On Red Lights

Just a preface: I could use a beer, if it didn't involve going for a beer. And the American Happy Meal site says, "HEY KIDS, THIS IS ADVERTISING!" across the top; I wonder if the spermy little Thai squiggles mean the same here.

And, well, there is much percolating. Once the coffee turns local, I'll start pouring.

You know how things go in my world: they just happen. It just happens that I end up in the Penyang projects. I was looking for information on Buddhis and had been misdirected out of the Malaysia Buddhist Society's wat. I sure as heck didn't want to be in the projects—nobody wants to be in the Penyang projects, not even those who typically ply such places, because most of the tenants are devout Muslims.

So I'm at a writing impasse, I need to move my scooter, I'm getting hungry again, and there's a 24 hour McDonalds. Win, win, win. But when I park, I get distracted by live music—a couple of farangs playing rockabilly blues. And as I investigate further, I end up in the red light district.

Were I back home and in, say, Reno, this would be a remarkably uncomfortable situaition. But I'm not in Reno. I'm in an off-season global magnate of beach resort paradise in southern Thailand on a Saturday night/

Not only did I make it to the bitter, destitute end of the red light street—it's a dead end populated by women who could've been women servicing service men on leave from the war in Vietnam—I made it back to the blues bar and actually got inside because all the members of the door guard were busy gyrating with one another on a pool table.

Great, now I can drink a beer and listen to some music, right?

HA!

Someone coming up and groping me from behind has always been disconcerting, even when I had something like pecs to grope. As the woman old enough to be my mother found out, there are only ribs. She recoiled and I turned in time to catch a shocked “Eww!” face. From a Thai bar dancer. Think about that.

And there was a flurry of handwaving and an explosion of Thai and the pool table was vacated to come grope my chest. Hmm, can we invent a less comfortable situation?

How about me standing up at the same time the band stops and everyone in the house turns toward the woman screaming, “YOU HAVA NO ASS!”

Naturally, all the other girls moved in to confirm.

End result? McThai has some great addenda to the menu. Of course I'll end up in the next red light district I find—who wouldn't?--I'll just be a little more prepared.. But McThaiRonald has some great things going: a black pepper chicken sandwich that's a grilled chicken breast with a black pepper marinade, a pork snackburger that's like a plain 'ol little hamburger but the meat's been passed through a finer sieve and has the nicer taste of animals raised on a diverse—if leftover—dietf, and sauces including plum sauce, sriracha, uber-spicy barbecue, a lemony tartar closer to aioli and fish sauce for the fries “functional definition of a Thai person, regardless of skin color: they put fish sauce on fries and ketchup on pizza. And even though I feel it as unsettlingly as the spicy green papaya salad with crushed, raw crab, after a month of such clean, spicy, unrefined, unrefrigerated, utterly foreign food, processed meat in a refined bun is darn close to bliss.