Life As Canvas

I, being the lucky girl I am, share some DNA with a friendly and successful guy named Joe. He’s actually my father’s cousin, lives in Bangkok and has a condo and a sailboat on the beach and, though I’d never met him before, he invited Erika and I to stay a few days with him at his condo. So generous!

The first night, he showed us around the heart of Pattaya, a beach town south of Bangkok known for its sex district. Though I’d known about Thailand’s sex reputation, I’d never really seen it up close. Pattaya was a little shocking, with its mass of flesh for sale clicking in heels up and down the street and the dredges of Western society stalking around like hungry lions, leering and smiling, pointing and wanting. The streets filled up with vendors, fake Rolexs, lots of red neon, and girls. Girls in miniskirts, girls in go go boots, girls standing in front of bars with signs, girls that are boys, girls gyrating in windows up above the street, girls on poles, Thai girls, Russian girls, walking hand-in-hand with old worn out white guys in Hawaiian shirts, their faces blank, or seeming to say “yeah, I know he’s gross. But what do you want me to do about it?” One beautiful young Thai girl smiled ironically while she walked past us holding hands with a man who must have been 75 years old or older.

I appreciated seeing it the way I was glad to see a cow being slaughtered in South America. We’re told this is the way things work in the world but without actually seeing it, it’s hard to imagine, or even believe. I don’t want to see every uncomfortable thing that goes on behind my shiny happy world but coming face to face with a few makes for a good, grounding sort of experience.

The next day thrust me back into the dream world, and it did feel like a dream sitting on cousin Joe’s sailboat listening to his classy chill out music and then arriving at an abandoned island where we snorkeled to a white beach and kicked around some shells, did cartwheels, gawked at the scene before us like something from a postcard or a tropical computer screen background in a grey office. Teal waves and choral, warm water. Bathtub warm. And we had it all to ourselves. Erika and I selfishly soaked it all up.

And Thailand continues to be a mix of the uncomfortable, the dirty, the dreary with the bright, overwhelmingly pleasant. One thing makes you appreciate the other, even exaggerates its effect. After these last two days, two images are burnt on my brain: the hungry smiles of badly shaved men, sweaty and old, shabby and shaking with anticipation, and the bright white of the island beach, the choral patterns in its waters, their soothing soft rhythm and the rattling beetles in the trees, these nature sounds, the only sounds around.