An Odd Sort of Homecoming

Halfway down the "off the beaten" drag, hang a left into a fantastically dense hallway. Squeeze past the tea stand, between Gucki and Parada accoutrements, past electronics and swords and knives so obviously inferior they don't even sport a knockoff brand name, and you'll begin glimpsing the worthwhile. Don't stop, though; if you're too oblivious to catch the glares, they do not want you here where the locals shop, just close enough to the touristicana's gravitation to pick up some monetary velocity but not so close the stench of scam can't be avoided. You might've come halfway around the world to see something just like this, but you are the problem with the world, the thorn in every eye that sees you because you are the tourist in the turf locals who deal with tourists call their own. You are global warming. You are crop spoilage. You are the sick kid at home. The broken parents. Aching back.

Smile and wave with the conviction that the scowls carry the same meaning as an invitation to a special dinner granny cooked. You might have to come back, perchance hastily, and you want it to be on the least antipathetic terms possible. And whatever you do, keep moving.

You'll eventually hit open air of sorts--the garden inside an apartment block, an alleyway between tenements, a onetime temple or park or otherwise reduced erstwhile sanctuary. Here you'll find the twisted wretches shunned by the lowest levels of society and shat upon by time. Here, where the maze leading off a minor route in the labyrinth off the beaten, you'll emerge into the culture, find the people, who find you as inherently interesting and bizarre as you find them.

You'll find incentive to get your lazy ass in language-learning gear, too.

Count on finding what you would least expect. Anything you see is available and relatively affordable; everything has a price, and if you weren't so oblivious you'd know it. And if you don't mind sticking through being the spectacle, you might luck into the sublime: someone considered too wretched to join the streetside world, to be part of the public reality, engaged in a private act so routine and unconscious it is done with complete and unconscious perfection; beauty: the octogenarian pounding fish paste, the septuagenarian stirring fried chicken with half the remaining eye while yelling at grandchildren scrutinized over the shoulder with the other; the man with a forlorn basset hound of a torso sagging over a stained-brown sarong sinking into the worn-through cushion of what was once a proud new leather sofa in his living room/shop floor or the way his wife seems to defy all laws of physics as she navigates what must be an anti-gravity toothpick around her vacant maw; a mother corralling her kid who's fascinated by the grate in the street; an early adolescent who grew up idolizing dad leaning back on his bike and taking a drag of Marlborough; dad wrenching on a bike and pretending not to notice; something so small it is unconscious, and in that disregard absolutely perfect: beautiful.

And halfway down the block, I found it: the rippled and dented pockmark tin tables that no longer fold with stackable plastic chairs twined intact with cellophane baggies (which are for Thailand what the union of duct tape and bailing wire would produce for America), the cart with off-round wheels and no pretense of refrigeration around a mirror-polished wok resting in a smooth lake of grease splatter and a knurled mangrove root o a woman operating the works.

Instead of sitting down and waiting for her to hobble her club-footed way over to me, as is the local custom, I hobbled my edema-swelled legs to the cart and pointed, as is my custom. When she saw me about to say something, the lady spoke magic: "Pad thai, chai mai?" Pad Thai, yes or no?

I have never before found pad thai noodles in Thailand.

It's as if they're too commonplace for photo slots on menu-boards (cartsides), and my illiterate luck has a knack for picking out either pho noodle or bizarre local favorites (funny thing, perspective: just as I was about to mention how happy I was to find an offal cart and getting little bits of everything, someone else in the lunch room me==went raving about how disgusting it is to see intestines anywhere near food).

Lots of nods, eager smiles, thumbs up: pad thai, all the way back here. Pad thai in the heart of a Thai area: this is not the tourist version. I sit as she heats oil in the pan, tosses in a handful of noodles without paying attention to measuring the absolutely perfect amount of oil, noodle, sauce, and water.

Pinches and ladelfuls and finally a couple of cracked eggs: here come my pad thai noodles.

And I know that smell.

There's an odd scent in the meet. An odd meat, actually.

Last time I encountered it was a little town in the Italian alps.

It might take a minute to recall, but you don't forget the smell of overcooked and salted horse.

I haven't seen a horse since I was last in Nevada, haven't seem horse meat since Italy, but I ate horse in some of the only pad thai I've had in Thailand. What is there to do but enjoy it and move on?

And somehow, as I made my way around the cramped square, hoping to find a less overpacked retreat route and started noticing the roar and honk of traffic outside the square, it feels like a return home: tired feet scraping as they drag me to and through places frequented by few farangs, the pasted-on smile as I choke down something few farangs attempt, and the attempt at a dignified retreat as my stomach reminds me why few farangs eat such things.