I.
The soldiers arrived on Tuesday. By Thursday, the bars were dark.
I had been in Bangkok for six days when General Prayuth Chan-ocha declared martial law, and two days after that he took the government outright, suspended the constitution, put a curfew on the streets, and announced that happiness was being returned to the Thai people whether they wanted it or not. The timing was either cosmic irony or proof that the gods have a sense of humor that skews toward the sadistic, because I had arrived in Thailand to do two things: see Gop, and go to bars. In that order, though the order is cosmetic, the two are inseparable. Gop exists within the bar ecosystem the way a reef fish exists within the reef.
The structure was being removed.
I had told him three months. I came in six weeks. I have never worked out how to say that sentence so that it sounds like a decision, so I have not said it, and he has not asked me to.
I heard about the coup how I hear about most things in Thailand that don’t directly involve sex or food: from Gop, translating the Thai news into the compressed Thaiglish that serves as our shared language for events of national significance. “Army man take country,” he explained, which was as efficient a summary of a military coup as I’ve ever encountered. When I asked what that meant for us, he said, “Cannot go bar,” which was an equally efficient summary of what it meant for the two of us.
Cannot go bar. Three words that contained the entire crisis. The bars: the gogo bars, the show bars, the beer bars, Bonny Massage, the mamasan stations, the barker positions, the neon, the stages, the Big Cock Show, the underwear that served as the last negotiable boundary between commerce and skin. They were where Gop and I had met, courted, bonded, fought, reconciled, and built whatever it was we had built.
II.
The curfew was 10 PM. This was subsequently revised to midnight, but the initial curfew, the one that came down in my second week, was 10 PM, which in Bangkok bar time is approximately 4 PM in civilian time, which means the evening hadn’t started when it was already over. The bars that chose to open did so at 6 PM and began shooing customers out by 9, giving the boys an hour to get home before the streets emptied and the army trucks began their patrols and the city that never sleeps was forced into the unfamiliar posture of unconsciousness.
Soi Twilight at 9 PM looked like a crime scene after the body had been removed. The neon was off: not dimmed, not flickering, off, the way a face goes dark when the person behind it has left the room. The barkers were gone. It had rained since four and the water was still standing down the middle of the soi, warm as bathwater over the ankle, carrying the sweet drain-smell it always carries and a slick of somebody’s cooking oil going rainbow under the one light left on. The massage boys from Bonny sat on their bench with their feet up on the rail out of it, staring at nothing, professionally patient, told there was no work and coming anyway because coming to work is what they do. A few tourists waded the soi, bewildered, like men who had traveled eight thousand miles for a specific product and arrived to find the store closed. They were the hardy or the oblivious, the ones who either hadn’t heard about the coup or didn’t believe it applied to them.
I walked the soi, or waded the last of it. This was my ritual: the pre-Gop circuit, the reconnaissance, the assessment of the ecosystem before settling into Gop’s bar for the evening. But the ecosystem had collapsed. Halfway down, one of the small ones, a place that had changed its name twice since I started coming and had never once changed its stage, had a padlock on the shutter and nothing taped to the door, which is how a bar on this soi tells you it is not reopening. The bars that were open were dim and quiet, the boys on stage going through the motions in their underwear, since the military had decreed no nudity, moving with the mechanical despondence of men told to perform and denied the tools of performance. The underwear, the briefs and the boxers and the boxer briefs that the boys wore with varying degrees of resentment, serving as the military’s contribution to Thai happiness. Clothed penises. Happy nation.
At Hot Male, Gop was behind the bar. This was unusual. Gop’s station was the stage or the floor, not the bar. But with no customers to entertain and no show to perform, the boys had redistributed themselves according to the hierarchy of boredom. The juniors sat in the back, smoking. The mid-tier leaned against the bar, counting the minutes. The seniors helped the bartenders. Gop was helping the bartenders and smoking, which is a thing he does only when there is no show and no customer and nobody who needs to be sold anything, and which I have yet to see him do on a stage or in a gym or in a photograph. He helped because helping was better than sitting and because Gop was constitutionally incapable of sitting when there was a body nearby that could be entertained, even if the body belonged to a mamasan who had heard all of his jokes and was not in the mood for any of them.
He saw me. The grin, the thing that survives coups and curfews and the suppression of the human penis by military decree, the grin activated, and he was over the bar and across the floor in the time it took the mamasan to register that she had lost her assistant bartender. The hug. The same hug: arms, weight, temperature, the exhalation against my neck.
“Bidness slow,” he said.
“I noticed.”
“Army man no like penis.”
“Apparently not.”
“I no like army man.”
He said it quietly, and looked at the door while he said it, and went back to wiping the bar. In his English army man is the army and it is also the men, and he said it so that nobody could make him pick.
III.
The hotel room became the world by subtraction. The bars closed at 9. The curfew began at 10. The street food vendors packed up early because the customers had packed up earlier. The river boats ran on a reduced schedule. The BTS was eerily uncrowded, the cars half-empty, the city moving through its day with the reduced metabolism of a body under sedation. By ten the soi outside was quiet enough that I could hear the lift at the far end of the corridor, which in five years of that hotel I had never heard.
By the fourth night of the curfew, we had established a routine. Released early from a bar that had nothing to offer him except the company of boys who were as restless and unemployed as he was, Gop arrived at the hotel by 8. He stripped down. The routine: shirt, pants, underwear. The towel. The shower. The return. Except now the return had no destination. On a normal night, the return from the shower was a transition: from private Gop (bathroom, closed door, sovereignty) to public Gop (dressed, groomed, ready for the soi). Tonight, and every night since the coup, the return was a terminus. He came out of the bathroom in his boxer briefs and stood in the room and looked at me and I looked at him. The room, the AC, the TV murmuring a Thai sitcom, the mini-bar, the bed. This was the evening.
“What we do?” he asked. Night four. The question had evolved from curiosity (Night One: “Where we go?”) to resignation (Night Two: “We no go?”) to investigation (Night Three: “You want go somewhere?”) to the philosophical (Night Four: “What we do?”). What we do, not what do we do tonight.
“We watch TV.”
“We watch TV last night.”
“We eat.”
“We eat already.”
“We…”
“You say sex. I know.”
I had not been about to say sex. I had been about to say talk, which is worse. Talking without the bar under it means talking about us, and we have spent five years not doing that, and we have done it the easy way, by always having somewhere to go and somebody else in the room.
He sat on the bed. I sat on the bed. The TV played the sitcom: the laugh track, the rapid-fire Thai, the bright colors. Gop watched. Or looked at the screen, which is not the same as watching. I looked at Gop.
He had one heel hooked on the bed frame and the other leg flat, and the sole of the flat foot was grey from walking back from the noodle place in flip-flops through water that had been standing in the street all afternoon. There was a fold across his stomach where he was sitting. There is not one when he is standing, and he would not have permitted it in a mirror. His hair had dried wrong on one side. The scorpion on his shoulder has a tail that goes crooked where the ink was done cheap when he was nineteen, and I have looked at that crooked tail from this distance more times than I have looked at my own face.
The rain came back on at some point and stayed on, hard, on the AC housing outside the window, and the room smelled of wet concrete coming up off the soi and the chili oil in the bag on the desk.
I have called this man beautiful in public for five years and it has never cost me anything to say. This cost something.
He caught me at it. He does not usually catch me, because usually I am looking at him in a room where being looked at is his job and my attention is one of a hundred things arriving at him an hour. Tonight there was nothing else in the room and no reason on earth for me to be doing it, and he took his eyes off the sitcom and caught me.
He did not grin. He said nothing. He looked back for about three seconds, and at four feet that is a long time, and then went back to the television without making a remark about it. He could have. He has made remarks about less.
I got up. I went into the bathroom and came back with a hand towel and the plastic ice bucket half full of warm water, and I sat down on the carpet at the end of the bed and took the dirty foot into my hand.
He did not stop me and he did not help and he did not make the joke I had expected and half wanted. The foot is the low end here, the unclean one, and I knew that before I sat down. Sitting down is what my knees objected to first and my pride second, and neither of them for long. I washed it anyway. The grey came off grey. There is a callus down the outside edge from a decade of flip-flops and a nail on the second toe gone thick and yellow since a stage light came off its clamp in 2009, a story I have heard four times and asked for twice. I could not tell whether he was letting me do this or waiting for me to be done with it. I have made a living off reading what men want and I could not tell.
He watched the television through all of it. Then, without looking down, he took the other foot off the bed frame and put it in my hand.
“Gop.”
“Hmm.”
“Is this enough?”
He looked at me. The quick scan, the assessment, the read.
“What enough?”
“This. The room. No bar. No soi. Just us.”
He considered. The head tilt. The expression that I have never fully learned to read, the one that contains both calculation and instinct, him arriving at something in one motion that I would need a spreadsheet and a night to reach.
“Before,” he said. Carefully. Finding the words. “I tink you come Thailand for bar. For boy. For sex. I tink I… one of boy.”
“And now?”
“Now you come for me.” A pause. “I tink.”
“You think?”
“I know,” he corrected himself, with the faintest smile. “You come for me. Bar, no bar. Army, no army. You come.”
“I come.”
“So room enough.” He shrugged. Whatever he was certain of he had been certain of for a while, and he did not appear to find my catching up complicated. “Room always enough. You not know before.”
Later, with the sitcom still running and neither of us having said anything more about it, he put a flat hand on my chest and pushed me back into the pillows. He does not do that. On a working night the sequence is fixed and I am the one who sets it. Towel, bed, position, finish, shower, the folded two thousand under the water glass in the morning. He has run it two hundred times and could run it asleep.
Tonight there was no clock inside it, and everything downstream of the clock came out different. He took my shirt off slowly and badly, catching it on my arm and laughing at that. He put his mouth under my jaw, on the loose part where I am fifty-five and where nobody I have ever paid has had any reason to go, and he stayed there well past the point where a man working would have moved on to the part that ends the evening.
I got a hand inside his boxer briefs and he was already hard. On a working night that means nothing. He is a professional, the professional gets hard on cue, and I have known that and used it and paid for it and made jokes about it in front of four hundred strangers.
The bars were shut. The soi was dark.
I said his name. He said “Shh,” the only English word he has ever used to stop my mouth, and then he went down on me with the television still going and the rain still coming down on the AC housing outside the window, no towel laid out first, no glance at the door, nothing in the room being counted by either of us.
He had one hand flat on my stomach, holding me down with no force in it, just weight, the way you hold a page open. He did not speed up when I asked him to. He slowed, which is a decision, and he made it with his eyes open and on mine. It went on past the point where I had any say in it. The sound that came out of me was not one I recognized and not one a man my age should be making in a hotel room off Silom on a Tuesday, and it kept going after I wanted it to stop. My legs were shaking afterward. Actually shaking, which has happened to me maybe three times in my life and not once before in that country. He put his cheek down on the inside of my thigh and left it there and waited them out.
Afterward he did not get up. That was the second thing, and it was larger than the first. In five years he has gone to the shower afterward every single time, door shut, water fifteen minutes, the sovereignty restored. Tonight he stayed where he was, damp, one leg thrown over mine, and fell asleep somewhere in the back half of the sitcom. I lay in the dark doing my arithmetic and could not find a single figure to put in the column.
IV.
I did not know before.
On the sixth morning he was on his phone before he was properly awake, thumb going, face doing nothing at all.
“Who.”
“Nothing.”
“Gop.”
“My mother.” He put it face down on the nightstand and then looked up to see whether I had watched him do it. “She ask when I send.”
“And?”
“I say next week.”
There was no next week available to him and we both knew there wasn’t. I lay there and made no offer. He never asked. The air conditioner ran. After a while he got up and boiled the kettle for the free sachet of Nescafé that neither of us likes and drank it standing at the window in his underwear, looking down at a soi with nothing on it.
Dave’s flight was booked and Gop had been told a week ago and I had still not once taken the date out and looked at it. I have never been proud of how easily I can do that.
Here is the arithmetic neither of us said out loud. The generals had not shut the bars. They had shut the hours, and the hours were the bars, because nobody offs a boy at half past eight when the streets go quiet at ten. No wire went to the house on the red road that month unless it came from me. And across those same days I had paid no off fee, no tip, and no joiner fee to a clerk who had stopped asking somewhere around the third night, because the hotel was two-thirds empty and nobody was counting anything. A military junta had handed me, free of charge, the only eight nights of my life I would have paid anything at all for.
I started that sum on the fourth night, lying in the dark next to him, and I closed it on the eighth, and I did not mention it either time, and I have never since been able to call the not mentioning tact.
On the fourth night I had also caught myself thinking that the generals had cleared the room of every reason but me. They had not. They had cleared it of everyone who could pay him except the man lying next to him, which is not the same thing and is nearer the opposite, and I had the whole sum in my hands before I noticed I had built it to come out the other way.
We spent eight nights in that room. Eight nights of the ordinary: the television, the pad thai, the shower routine, his body against mine, the temperature, the arm, the AC, the darkness. We talked more than we had ever talked, and not deeply, because the language will not carry it. “You want Coke?” “I want Coke.” “Two Coke.” “I pay.” “No, I pay.” “Okay, you pay.”
Go back to the fifth night. The curfew had been relaxed to midnight and some bars were cautiously reopening with the boys in their government-mandated underwear, and Gop asked if I wanted to go out.
“Do you?” I asked.
“I go if you want.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“That’s Thai answer.”
I laughed. He laughed. The echo of the glass-wall fight, That’s Thai answer, returned as comedy, the sharp edge worn smooth by the weeks between Valentine’s Day and the coup, the edge worn from weapon down to inside joke.
“Stay,” I said.
It came out flatter than I meant it. One syllable, no packaging, no parenthetical to hold the door open behind it, and it landed in the room and sat there, and the AC pushed its cold air at nothing, and outside somebody’s motorbike went down the soi and did not come back.
He didn’t answer. He picked up the remote and put it down without changing anything. He got up. He went to the window, and I could see him deciding, and I could see him letting me see him deciding, and I did not know then and do not know now whether the second thing was a courtesy or a price being quietly named.
“Bar open Friday,” he said. To the window.
That is the answer, if you know the language. Friday is a night with customers in it. Friday is between eight hundred and three thousand baht depending on the room and the man, and he has never once told me the upper number and I have never once asked for it, and he was telling me now, in three words, what the next four days were going to cost him and that he intended to spend it.
“I know,” I said.
He stood there a while longer. Then he came back and sat down on the end of the bed with his back to me and said, not turning around, “You take medicine today?”
That was the whole of his negotiation. He had extracted three promises from me in April on a phone line at midnight, and he had said I scare, and he had not mentioned it once since I landed, and he chose that moment to collect.
“Yes.”
“Show me.”
I got the bottle off the nightstand and put it in his hand and he looked at it, the label he cannot read, the count he cannot verify, and gave it back and said “okay” and lay down. I put it on the nightstand on his side of the bed.
He stayed.
He was asleep before I was, one hand still curled where the remote had been. The AC cycled and caught and went on. Outside, soldiers were driving a city into happiness at gunpoint. In here the walls were not glass and the door locked and the bottle stood on his side of the bed, where he could reach it before I could.
From the Blog, drafted on the eighth night, finished three weeks later from Culver City
Who Is Prayuth Chan-ocha And Why Does He Hate My Penis So Much?
In Which the Author’s Reproductive Organ Wages a One-Sided War Against Martial Law
The general who seized the country has decided to make every Thai citizen’s World Cup experience free, complimentary and inescapable, every match, all sixty-four of them, broadcast on the army’s own channel, because nothing says we are returning happiness to the people like a junta commandeering the airwaves to make certain that every bar and restaurant and hotel lobby and bedroom in the kingdom is tuned to men chasing a ball instead of to the men chasing the men in my particular corner of the entertainment industry (and let the record show I have nothing against football, I simply have something else against it). My penis, which had been cautiously optimistic about this trip, has filed a formal objection.
It gets worse. The junta has informed the bar owners on Soi Twilight that nudity and sex shows are no longer permitted, so the traditional presentation of the male anatomy in its full, unencumbered state has been banned by a man in a uniform who apparently cannot say the word “happiness” out loud without most of “penis” turning up in the middle of it, and who has nonetheless decided to take it out on mine. That presentation had been the soi’s defining cultural export since before the internet made such things simultaneously more available and less impressive.
The curfew compounds the problem. The bars have adapted, opening earlier and closing whenever the police happen not to be looking, but the window for what used to be a leisurely evening of comparative anatomy has narrowed to a slot that barely accommodates a drink and a decision, and now the decision has to be made blind, or at least half-blind, because the boy on the stage is wearing underwear that promises and does not deliver, and the gap between promise and delivery in this town has historically been wide enough to drive a disappointment through.
And yet business is fine. This is the part the doom-and-gloom merchants on the forums can’t see from their apartments in Pattaya. Not booming. Fine. The farang who’ve fled, frightened by the tanks and the curfew and each other, were largely the ones who negotiated tips like they were haggling for counterfeit handbags. The ones who remain understand that a gogo bar is not a discount warehouse but a theater, and that the price of admission includes the performance, the performer, and the unspoken agreement that both parties will behave as though the evening matters.
I have not offed anybody in eight days. The mamasan at Hot Male has stopped asking, which from a mamasan is practically a condolence card, and I have not corrected her, and I am not going to tell you here what I have been doing instead, because it isn’t funny and because it isn’t what you came for. There is also a flight landing on the ninth that I have not mentioned to anybody, including myself.
The soi is quieter than usual. The boys are clothed. The general is on television. And my penis, despite its protests, will survive. It has survived worse. It has survived Bakersfield.
