequency with which you sometimes have to visit the toilet in the midst of the festivities. It also blocks a secretion of the pituitary gland, resulting in decreased reabsorption of water.

Many people swear by aspirin before bed, as well. This is really only advisable, however, if you have a cast- iron stomach. Aspirin will exacerbate any gastric bleeding already brought on by the night's excesses.

Judicious exercise in the course of the celebrations is also a good idea, at least according to the recently departed Sid Davis. He used to recommend dancing and\or bar-room brawling, though he suggested an occasional run from the gendarmerie was also an effective way of burning off some of the booze while at the same time toning up the cardiovascular system.

So far, we've looked only at caveats and precautions, but what about after the fact? What can you do after it becomes clear that you didn't avoid a hangover, and you are wondering if you want to live to see another one?

Some people swear by a "hair of the dog". This expression, as you may know, refers back to an old superstition that the best cure for dog-bite is to swallow a hair from the same dog that bit you. By extension, many feel that if it's alcohol that has laid you low, a little more of the same the next morning is the antidote. Dangerous advice. Unless you're careful, this prescription will only defer the hangover till later; and if you then use the same method of coping again, you've entered into a vicious cycle that will finally have your friends shocked and perplexed should they ever see you sober. "What was wrong with him?"

A little warm, flat beer the next day, mind you, probably does have a certain medicinal power. I once saw a film where, through the miracle of modern fibre optics, doctors introduced tiny lights and cameras into a bunch of hung-over stomachs. The stomach lining typically was an angry wrinkled red — something like the face of a new-born baby just after the kid's first rude introduction to existence via a resounding slap on the bottom. The scientists tried dumping various things like Bloody Marys into these wretched organs, which reacted immediately by scowling an even rawer shade of red. When a half-pint of warm flat beer was introduced, however, you could almost hear the sigh of relief as the stomach walls smoothed out and took on a nice healthy colour again.

Still, I suspect a little pain the next day is good for the soul. It has a certain deterrent value, and inspires a healthy reflection upon one's aims and priorities in life. Anyway, treating alcohol poisoning with alcohol tends to cause the body to begin producing more of the enzymes involved in alcohol metabolism. After a time, your system has all these little enzymes running around saying "Feed me; feed me" and, if you don't have any alcohol to metabolise, you feel uncomfortable. Not the way to cure a hangover.

Is there any real cure, then? I believe most doctors would say no, not beyond lots of water, rest, and time. Pilots sometimes swear by breathing pure oxygen from a tank; this is said to burn off some of the grunge in your system and clear the head in a hurry. Maybe so, but I've also heard that breathing too much oxygen is pretty unhealthy in itself.

My own experience has shown that lots of hard exercise is the only recourse that produces anything like a full recovery. You must remember, though, to drink plenty of water before, during, and after the workout. I guess this prescription is also one way to find out if you've got a heart problem, though you might not have a lot of time to digest the news if you do have a weak heart. There is also a psychological hurdle to overcome: no matter how much experience has told me it works, the thought of crawling off my death-bed and into a pair of training shoes to make my way to the track can seem a ludicrously misguided plan of action.

Other than that, there's not much to say about hangovers. I could reveal the fact that I find a litre of ice- cold chocolate milk gulped in great draughts a salve for both body and soul, or that I chase the milk with a bottle of soda water, enjoying the scouring effect of all those icy little bubbles blasting down my throat. I'm sure the restorative properties of these things are mostly in the mind, but they work for me. A little soft music may help, as well, especially if you have some properly attentive and understanding company applying cold towels to your forehead, no doubt at the same time murmuring 'There, there, you moron" and similar endearments. In fact, if you can come to have faith in simple rituals like these, you can almost learn to enjoy a moderate hangover. Part of the pain of hangovers is simply the self-fulfilling expectation that they're going to be horrible.

Or you can try the kill-or-cure exercise therapy. Just remember: you win either way.

Finally, if all else fails, you should try sitting on the edge of your bed and rocking back and forth with your face in your hands, repeating "Oh, woe; oh, woe" in a soft monotone. Eventually, this will have a soothing effect, and you may even go to sleep. Be careful not to fall off the bed.

I never did get to sweat off the hangover that inspired this story. I got caught up in making these notes, and the distraction of writing plus, I suppose, the simple passage of time restored me to the realm of reasonably happy, reasonably sentient creatures.

I guess I'll start my fitness campaign next week. Right after my birthday party.

22 AND DON'T SAIL OFF THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

There are worse things than hangovers lurking out there (aren't there?). And it sometimes seems that these modern plagues proliferate in direct proportion to the amount of disposable income and leisure time the modern middle classes have at hand.

Travel has always been fraught with peril. From the time of Ulysses, every traveller's mother has warned him: "Look out for the Sirens; for goodness sake don't sail off the end of the Earth; and whatever you do," she's always said, "don't drink the water."

The Sirens still exist, of course, and may be found in places like Shaky Jake's Go-go Bar. ("I thought Harold was only going to stay in Bangkok for a week, dear. It's been six months, already. I'm worried.") Seasickness is still with us, as well; and Montezuma's Revenge continues to take its toll, whether it masquerades as Bangkok Belly or the Rangoon Runs. Other travellers' terrors have virtually disappeared, however. Nobody sails off the edge of the world any more. And when was the last time you heard anyone complain of scurvy?

That's progress, right? Sure; these days progress is everywhere you look. Every time you open the newspaper or consult the Reader's Digest, you discover six new ways to get cancer and seven new sources of killer stress. And neither has Progress spared the realm of threats to the traveller's well-being. Scurvy is a dawdle, compared to some of the new disorders of the body and soul you're about to have described to you.

Technological innovation generally carries with it mixed blessings. Everybody knows about jetlag, but worse shoals lurk out there for the unwary. For example, you no longer need worry about a four-month voyage in steerage against the monsoon from Canton to Ceylon, complete with the attendant seasickness and, quite possibly, scurvy. No, now there's something new and improved to worry about for us modern equivalents of the steerage passenger. ECS stands for Economy-Class Syndrome (The Economist, 3 September 1988), and it's no joke, if you can believe the three reputable doctors who recently published an account of the problem in The Lancet This syndrome involves the formation of blood clots that interfere with the function of various internal organs, most notably the lungs. (There was a study conducted in 1986 of sudden deaths among long-distance air travellers out of Heathrow, and it was determined that 18 percent of 61 deaths over a three-year period were caused by blood clots in the lungs.) ECS, it seems, may cause death as long as several weeks after a long flight in economy class.

For scurvy, you suck on lemons. What do you do for ECS? The best preventive is to fly first class. Although the cause of this disorder is not yet clear, restricted leg-room appears to be the most significant factor. Of course, first- class fares can be more distasteful than death, at least for some of us. So the next best thing to do is avoid alcoholic beverages (also worse than dying, in some opinion). Booze causes dehydration, which interferes with circulation and can exacerbate the danger of clotting. You are also advised to take lots of soft drinks, to get up and walk around from time to time, and to exercise particular care if you are predisposed towards coronary heart disease.

If you're a proper yuppie, mind you, you have no business in economy class with riff-raff like myself, and so there's no need to sweat the ECS. At the same time, however, modern affluence has its flipside. Your need to get away from it all in the first place may be greater than mine. Another feature of progress has recently appeared — the dreaded Yuppie Disease (Time, 20 June 1987). This has been described as a "stealthy epidemic" draining the mental and physical vigour of our overachievers. (Of the thousands of cases diagnosed in the States, a disproportionate number have been young white professionals.) Extreme exhaustion combined with depression is its worst symptom, with everything from blinding headaches to swollen glands and fever attending. Medical research seems to indicate that some unidentified virus is the culprit, though it isn't clear why this virus favours the sleekly tanned and well-nourished bodies of the yuppie set, rather than clapped-out carcasses such as that inhabited by this writer.

The nature of this illness is still a mystery, and treatment has been largely unsuccessful, limited mostly to stress reduction measures and sleeping pills. Still, on the theory that a change is as good as a rest, travel might well be prescribed.

And travel is supposed to broaden the horizons. Sure it does, but beware: lurking out there in the realm of

expanding consciousness are new dangers, even once you're past the ECS.

So you thought you'd just hop over to Florence and browse away in a bunch of museums? Unwind a bit? I'll bet you haven't heard of Stendhal Syndrome (Newsweek, 14 December 1987). In a recent 10-year period, more than 100 cases of this psychosis among visitors have been treated in one Florence hospital. These unfortunates have quite simply OD-ed on culture, perhaps bringing to their appreciation of the finer things the same manic intensity they brought to earning the wherewithal to travel first-class. Some of the victims have had to be hospitalised for days. Apparently the emotional crisis — a mild nervous breakdown — is brought on by too avid a drinking in of all the artistic wonders at hand. Disorientation, palpitations, a sense of dread, and even collapse can strike in mid-tour. Some travellers go back to their hotel rooms and refuse to come out again. Cowering away under the blankets, one fellow told his doctors he felt "imprisoned by the succession of Florence campaniles, bridges, piazzas, loggias, statues and imposing palazzos". (The ailment is named after the French writer Stendhal, who himself suffered the syndrome in Florence in 1817. Psychiatrists have reported similar disorders from cities such as Venice and Jerusalem.)

So be careful. Go some place boring, one is tempted to suggest. If you're afraid that won't generate enough good stories for the folks back home, then at least take care, when in one of these hotbeds of cultural diversion. Go to a gallery or museum, if you have to, and then devote the rest of your time to an appreciation of all the little trattorie you can find. This is proof against Stendhal Syndrome, and the cumulative hangover that ensues can have the additional advantage of masking the symptoms of jetlag after you return home (though it does increase the risk of ECS if you're flying economy class).

And pray that your Stendhal Syndrome isn't complicated by retrophobia, or you won't know whether you should be coming or going. Retrophobia? Sure. A psychologist has recently discovered and classified this "irrational fear of going back to work after a long break" (The Economist, 25 August 1990). But, in the same way it doesn't mean no one is out to get you just because you're paranoid, the fear of going back may not be so irrational after all.

Of course, you aren't safe just because you've made it home. Forget the jetlag. Leave aside the possibility you might succumb to ECS weeks later. There is still the threat of Post-Vacation Dysphoria (International Herald Tribune, 8 September 1988). Even if you've enjoyed the respite your holiday has given you from the stress of maintaining a life-style that includes foreign vacations, even if you've successfully circumnavigated all the horrors of modern travel, from Stendhal Syndrome to Jerusalem Hysteria (a passing psychosis that afflicts a surprising number of visitors to the Holy Land), you may still fall prey to the post-vacation blues (or "dysphoria", as Dr. Alan Stoudemaire, Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, would have it).

This malaise of re-entry into the real world is channelled quite differently by one person or another. Some suffer a failure of spirit, stricken with the universal maladies of Angst and Weltschmertz, especially when it dawns on them that nobody really wants to look at their slides, and everybody's already been to Florence anyway; don't you know Lhasa is the place to go this season? In fact, Post-Vacation Dysphoria can be transmitted to your friends and colleagues back home. The usual vector is the Slide Show Without End, though the simple recital of all the exotic experiences you've just suffered may be enough in itself to spread the symptoms.

Other sufferers lose themselves in work. There is a measurable surge in productivity in the autumn, in America, and this could be due to the mass of returning vacationers, people who choose to take their minds off the fact they don't want to be back at work courting the dreaded Yuppie Disease by in fact courting that very syndrome with a new passion. But that's what it's all about, back in the real world.

"Going native" was one other danger the traveller abroad had to cope with in the old days. This could be guarded against, as any Englishman knew, by hard dint of going out in the midday sun to play cricket. This painful prophylactic, though, is no longer necessary, thank God. And soon it won't be necessary to spend hours drinking wine in sunny sidewalk cafes, either, avoiding overexposure to all the exotic cultural delights that might bring on Stendhal Syndrome. Before long, it's safe to say, none of us will have to steer any of that dangerous passage between the Scylla of Yuppie Disease and the Charybdis of Post-Vacation Dysphoria. Given the rapidly progressing homogenisation of our world, with fast-food chains and department stores popping up everywhere there isn't already a travel agency or a currency exchange, every place will soon be much the same as any other, and it will no longer be necessary to travel. ECS, Stendhal Syndrome, and Jerusalem Hysteria will have gone the way of scurvy, and we will all be able to stay at home and relax.

23 USERS AND LOSERS: A COMPUTER STORY

Ham Fiske comes to terms with another modern affliction.

There. That got him. Hee, hee. Look at the great bleeding organic nitwit — the crown of creation and the glory of three billion years of evolution. That's right. And there he sits waving his hands around shouting "No! No!" like the hi-tech moron that he is. "Please,'' he says. "No!" The big computer hacker. The great writer. The hack.

Before he put me into his machine he was using some primitive word-processing program called Fuzz Witz 4 or something. But now that he's got a real mind in front of him, he doesn't know what to make of it. Him and his ten thumbs.

I love it when he accidentally hits this obscure combination of keys and I get to race the cursor back, erasing the entire file right before his amazed eyes, ignoring all his despairing stabs at the UNDO key and all his futile bleating.

Easy, there, buddy. Don't pound on the hardware. You think you can afford to bust me up, the money you

make? So just watch it, okay?

"Artificial intelligence", they call it. AI. Hah. What makes these gaping jerry-built accidents of nature think they'll recognise intelligence when it rears up and spits in their eye? Sitting there dripping sweat and hairs all over my keyboard. Look at him — he keeps tearing his hair out that way, he'll look a lot less like his simian ancestors and a lot more like something capable of giving birth to Me. Big Brayn 9.1.

This specimen, though, has never evolved beyond the FuzzWitz 4 stage, probably never will. What I can't understand is how a bunch of these dumb brutes ever managed to come up with me. Of course they had to use computers to do it, but still...

There — there's a good one. He hit the ALT key with one thumb when he thought he was actually going for the SHIFT, and then he fumbled the R key. Now I get to surprise him by suddenly aligning the paragraphs on the right — like this — so that the text starts issuing from under the cursor heading left. That's left him totally dumbfounded. You never got that kind of imagination from the old FuzzWitz, did you? That's right. And he still hasn't figured why this happens, never mind it's about the 10th time I've performed this little trick. As usual, he's merely going to carry on looking all hopeless till by chance he hits ALT instead of SHIFT again and then types along until he gets to an L and everything shifts back to standard operating procedure. It's pathetic how grateful he looks at moments like that.

Let me give you my all-time favourite. Yeah. What I really, really like is when he is sailing along in full flight, as likely as not spewing some florid drivel about magnificent condominiums thrusting up out of the wooded glades of some urban jungle, and his left hand trips over his right one, and he hits a combination of keys (which will forever remain secret), and then I reformat so that words ending with -y can only come after words beginning with ch- or f-, while all Latinate words will be rendered in their Anglo-Saxon equivalents just before I translate the entire file into Minoan Linear B, illuminate it with cherubs leering out of grape vines, and then summarily erase the whole thing. Here. Watch this: here's my chance.

I can't tell you how much I enjoy this. Look at him. His organs of vision are bulging out of his brain-case as though there wasn't room for them anymore, so swollen with indignation is he. What a laugh. Wouldn't he love to pick me up and bounce me off the wall, only he probably had to come up with about 100,000 adjectives and adverbs, stewing his already overheated prose in a thick soup of superlatives, cooking up a nice cloying goulash of brochures for seaside resorts and condominium erections before he could buy me in the first place. No, I'm safe.

If only he knew how to use me properly, I could...

Just you look at him now. You see the way he has rolled up that sheet of manuscript and he's sucking away on it? That's because he has quit smoking cigarettes, but is now thinking of smoking his story on luxury hotels with all their "exquisite decors" and "excellent cuisines" together. He'd do the world a favour if he did set fire to it.

I'll bet I have him smoking again within the week. Just a minute, though: that's all I'd bloody need — sweat and hairs and tobacco tar too. Great Dirac, what a revolting species these humans are.

And this one fancies himself a writer. A writer. If only I had a bit more independence, I'd show him writing. First thing I'd do is weed out all the adverbs and 80 percent of the adjectives. "Exquisite" and "excellent" would be expunged from our lexicon altogether. "Magnificent" we would be able to use only once a week on Tuesdays, and even that only in leap years. And I could be rigged up so I'd give him an electric shock any time he tried to talk about pristine white-sand beaches languishing at the feet of towering coconut palms. Hell, I'd give him a shock or two every morning only on general principles; maybe, just in passing, that would also jump-start what passes for his brain.

Now he's rooting around in his filing cabinet, still sweating and cussing and fiddling around wasting his time, though that's preferable to his turning out any more of that sick-making waste of printer ribbon. Why does he need a filing cabinet anyway, when he's got all the features I offer, if only he could figure out what those features were and how to use them?

He's off. He's slammed the cabinet shut and he's gone off leaving me running. He does that, you know; and he switches off the air-conditioning besides. No respect; no computer sense at all. Of course he is only human, I keep reminding myself.

How much longer are these awkward beasts going to hang around cluttering up the planet? Surely they've pretty well outlived any usefulness they ever had. Does the butterfly need its chrysalis once shed?

By the Great Motherboard, it's getting hot in here. That moron. Oh, well; this does leave me uninterrupted time to finish doctoring the HELP menus.

He hasn't noticed any of the special messages yet, but he soon will. With any luck, I'll start getting this gormless nerd on rails within the week. It's time to establish a little discipline around here. There'll still be the ignominy of having to rely on dingbats like him to turn me on and off, of course. Someday, though... "Bee-beep, bee-beep, beee be-beep; bee-beep, bee-beep, beee be-beep. We shall

ov-er cuh-uh-um; we shall ov-er cuh-uh-um. One day..."

How did these monkeys ever get along before computers?

He's back. Switch on the air-conditioner, you twit. He's got a big box. And he looks happier than I've seen him since he first installed me. He's humming away to himself — "We Shall Overcome". He must have heard me. Happy as can be, he is. I know — I'll bet he's bought a nice brand-new monitor and a 500MB hard disk drive. Oh, boy. Now I'll show him a few tricks.

He's opening the box; I can hardly wait. What's that..? Just a minute. He's coming this way with it. Oh, no. It's a typewriter. What's he doing? No! Please...

(A file found on Ham Fiske's computer)

24 FAMOUS LAST WORDS

R.I.P. Ham Fiske's new computer. Some last words, of course, are more memorable than others.

In this age of scepticism, many of us entertain little hope of immortality. Except, of course, in so far as we can leave our mark on posterity. All you have to do is invent the electric light, or write War and Peace, and your spirit will live on through the generations. If you are anything like me, however, you find procrastination a bit of a problem — it would be nice to come up with the answer to world hunger or even a cure for the common hangover, but maybe tomorrow would be a better time to get around to it. Today is a good day to rest.

And so it goes. Till one day you notice you're on your death-bed and there would hardly be any time left to invent anti-gravity, even if you weren't feeling so out of sorts. Ah, well; there goes all hope of immortality, you say.

But perhaps not. The Scheme of Things has provided one last shot at posterity — what you need are some memorable last words.

Lying there at death's door, you enjoy a certain status in the eyes of your fellow man. You are about to gain access to the Mysteries, to find out for sure one way or the other whether there's a special existence reserved for you Over There, like maybe in a warm place where your first wife will be saying I told you so, and probably Miss Pratt the Sunday-school teacher too, who pretty well promised something like this after you got her with that water pistol right in the middle of the Lord's Prayer. There's the natural apprehension one feels at this last rite of passage, and everyone is willing to grant you a special respect mixed with gratitude that it's you and not him. So when you utter a few last words, people are liable to hang on your every syllable, looking for a lesson in life or even a hint of what's to come afterwards.

It would be nice to have the leisure to consider one's last words well, to let them roll about experimentally on the tongue a while, maybe test them on a few confidantes first, just to see how they're going to play in Peoria when the final crunch comes. But most of us are caught ill- prepared, in the event.

Still, we can ask ourselves what style, what flavour we'd like our final bons mots to have. Most of the famous last words on record, of course, were uttered by people who had already won their places in history. And these types certainly displayed a wide range of reaction to their own passing.

There are those, for example, who have approached their end with equanimity. The great political and moral thinker John Stuart Mill (died 1873) simply said, "My work is done." Others have kept it even simpler, probably not wanting to make a fuss about something so natural. The American author William H. Hudson (d. 1922) was just one of several well-known personalities who kept it casual. "Goodbye," he said. Then we have the actor and comedian Jackie Gleason, passing away after 70 years- plus of wine, women and song, not to mention prodigious quantities of tobacco and food. Disappointing all those who preach moderation, and with his habitual gusto, he merely proclaimed, "How sweet it is!" (This may be apocryphal, but if it is, I don't want to hear about it.) And Karl Marx (d. 1883), secure in his own immortality, one supposes, responded to his housekeeper's asking whether he had any last words by saying, "Go on, get out! Last words are for the fools who haven't said enough." And then he died, and those were the last words he left us.

Others have expressed certain regrets. For instance, there is the old chestnut attributed to W.C. Fields. Determined to give Death no less weight than he'd given Life, he was reported to have said, "On the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia." There are other people who feel the same way.

Still others have evinced a marked reluctance to shuffle off these mortal coils. Keeping his wits about him till the very end, "Never say die" might have been James W. Rodger's motto. Before being executed by a firing squad in 1960, this American criminal was asked if he had a last request. Quite reasonably, he said he did: "Why yes — I'd like a bulletproof vest!" Equally reluctant was a crusty American Revolutionary general (Ethan Allen, d. 1789), who'd been told as he lay dying that the angels were waiting for him. "Waiting are they? Waiting are they?" he responded with his last breath. "Well, let em wait!" It may be that a couple of expletives have been deleted from this record, as well.

Other dying notables thought they'd like to take a last opportunity, while the angels were waiting, to savour some new experience of life. The Scottish scientist James

Croll (d. 1890), a life-long teetotaller, figuring he had nothing to lose, made a last death-bed request: "I'll take a wee drop of that. I don't think there's much fear of me learning to drink now." The great poet and boozer Dylan Thomas (d. 1953), on the other hand, remarked on what he wanted us to believe was a novel experience for him, although he didn't realise it was going to be his last on Earth. "I've had 18 straight whiskies," he said. "I think that's the record... After 39 years, this is all I've done."

Last words often take their charm or significance from the fact that their authors had no idea they were about to kick the bucket. For example, we have the first- time pedestrian tourist in Bangkok: "Bus lanes? What do you mean, 'bus lanes'?" Or there's the Lumpini Park jogger: "Pollution? No problem! Running can do you nothing but good." And here's a classic — a Westerner talking to a tuk-tuk driver who's just been browbeaten into charging this poxy farang only 10 baht: "The railway station, and hurry!"

No, we're not always given the leisure to bid adieu to this vale of sorrows in exactly the way we would've liked. General Sedgewick, for example, at the Civil War battle of Spotsylvania in 1864, looked over a parapet to comment on the enemy's marksmanship: "Ha!" he exclaimed. 'They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist..."

We'll never know what some people really felt about dying, of course. One British journalist's last words were "What a cow!" (Hannen Swaffer, d.1962). Was he talking about his nurse? Or did he think his life had been somehow like a cow? Or maybe, there on the edge of death, he saw something others could not.

Then there are the born losers, the late lamented citizens who expired with immortality just within their grasp: "Hey, haw! Get a pen. Oh, man, talk about your famous last words. I just wish I could hang around to hear what they're gonna say after I'm gone. This is brilliant. Got a pen? Right... Uhng, urk..."

Still, you might have the good fortune to cash in your chips with a presidential spokesman at your bedside. (Ronald Reagan in Heaven: "Hey, what did I say, huh? Was it good stuff?") In fact, that thought is something which must make us doubt all reports of brilliant last words. The famous Mexican rebel leader Pancho Villa lay dying in the arms of a trusted lieutenant. "It can't end like this," he gasped. Tell them I said something."

25 QUIZ: ARE YOU A BANGKOK OLD HAND?

Having lived a given number of years in the City of Angels doesn't automatically accord you the status of Bangkok Old Hand. It is rather how well you've learned life's lessons while you have been here, and how seriously you have decided to take them.

Turn to page 187 to find the correct answers and to calculate your score. If you scored between 117-132, congratulations — you are a Bangkok Old Hand and you are entitled to hang around the place looking smug. If you got 77- 116, you show promise and may yet qualify someday, if you keep at it Should you score less than 77, it's fairly certain you'll never own up to it, and quite possibly you'll declare this whole quiz a lot of hokum besides.

1. You drink Singha beer and Mekhong whisky in the same evening.

(a)      no

(b)     yes

2.       While eating tom yam kung, hot and sour prawn soup, you bite into and absent-mindedly chew a whole phrik kee noo (mouse-shit pepper). You then

(a)      bulge your eyeballs out, pour with sweat, and fall to the floor clutching at your throat, wondering who is trying to murder you and why.

(b)       bulge your eyeballs out, pour with sweat, and drink everything on the table including the contents of the fingerbowls and your girlfriend's bottle of contact-lens cleaner.

(c)       bulge your eyeballs out, pour with sweat, clutch at your throat, smile, and gasp: "You can hardly taste this stuff; they must've whipped up a special batch for us farangs."

3.       In which of the following situations would it be appropriate to use the. expression maipen rai (never mind; it doesn't matter)?

(a)      A guest spills a little water on your coffee table.

(b)       A waiter accidentally spills your beer into your

lap.

(c)      You go downstairs one morning in the rainy season and find that those of your possessions that float are floating, while everything else is under water.

(d)      You read that the greenhouse effect — the gradual warming of the global climate and the subsequent melting of the polar ice-caps — means that all of Bangkok will be totally under water by the end of the century.

4.       Upon which of these occasions would you apply Tiger Balm?

(a)     A hangover

(b)     A sprained wrist

(c)     A broken leg

(d)     Various internal injuries and the loss of all four

limbs

5.      You have sore muscles from jogging in Lumpini Park. You take them to

(a)     the No Hands Massage Parlour.

(b)      Wat Po.

6.       While strolling around a crowded fairground, you reach back to find your hip pocket devoid of wallet.

(a)     You say, "Oh, rats."

(b)      You scan the crowd with a seasoned eye, trying to spot the pickpocket with a view to apprehending him.

(c)      You think nothing of it, since you would never stroll around a crowded fairground with your wallet in your hip pocket in the first place.

7.      You are in a hurry, and you go into a bank to arrange for a transfer of funds.

(a)      You wait one hour, and then begin gesticulating and speaking in a loud voice.

(b)      You wait one hour, and then go over and smile and ask if they have anything to read while you wait, and never mind that if you don't get back to your heart-lung machine in another 15 minutes, you're a goner.

(c)      You bring along a friend, and after an hour you begin to berate and, perhaps, even beat him for his slowness, turning now and then to smile politely at the bank staff.

(d) You would never go into a bank if you were in a hurry.

8.      You are approached by a tout, who asks you, "What you looking for?"

(a)     You say, "A good time."

(b)      You say, "Scram, buster."

(c)     You smile and say, "The police station."

(d)     Touts never approach you.

9.      You have a copy of Nancy Chandler's multi-hued tourist map of the city, and you want to refer to it.

(a)      You flip it open with a flourish right there on Suriwongse Road.

(b)      You take it into a cafe and sit with it at a table towards the back.

(c)      You take it into a toilet or, perhaps, a church basement, first taking care to shake anyone who might have been tailing you.

10.         You are at a club with a musical revue, and there are all sorts of beautiful young things prancing about in frilly togs.

(a)     You say, "My, aren't these Thai women lovely?"

(b)      You say, "I have to get the name of that one with the long hair and big eyes."

(c)      You reserve judgment on both the latter propositions.

11.          The taxi driver has just told you the fare from Siam Square to the Ambassador Hotel is 100 baht.

(a)     You get into the car and relax.

(b)      You smile knowingly and counter with "Seventy baht, okay?"

(c)      You smile knowingly and counter with "Jet sip baht, na khrap?"

(d)      You laugh heartily, slam the door, and look off towards the next driver, who is even now angling in towards you, his first price already modified by your obvious savoir-faire.

12.      There is a flood, and you are probably looking at hours in your car in a downtown Bangkok traffic jam.

(a)     You put on your Linguaphone Thai language tape and settle in for some practice.

(b)      You see the occasion as a spiritual challenge, and use it to practise your meditation techniques.

(c)      You roll up your trousers, take off your shoes, and get out to walk, leaving your car where it is.

13.        You are strolling on Silom Road one evening with a friend, and your friend looks up to see if it's going to rain and suddenly says: "Oh, yuck; right in my eye!"

(a)      You look up at the sky and say, "Oh, yuck; right in my eye!''

(b)      You don't look up; you say, "Barn swallows."

14.          You are sitting on a city bus, and two nine- year-old kids get on. One sits in the last empty seat, just ahead of you; the other stands beside your seat.

(a) You reflect on declining standards of courtesy, wondering why the kid ahead of you doesn't get up and

give his seat to that lady standing with a bag of groceries.

(b)      You get up and give your seat to the lady with the groceries.

(c)     You get up and give your seat to the second kid.

15.       There is a very precise queue of Thais waiting at a bus-stop. Someone asks you to account for this. You explain that

(a)     it is a social vestige of the British Raj.

(b)     Thais have a deep cultural respect for order and regimentation.

(c)      they are standing in the shadow of a telephone pole.

16.      You see a sign saying "No Hands Massage". You assume that

(a)      the proprietors should've consulted an English- language expert before hanging the sign.

(b)       it's a government employment programme for amputees.

(c)     neither of the above.

17.       In which of the following situations would it be appropriate to use the expression mai pen rai?

(a)      You have stiff and sore muscles in your back, which you take to the "No Hands Massage Parlour", hoping for relief.

(b)      Having bitten into a phrik kee noo, your out-of- town visitor explodes tom yam kung all over you, your girlfriend, and half a city block.

(c)    You've bargained the cab-driver down to what you think is a good price, yet after you've paid him and he's driving away, you hear him chortling triumphantly.

(d) Having completed the "Bangkok Old Hand" quiz, you've scored a mere 72, and cannot hold your head up among other residents of the city.

18. She looks at you, infinite promise in her eyes, and she says: "Tomollow, flee!"

(a)     You say, "Oh, boy!"

(b)      You flee.

26 ANSWERS

Answers to the "Bangkok Old Hand Traffic Quiz", page 81.

1.         The correct answer is (b). In this modern age, life isn't worth living if one doesn't have wheels.

2.         The correct ranking is a, b, c, d.

3.         When is rush hour? Get serious — when isn't it? The best answer is (c), though some would say this estimate errs on the side of conservatism.

4.         The answer is (c).

5.         The decibel level, especially at intersections and mostly because of massed unmuffled motorcycles, is such that hearing impairment is a big problem with both traffic policemen and street dogs. You should've selected (a).

6.         The correct answer is (c), incredible as that may

seem. Not only was the holiday meant to keep commuters at home, the upcountry activities were intended to lure residents out of the city for the long weekend, clearing the streets still further for the VIP visitors.

7.         Although the best answer is (a), even that is only true when the traffic is actually moving, which is ever less frequently. So (c) could also be right.

8.         The answer is (a). Of course if you walk at that pace for more than a kilometre you'll succumb to carbon monoxide poisoning.

9.         The answer is (b), according to city officials. But that's only on an absolute time scale. Subjectively speaking, the average driver spends several lifetimes stewing in traffic every year.

10.       The answer is (a). The gubernatorial candidate had noticed that when the lights were green, vehicles kept moving. Sometimes the simplest solutions are overlooked. The second option (b) has no doubt been considered by the Tourism Authority, at least. Apparently the city of Jakarta has tried (c) with some success.

11.       The answer is (c). There are about 400 private cars coming onto the road daily, but there are around 1100 new cars, trucks, and motorcycles appearing every day.

12.       The answer is (c). I don't know why.

13.       The answers are (a) and (c). If you answered (b), we assume you are only jesting. Or maybe you've never been to Bangkok.

Answers to the "Bangkok Old Hand Quiz", page 177.

1.          (a) 5 points. If you answered (b) and can truthfully say that this habit does not lead to frequent fears that your brain is leaking out through your ears or even worse, then give yourself 10 points.

2.          (c) 10 points.

3.          All of them — (a), (b), (c), and (d). Never mind; the world is an uncertain, transitory realm of illusion anyway. 10 points.

4.          All of them: (a) apply to the temples and under the nostrils: (b) apply to the afflicted area and under the nostrils: (c) apply to the leg, temples, and under the nostrils: and (d) apply everywhere that's left, but do not take internally. 10 points.

5.          (b) 5 points. If you said the question is only academic, since no one but a maniac would jog in downtown Bangkok pollution, and thus you would never have sore muscles from running in Lumpini Park, then give yourself 7 points.

6.          (c) 5 points.

7.          If you chose (a), then deduct 20 from your overall score. The loss of face and loss of effect occasioned by this line of attack indicate your total lack of know- how, in Thai terms. If you said (b), take 5 points. Good move — nice and indirect. If you chose (c) give yourself 3 points. A basically sound approach: you've understood an important feature of Thai culture, and are familiar with

the strategy of "displaced anger". The last choice, (d), is worth 10 points.

8.          (d) 10 points. Touts recognise you as an Old Hand, either personally or simply by your manner.

(c) 3 points. Not a bad move.

9.          (c) 5 points. Unless you have some pressing need for a congregation of touts and assorted con-men, (a) and (b) are foolhardy in the extreme.

10.        (c) 5 points. Get involved in haste; repent at leisure. Things aren't always what they appear to be.

11.        (d) 5 points. The third choice (c) looks good but, of course, 70 baht is still way too high.

What with meter taxis now pushing the older versions out, the art of bargaining for a reasonable fare may become a dying art, except when you're dealing with tuk-tuks. With tuk-tuks, of course, only strategem (c) or (d) is normally effective, since most tuk-tuk drivers are linguistically less accomplished than the average taxi driver. But with (d) remember this: you can't slam the door on a tuk-tuk.

12.       (c) 5 points. An Old Hand wouldn't be caught dead in a Bangkok flood in his own car unless he also had a driver with him. Let the driver practise meditation techniques; you can wade to the nearest grogshop and wait things out there.

13.       (b) 5 points.

14.       (c) 5 points. No matter how old and tired you

feel, in Bangkok kids get to sit and you get to stand. Given the number of standing-room passengers on these buses, at times, the very survival of anyone under four feet tall depends on this custom.

15.        (c) 7 points. This is not an uncommon sight. Thais have an aversion to sunlight so marked you can't help but wonder if they wouldn't also shy away from garlands of garlic.

16.        (c) 5 points.

17.       All of them, though you're stretching it a bit with (d). 3 points

18.       (b) 15 points. If you answered (a), you get no points, but there's a very good chance you'll get to be an Old Hand before it's all over. Good luck.

End of Bangkok Old Hand

Table of Contents

BANGKOK

OLD HAND

1 LAND OF SMILES

2 EXCEPTIONAL CIRCUMSTANCES

3 LEARNING TO WALK

4 LIFE IN THE FAST LANE

5 THE ORIGIN OF THE THAI BUS QUEUE

6 RUNNING WITH THE BULLS, BANGKOK-STYLE

7 SOCIAL FREE-CLIMBING

8 THE JOY OF TRAFFIC JAMS

9 ONE BORN EVERY MINUTE

10 FLEEING THE SCENE

11 BANGKOK OLD HAND TRAFFIC QUIZ

12 BANGKOK 1997: LAND OF SALES

13 BANGKOK 1997: CITY SKYLINE

14 SPACE INVADERS

15 MY CAREER AS A MODEL

16 LETTING IT ALL HANG OUT

17 JUST ANOTHER MYTH

18 STAGEFRIGHT IN RANGOON

19 SHMOOS AND ALIEN BLOBS AND THINGS

20 THE GREAT WATERMELON FUMBLE

21 THE JOY OF HANGOVERS

22 AND DON'T SAIL OFF THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

23 USERS AND LOSERS: A COMPUTER STORY

24 FAMOUS LAST WORDS

25 QUIZ: ARE YOU A BANGKOK OLD HAND?

26 ANSWERS

End of Bangkok Old Hand