I decided to splurge and booked a bungalow on the beach with a healing treatment. It makes me feel better to think that part of the music position went because I'm so darn draggy from being so darn sick. So maybe, if I get well... and since so many therapies have done so little good... and here I am.
Town needs some more time before I say anything about it. It's an off-track tourist trap that isn't, and I'm not quite sure why. What matters for the present narrative is that I'm here, anticipating a rejuvenating experience, heading for the bar/grill the proprietor recommended, anticipating being home by 6 and out by 8. But then a beautiful blonde girl walks up and tells me my name, where I work, and my closest coworkers. Eh?
Gotta love the information age.
She sits and we talk and it's very nice, and she mentions a concert she's here for and alarm bells go off. It's not that I'm so curmudeonly that a concert on a Thai beach is unappealing, it's that a long sleep in a seaside bungalow without neighbors or alarms sounds beautiful enough to justify handing over more than I'm comfortable putting in print.
Another NST farang shows up and relieves some conversational burden. It's good to know that I'm still painfully, socially fatally awkward when it comes to small talk with attractive members of the opposite sex.
I figured there would be a crowd of farangs going to this bigtime show, and I'd have an easy time slipping out. But no: I was 20% of the population.
And how fascinating: It was a solid five hours of sitting on the beach while beer flowed; one of the later arrivals pulled out a bottle of whiskey and ordered cokes; shots of tequilla; the liberal distribution and partaking of mind-altering substances. And I nursed on beers chewed with buckets of ice cubes, snuck to the bathroom to pee and have another Coke Light while pointedly not thinking about the culinary goodies I could be ordering for the same cost.
Go figure: at the same time I order a sugar-free soda, I'm thinking about french fried potatoes with ample ketchup, chicken wings, or maybe a cheeseburger with an egg sunny side up. I can honestly say I've been off it for so long that I just don't like the syrupy blanket of regular sodas, but there you go.
I digress.
We were, as I said, at a beachside bar and grill, which is to say, we were sitting around a plywood platform with sand in our toes and crevices.
A word on sand: the Thai beaches I've seen have all disappointed my whitesand expectations. My beach experience—limited to the West Coast and Hawaii—has been of either finely decomposed and powdered sand that occasionally has striations of darker or lighter minerals but is otherwise homogenous, or of wild conglomerations of barely-decomposed rocks and shells; the former are beaches for sunning and swimming, the latter for combing and poking.
Everyone seems to talk about Thailand's whitesand beaches, which to me carries the connotation of pure white, pulverized talc or pumice without a blemish beyond footsteps. In reality, the beaches are a homogenous blend of sand, rock, and shell in all states of decomposition. Depending on the tidal forces, you can walk in sand soft enough to host a naked baby's bum, or broken shell fragments that will shred even callused feet. And as with everything in Thailand, they're not really white: could've been, maybe even recently, but there's a pervasive layer of grody turning it a dull off-brown.
Same with the crystal water and clear blue sky: it could happen, but the pervasive reality is that it's too humid for the sky to turn what my Alpine eyes would consider a clear blue, even when the overcast burns off. Let's not mention the pollution.
And the nice, sandy bottom means that the shallow water looks dirty brown unless you're seeing it from straight above on an unnaturally clear day, when it would appear crystal clear and sandy instead of adding a sandy brown tint to a reflection of the tan-brown sky.
As the hours drag, at least for me (nothing against watching mentally altered people, especially intelligent ones whose conversation gets quite fascinatingly fragmented, but sometimes it falls a little flat, like when you have a nice patch of sand and could very happily fall asleep on it) I found myself mostly silent. I have very little to add to conversations about beach parties, the advantages of certain hookups, the latest movies on the home-recorded circuit. I kept thinking that someone was missing something somewhere, trying to figure out where I diverged from what seemed to be the accepted path, and failing in the process But it was too late to bail, and too early to believably quit, so I was there through many rounds of debate—is the group really coming? Really? You think they would actually play this gig?
Apparently, I've come to the area on the opening of a swanky resort, and they're having this band perform on a stage set up on the beach. It's an invite-only dinner for owners and the big shakers of the local economy, with fireworks kicking off the post-dinner gala. Fireworks and a band with a guy playing Kenny G style riffs on an alto and occasional Enya covers. I've never heard of this reggae group, wouldn't know what to make of it if I had, but I'm having serious doubts a respectable group would show up for the gig.
It is finally decided that we should go check out the place—stash our bags under the tables and mosey on down the beach. Enroute, my compatriots discuss the merits of various sleeping accommodations: behind the fence at the bar and grill is popular, but there's another bar down the beach where a bunch of Rastas live in hammocks anyway, so it's a great place to crash.
After a phone call from his wife/girlfriend, Charlie, who owns the B&G walks down to meet us and get us in past the security guards who've been hanging out behind the stage, smoking.
A small group could fit comfortably on the stage, and, based on the swanky sorts of charity benefit concerts I've worked, a couple hundred beach chairs could be set on the beach in front of the resort/condos.
Instead, the stage lights flash down on a dozen grass mats with tamarind rounds placed to keep their vacant selves in place. At the top of the beach, little pagodas with sheer white curtains and white leather couches have offset lighting designed to compliment the evening formalwear within. Behind the pagodas, the condominiums.
Walking to the bar is disconcerting. On one level, the house pours are Johnnie Black, Sapphire, Chopin, and Bacardi Superior. And they're free. And when I order a Johnnie and soda, thinking it will make for the most enjoyable nursing, especially with ice, the bartender gets it backwards from the get-go. He pulls out a tumbler, drops in an ice cube, melts it with about eight shots of the good stuff, and floats a splash of soda on the nee-ice cube.
Never in my life have I seen such a drink from a professional.
This drink is what my grandmother poured herself on a bad night, but she didn't use a pint glass. This drink is what you don't make at home when you realize that a glass is just a formality and there's nobody around to care.
And the smiling man in traditional Thai finery just handed it to me.
I'm not sure if it's a good or a bad thing, but it's a trip.
Also odd is the racial breakdown: men in cabanas are white and either robustly larger than reality or trimmed superlatively sleek. Each has at least one woman with him, and she is either breathtakingly a beautiful Thai doing shame to Western evening wear or a Scandahoovian blonde with enough money to amplify already preternaturally-attractive features.
Accents vary between the universal off-Oxford, Germanic, and Scandahoovian. Nobody around the cabanas speaks Thai audibly.
Behind the bar, passing enroute to the lounges, Thai people exchange whispered snippets as they glide in oppressively-sumptuous looking silky things. As I rove, I find them in back rooms and segregated corners; here are the locals, the people making a life in paradise by leeching from rich tourists, but the ones with class enough to hide it; here are the people with wear calluses and grill burns on their hands, people whose steps do not jiggle the boards as they walk; here are my people, but as I stand in the graceful light from poolside candles and subtle track lighting from behind swank picture windows, effectively illiterate and dumb, wearing road-weary athletic pants and a 100B polo, obviously crashing the culture and the party and without the know-how to say otherwise, I am completely unwelcome.
First time that's happened in Thailand. Usually, my farang skin and a stupid smile get me in. In America, listing my pedigree would do the trick. Here, I failed.
I am of neither the working nor luxury class, though part of me wants to prove that I am accustomed to rubbing shoulders with each. I am a backpacking farang without interest in drugs or parties. I am an instructor, a respected and upright position in this culture, educating elite children, and I'm doing so because it seemed more interesting than what I was doing back home.
Who am I? What identity am I chasing? What do I hope to find? Why am I here? And not in the Big Question sense—what the hell am I doing in Thailand?
No, I did not make any progress toward any answers. But I did realize where I'd seen this place before: every single James Bond movie in a tropical setting. Teak sidewalks, glowing candles set in polished stones in thick glass vases, swimming pools gently overflowing and cascading into filters buried under natural stone, beautiful and brightly-colored, if not necessarily colorful, locals serving bottomless top-shelf cocktails, and me walking through it toward a crowd of farangs who brought in 40s of cheap beer and are the only ones hooting at a woman gyrating under two flaming hula hoops.
It was indeed the big, famous reggae group. I might recognize the name if I saw them, and I would definitely not recognize the music. But I have no doubt it was the best group the more-than-considerable funds of those 48 people in attendance could drum up. So maybe, were I inclined, I could brag about seeing one of the biggest reggae groups in Southeast Asia, or about crashing the opening gala in a new and uber exclusive resort, or I could brag about the amount of drugs going on around me. I certainly do wonder how it happened, or why, but for now, it's worth marveling that here's me, in Thailand, in a job that allows a weekend spent in a beach bungalow for a curative round of Eastern medicine.
Huh?
Welcome to Thailand?
(PS: photos taken on my cell phone did not come out: black backgrounds with globs of light that not even I can distinguish. Go figure, I left my camera with the conviction I would be back home, in bed, early.)
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