Bangkok Knights (11 page)

“Do you know,” said Eddie, “I’m going to kill all of those
nit-witted birds one of these days. Especially Nixon.”

If you happened to be in the middle of a force-ten
hangover, which Eddie said he was, in my opinion there were better places to
enjoy it than the patio out behind the Cheri-Tone Guesthouse. For reasons best
known to himself, Eddie had five high-spirited mynah birds in cages hanging
about the wrought-iron enclosure where his wife Lek and her sister Meow served
meals to their guests.

Eddie, himself, used
the area to make notes towards his novel. When existence had little of note to
offer, which was sometimes the case, Eddie would work on expanding the
linguistic repertoire of his birds. Or if there were guests he might talk to
these creatures instead, dispensing advice on all matters pertaining to survival
and the maintenance of one’s cool in the Eastern Hemisphere.

“How’s business?” I asked.

“Wonderful,” said Eddie sourly. “We’re filled up.

“Pot and Dit have taken one lot up to Ayutthaya in the
minibus; there are a couple of great big Dutch girls who went out only ten
minutes ago with the avowed intention of seeing some real Thai life and finding
a source of natural yoghurt. And there’s still a bunch upstairs rolling joints
and tearing more holes in their tank-tops, or whatever it is they do when
they’re not down here complaining about the heat and the price of cottage
cheese.”

This was Eddie’s livelihood he was bad-mouthing here.
“Eddie,” I said, “it was only a short time ago you were telling me there were
no guests to be had and next thing you knew you’d have to find honest work or
something. C’mon, cheer up. Business is booming.”

“Well, sometimes it gets to you, you know? I swear, the
times are changing, and sometimes I just don’t know how to talk to this new
generation. Or whatever it is.”

Hangovers can do that to you — make you feel as though a
generation gap has suddenly yawned between the way you are now and the way you
were only yesterday.

“Oh, yeah,” he went on, “this lot have been to Christian
retreats in Kerala and yoga ashrams in Kashmir. They’ve spent as much as two
weeks at a time in Buddhist monasteries. They’ ve seen the Taj Mahal by
moonlight, and they’ve been robbed in Jakarta. Lost the camera in Rangoon and trekked over some mountains in Tibet you’ve never heard of. Been there; done
that. Had dysentery in Lhasa.

“Yuppies disguised as vagabonds, they leave off
worshipping money for weeks or maybe even months at a time, and they come out
here for a spiritual booster. They collect countries like stamps and they learn
how to say ‘Too expensive!’ in seven languages or more.

“Normally they become blessed with a pretty good knowledge
of the Mysteries after the first month, and then spend the rest of their
pilgrimage through the guesthouses and GPO’ s of Asia telling each other how
they should be existing and which joint has the best cheeseburgers in Bali.”

Eddie was in fine form, possessed by a rap which
transcended hangovers, a message for humanity which demanded expression; it
caused him to draw himself up erect in his chair and it drew stern fire from
his eyes.

A couple of the aforementioned vagabonds in tattered
tank-tops and baggy cotton trousers had meanwhile appeared at a table in the
opposite corner of the patio. Ever sensitive to emanations of guruishness, they
had homed in on Eddie and were straining to hear his words.

“There they are, sitting in thousands of guesthouses,
explaining to each other how to exist, currently being quite turned on to think
that existing is actually problematical in the first place.”

I could’ve sworn one of the travelers actually nodded at
this, eyes wide with avid willingness to be made wise. Rather lovely eyes, I
noted, set in a generally lovely face.

Lek appeared from the back to serve this vision and her
companion toasted whole wheat, no butter, and soft-boiled eggs. Plain bottled
water to drink. Lek came over to refill our coffee cups and to ask Eddie if he
thought he might actually feel up to making a run to Foodland for more
provisions, a little later. Eddie gave her the kind of look gurus give people
when they’ve been distracted by matters so mundane as to be unworthy of
comment. Lek gave him another look right back which said you’d better be up to
it.

Eddie practically inhaled the whole cup of coffee in one
go, but did not appear noticeably the happier for it. “You’ve got your
Siddhartha Joneses and your Siddhartha Smiths,” he continued. “You’ve got any
number of up-and-coming accountants and media buyers who’ve discovered
Shangri-la, and who are ready to argue that their Shangri-la is better than
your Shangri-la, or at least that the guesthouses there are cheaper.

“Guesthouses! I was down on Khao San Road the other day,
and I swear they’re building guesthouses on top of guesthouses. You can hardly
walk down the street any more; the postcard racks and breakfast-menu boards
have taken over the sidewalks, and the travelers have spilled out onto the
pavement. No kidding, there are tables and chairs all over the road, and thousands
of tattered ninnies are huddled together out there talking about where they
bought their embroidered shoulder bags and about how isn’t Kathmandu a bit
spoiled these days, you really have to go to Tibet.

“Your first impression is there’s some kind of pogrom on,
and in a minute uniformed men will set up machine guns at either end of the
street, and a loud-hailer will tell the crowd they’ve got just enough time to
order a last cottage cheese and green salad before they’re all dead meat Yeah,
if only it were so.”

“Hey, Eddie,” I said. “You’re running a guesthouse, here.
Aren’t piles of dead travelers in the streets going to be bad for business?”

“I don’t care.”

^il
Bah-bah
_t
baw-baw”
said Lek in
passing. “Crazy.”

Just then, affirming my ability to make things come true
simply by wishing hard, the traveler with the eyes came over and said hi. I
guess she mistook Eddie for the source of the thought waves, though, because
she sort of zeroed in on him, asking him if he were the proprietor. She asked
this in a voice like a furry oboe, a voice that kind of fizzed and fuzzed way
down inside you, somewhere. Her English was accented with an intriguing hint of
Scandinavia. She was tall and well-proportioned, and her loose sleeveless top
had only a couple of holes in it, and nothing underneath. She was the kind of
young lady that grew on you quite quickly.

Eddie owned up to running the joint and told her to sit
down. She called her friend over, and he joined us as well, a 6’4” blond,
bearded scarecrow. He was a real veteran of the trail, by all appearances,
reduced to these cadaverous dimensions, no doubt, by over-priced cottage cheese
and dysentery, and weighed down by heavy Nepalese jewelry and the burden of
sailing consort with this goddess.

Olga the Goddess turned out to be Norwegian and she was a
computer programmer. Wolfe, on the other hand, was German and had an obvious
love of uniforms, sticking out of a grimy tank-top the way he did, and
affecting baggy purple-and-green-striped pantaloons. He was a real-estate dealer
from Hamburg.

“Can you tell us which bus we should take to get to the
Burmese Embassy tomorrow?” Olga’s voice fluted and furred and so befuddled me I
couldn’t get the right bus number out before Eddie did. He offered this number
as though it were a priceless pearl, his eyes so wide and earnest I could see
statuesque Nordic beauties reflected on their glistening orbs.

Eddie seemed quite impressed with this new guest, in fact,
and you got the idea he would by no means want to see her gunned down on Khao
San Road or on any other road either, come to that. Lek, on the other hand, was
lurking in the doorway like a Ninja at work, and when Eddie called for beer I
just sat there in awe of his nerve. Even the birds were silent — the calm
before the storm.

Eddie got his own beer and, when the guests said in
response to his offer, “Oh, no; it’s too expensive in Thailand”, he said “Don’t worry; it’s on me” and I said “Have you got a Kloster Beer?” thinking I
didn’ t want to be entirely sober when Lek finally decided to go into action.

“When are you going to Burma?” asked Eddie in a faint
voice, having chugged the better part of a beer in a fine display of this manly
art.

“Excuse me; what did you say?” Wolfe craned towards Eddie,
politely pushing a shaggy mop away from the nearer ear. Olga also leaned
forward attentively, her batiked shirtfront, you had to notice, falling away
from her abundant bosom.

Eddie repeated his question, and they told him five days.

“We came from Koh Samui, and Tuesday we go to Burma,” said Olga.

“Ja, ja. Burma,” added Wolfe.

“How was the weather on Koh Samui?” Eddie asked very sofdy.

“What? What did you say?” Olga leaned forward again.

Suddenly Eddie straightened up so fast he almost went over
backwards. “Ah, Lek. Hi. I was just talking to these guests, here,” he said,
looking vaguely all around — everywhere, in fact, except at the bra-less beauty
whom, he would have had you believe, he hadn’t noticed yet. Lek merely
collected the coffee cups and returned to the house without comment. But then I
didn’t expect her to compliment Olga on what was pretty clearly an all-over
tan.

I finished my beer and said I had to go downtown on some
business. Sure, I told Eddie, when he asked me: I’d pick up his provisions at
Foodland; it was on my way. I’d come back with the stuff before dinner.

Wolfe insisted on shaking my hand and saying good-bye, but
Olga remained largely oblivious to me. Eddie was telling her about a really
interesting place in Burma, not too far from Pagan, but off the beaten path,
nevertheless.

When I came back a couple of hours later, I could smell
Eddie’s Burma cheroots, and I knew he must have taken on a fair load of Dutch
courage, because in the normal course of events Lek wouldn’ t have let him
smoke one of those things in the Cheri-Tone or even fifty meters upwind of the
place.

Eddie was surrounded, now, by several uniformed vagabonds,
though Olga had situated herself close enough to surround him all by herself.
It turned out, according to the account I got a couple of days later, he’d quickly
established his supremacy in this little herd, no matter he was sporting a
rumpled but clean khaki safari suit and laced leather shoes. Where this guy had
done
that,
for example, Eddie’d aced him with six months in Kathmandu in 1967. Where that guy, on the other hand, had been
there,
Eddie had
trumped him with a hike through northern India back when villagers didn’t even
know what a backpack was. A common theory had had it he was carrying a folding
bed. Then he’d finessed one piratical-looking chap who’d crossed illegally into
northern Burma — he’d merely related his own adventures under fire in the Shan State and the time he’d been a guest of the famous opium warlord.

By the time I arrived, though, it had already been
conceded there was no contest on the been-there-done-that front, and our
friendly neighborhood guru was on a different tack.

“Oh, yeah,” Eddie said, waving a smoldering cheroot
expansively, and swigging from a bottle of Singha. “You’ve got to have, I
figure, maybe thirty-five units, minimum, to make a go of it.

‘Units’? I asked myself. Did he mean ‘rooms’? If you’d
wanted to give me two-to-one odds, I’d have bet you Eddie didn’t even know how
many rooms there were in the Cheri-Tone, much less how many
units.

“That way you get the volume of peak-season trade you need
as a hedge against the ‘off season, you know what I mean?”

Maybe they did, but I reckoned he was talking through his
hat, and looking at Lek’s face, you had to think she agreed. ‘Units’ and
‘volumes of trade*. Eddie knew about how much return you got on an empty Singha
beer botde, but after that his interest in business waned considerably.

The next thing I knew, however, I was witness to an
exchange between Eddie, Wolfe, a barefoot investment counselor from Sydney, and a shaven-headed accountant from Denver that was couched in terms so
commercially esoteric as to confound me altogether. Olga simply stared,
enthralled; she kept leaning forward attentively, emitting the occasional
“Marvelous!” and thereby inciting Eddie to ever new heights of flim-flammery.
He was even saying things like ‘bottom line’ and ‘go for it’. It was as though
some Yuppie demon had taken possession of him. It was frightening. And it was
funny — Eddie had been a friend of mine for years, but it was only that night
that I learned he’d done degrees in Commerce and Economics, and had worked as
an investment consultant in Pittsburgh before coming out to the Far East
Unbelievable.

You could see Eddie’s hangover was very much a thing of
the past, by that point Or, more accurately, it had only been deferred. Lek
would make sure it reappeared with a vengeance the next day, if I read the
situation correctly. Right at that moment Eddie was in full flight, however. He
had by now fully established his status as a dab hand at this business of
Existence, and as a guru of no small talent. He even went so far as to
introduce Olga to his Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry tapes. The thoroughly tanned
Nordic nymph had never heard of either of these gentlemen before, but she
immediately recognized them as artists of some stature. As a reward for her
perspicacity, Eddie was going to teach her to dance the Twist to the tune of
“Maybelline”.

But suddenly everything went black, and the music died.
Then Lek’s disembodied voice announced a fuse must’ve blown, and would Eddie
please see to it? Somehow, a cement bench had found its way out onto the patio
and Eddie almost broke his jesus leg, as he put it

When I dropped around a couple of days later, Olga and
Wolfe were no longer at the Cheri-Tone. Regretfully, of course, Eddie had had
to inform them that the place was fully booked and that their room had been
reserved for an old and favored guest. He said he could place them in a very
nice guesthouse over on KhaoSan Road, if they liked.