Illustration courtesy of AK

BANGKOK

Here we are, in another girly bar. Same, same, every night. On our way in, the katoey were merciless. Three of them, lounging up against the wall outside the bar. "Ooooh," and, "Big Boy," they said, grabbing at Gary's arms and crotch. "Show us, huh?" One pointed at my tits. "Real?" Then to Gary, "Squeezem. Look," and she pulls one fake tit out of her chintzy leopard print halter, grabs his arm roughly and makes as if to press it there. Gary withdraws his arm, slows, smiles, exchanges a few whispered words. The katoey giggle and slap Gary's butt as he walks by. "Bye-bye." They wave to me mockingly. I didn't even want to come tonight. But Gary won 2,500 baht playing horses and insisted. There's always a reason, and his eyes light up so when I say okay. How can I be jealous of katoey?

Singha beers. Itchy strobes. House music. A horseshoe-shaped stage. More slender girl-women, this time in cowgirl outfits. Sequined silver vests and cowboy hats, tooled boots and white leather G-strings. Walker is transfixed, doesn't notice me fidgeting. I told Walker I didn't feel like coming tonight — how many girly bars do we have to go to?

In the corner is a widescreen TV showing one scene continuously. At first I don't know what it is — think it's some psychedelic lava lamp effect, a throbbing pulse of pinks and blacks, sea anemones locked in mortal combat, an animated Rauschenberg, a mouth undergoing invasive surgery — but then I see it is an extreme close-up of a four-foot-high black cock sluicing in and out of a five-foot-high pink pussy.

I look around, embarrassed, but no one is paying any attention to me, and I realize I have never really watched porn, let alone hung out in girly bars night after night. The movement is mesmeric and I have to steady myself from swaying with my hand on the back bar. Again I look at Walker, to anchor my vision, but he too has not moved — it is as if everything is moving repetitively or else has stopped moving altogether.

The bar is undulous and wavery, with frozen parts. I realize I am soaking and it reminds me of the sensation I sometimes have when I am bleeding, that all my innards are slip-sliding down and will flush out along with the blood, leaving me gutless.

It is only with great concentration that I can tear my gaze away from the screen and join Walker in viewing the stage. We are now one gaze, Walker and I, swallowing up each and every girl — and I, for the first time, am his partner. Look, touch, take. There is always more and there is never enough and all is molten. Oceanic. I think I'm getting it.

With one look now I can pierce through the veil of manner, see desire. Everyone is want. What did the Buddhist tract say? "One must look correctly to be able to penetrate, otherwise one will see nothing." But was it meaning this? I can't remember.

A particular girl captures my attention. Instead of cowboy boots, she's wearing Doc Martens, and looks more Samoan than Thai. She is built, and attacks the pole with muscularity, climbing to the top then slowly twirling back down head first, her legs snaked around the gleaming pole, then pow, into a split, wham, into a back handspring, all meaty shimmer and steel-toed boots.

Now the girls openly eye me while the men hunched around the stage shoot me homicidal looks. It is the first time I've noticed the men hating me. Walker nudges my side.

"The girls don't like men — all those ugly, drunken tourists, hitters, losers. They're into women."

He is so enjoying this. A nothing guy with red crew cut and close-set eyes actually spits in my direction.

"These men want to kill me," I say.

It's not only a revelation, it's a turn-on. I am powerful. Electric rays snake out from my fingertips and into the watery reality strobing around me.

Four Singha bottles later, not the Samoan but another girl, Suki, is grinding her soft ass up against my groin. I find myself placing my hands on her bare hips, guiding her, the fringe of her vest swaying at my fingers, the dimple of those hips softly indented and cool to the touch. She is the only girl wearing high heels — scuffed white numbers like you'd wear to a wedding and toss afterward. I want to hold Suki, keep the gnarly men away, give her a sack of American silver dollars to match her outfit.

Buzzing and ultra sensitive, I feel something shift in the air. Walker, on my left, also leaning against the back bar, has placed his hand on Suki's hip and she freezes. He slips his hand up onto her arm and I can feel the hairs rise there. She's mine, I want to tell him. Don't touch. But instead, I gently push her toward the bar so he can't see. She turns toward me, her black bangs swinging.

"Buy me a drink," she says shyly, pointedly ignoring Walker.

But it is Walker who goes to the bar, gets her a drink, some blue-colored confection.

While he is gone, I reach up and lightly brush my fingers against her tit. She's so flat. How the fuck old is she? I can't tell anyone's age at all in Thailand. She could be thirty; she could be thirteen.

They turn on the lights and the house shifts to slow-dance-goodnight-get-the-fuck-out sap.

"Let's go," I say to Walker. I want to escape from the harshly unpleasant glare. I've had enough. But he hangs back. Suki has moved away, stands in a cluster with some of the other girls who now, in the blinding light, look incredibly young, all carrying school satchels with bionic bright flower stickers on the flaps.

"Walker," I say.

What is he waiting for? He is a different man at night, in these bars, more wired and distant. It makes me panicky, afraid I'll lose him. We move slowly toward the door, but Walker stops at the cluster, says something to Suki, who looks away. The other girls giggle. Walker rejoins me.

"I asked her to maybe come out and have a bite to eat with us or something."

"Walker, it's 3 a.m. I'm tired."

Suki looks uncertain, catches my eye. When she does, her eyes turn dead. In their reflection, I see a hoary-scaled reptile shedding his pink-fleshed humanoid daywear. The blush suffuses my face, but she has already turned her back to me and together with the other young girls, en masse, the many-legged, many-armed, flower-satcheled young cowgirls melt away.

PHUKET

The whore's name is Bang and she has a crush on me. She is on break. Most of the girls in Delight Ship Bar are dressed in school uniforms, white ankle socks, heels. A few wear cheap synthetic dresses. Bang wears a mini jumper and scuffed white pumps that are two sizes too big. Before she went on break I watched her dance. I stared at her narrow heels sliding around in the pumps that belonged to someone else, then at the sweet V of her shaved crotch, which kept appearing and disappearing as she wriggled against a pole in front of her. I could have stuck two fingers in that gap behind her heel. Two thick American fingers.

Bang barely reaches to my chest, and I can circle her wrists with my index finger and thumb. Bang has a friend named Bong. I prefer Bong. She is taller, curvier, more sultry, with long eyelashes and a constellation of freckles that looks like dirt over her left clavicle. Bong leans over, whispers in my ear.

"You are better looking than him," she hisses. "You should not be with him."

I like her warm breath in my ear. She squeezes my waist, then goes back onstage. Bang presses her slender hip against mine.

"Take me home," she says.

She ignores Walker. Walker, who is leering. Whose eyes are moist with anticipation.

Bang holds my hand as we walk through the crowded street, past carbuncled men with perfect Thai girls at their sides, girls who are bought. And yet the men are proud, they walk by as if they are hot shit, this is their pretty young girlfriend and it's all real, when the truth is they hemorrhage money to pay for a whole night with these girls. What is real is the stink of third world sewage and rot, the fry smell of cooking dough, simmering chilies, twinkly lights strung haphazardly everywhere and everyone leering. Me too - my face is figured by kink, and Bang's small hand is in mine.

People are watching, staring. This threesome is something a bit out of the ordinary even for Phuket … not much, but a little. She talks to me, Bang does, about her family. She has three children, she is from Laos. In Laos they have a very primitive counting system: One, two, three, many. Bang wears a gold necklace and bracelet and anklet. In the shadow-pocked night they glitter against her dusky skin. Her hand is humid, meltable, but then so is everything. The world is covered in a sheen of sweat. I am in Phuket, walking hand in hand with a whore down a street back to the hotel room I share with Walker.

We sit on the bed, awkwardly. The TV is on. Time is a Slinky - tight coils of seconds stretching U-shaped over our heads, between our bodies, then collapsing with a slap. The thin bedspread is decorated with cross-country skiers. It is 90 degrees even now.

"Something to drink?" Walker says.

Orange soda?"

"Please, yes.".

"Me too," I say, and Bang and I sip from the same orange soda can. After some long minutes pass, us staring listlessly at the TV screen, Walker says to me, "Kiss her." I kiss her.

She tastes like Laos. Pungent, earthy, fetid, powerful, rank, completely foreign. I recoil. To compensate, I kiss her with more passion, brush back her silken black hair and cradle her head as if I am the man. Bang is so tiny. I want to make her come. I know whores rarely come, if ever, even though I've never been with one. I want to make her happy, and I want to turn Walker on, show him what I can do.

With her delicate frame, she's almost weightless above me, like she's floating. I remember playing airplane with my father, how his fat feet lofted me high into the air. I lift Bang, softly place her shellfish cunt against my thigh and make her ride, deep-kissing her into an altered state. My thigh is a stallion, and her cunt is riding barebacked, shaved clean. I feel the pulsing there, a naked mouth with pursed lips, trying to speak.

As she writhes on my body, I see again an image from this afternoon: the ex-votos, those parti-colored frangipani fabrics they tie around sacred trees for blessings, undulating in the sea breeze. This is her body. Slender. Furling and unfurling. Silk-spun.

I hold Bang close. She grabs a handful of my fat American tit in her tapered fingers, sucks on the nipple furiously. Maybe I am a fantasy for her, vaguely suggesting one of those fleshy babes who charges up and down the TV beach in her wet, red clingsuit; perhaps it's simply my otherness that makes her wet; maybe, like she to me, I stink of the foreign, too. Maybe all those soaps and lotions, perfumes and sprays seem a kind of formaldehyde to her, and she is wondering as she searches my body, "What are Americans trying to hide?"

Now Bang is making little gasps. Encouraged, I become merciless; for minutes, hours, my thigh gallops against her pretty little cunt. I dare not touch that cunt although I think about touching her the way I touch myself. But that is my private prayer, the secret communion of my own flesh and fingers. Like a bat, I blindly radar in on Bang's steady, small gasps, search for clues to take her home. Then we are grooving together on a shared plateau where foreign tongues blend, and two bodies are reborn as Siamese twins, joined at the hip of Walker's greedy gaze.

This is taking forever. Before we finish, the whole world will have rubbed its genitals into oblivion.

Pressing harshly against her cunt, I make more violent, urgent moves, wanting this to be over, wanting Bang to love me for just this moment. I crush the smooth almost rubbery netherlips, mash them so her pubic bone clicks back and forth, and it is like I'm kneeing her in the cunt. It would take so little to damage her, and I am tempted. I hold Bang even more tenderly, shamed by my impulse, unable to imagine three children emerging from between her fragile legs. Finally Bang exhales a sharp, bestial yelp.

I am exhausted. Disgusted. Triumphant. Disoriented. It is as if I have woken from a strange claustrophobic dream and here it is, that dream. Inescapable. Her juice trembles down my thigh, her bony chest shudders against my pillowy breasts as if she were my baby. If I dared I would pick her up and hurl her from the door of The Seagull Cottages, #7. She is old enough to fly. Bang wants to keep kissing me. Finally she asks Walker if he wants to fuck her?
"No," he says. "Nah."

He pays her at the door. Bang wants to come back tomorrow, to visit me. She wants to bring her three children to play at the beach. I say I'd love to. Bang gives me her number, kisses me shyly on the lips.

When tomorrow comes, we take the train back to Bangkok. On the train, Walker does not mention the whore, but I cannot stop thinking about the smallness of her hands, her assaultive smell, how much I loathed and cared for her at the same time -- a woman I know not at all. Some other kind of currency was exchanged during that transaction. Something more valuable than that was traded.