It is a good thing that I love hot weather. It doesn’t get much hotter than this. The thermometer caresses one hundred degrees every day. It’s a love affair of blazing proportions. While I do love the heat, I am blessed that I can afford an air conditioner, as well as the electricity to run the thing. I have the only AC in the village, a novelty that many villagers have had to see and feel for themselves. Many a card game has been played in my bedroom for the relief this affords those who have never had much relief from the heat. Although I don’t mind having the gals in my room playing, I do ask them to keep it down (the card games can get a bit noisy) and I put my foot down when my wife and her friends start bitching that it is TOO cold in the room. Don’t like it honey, you all can shake your asses out of here and go outside the room to play. I caught her a few times trying to turn down the AC. There’ll be none of that this season dear. Touch that climate control again and I’ll break your pretty little tan fingers and kick you in the bum to boot. Sammi (husband) controls the AC. Hands off!

Today we decided (that is I did) that it was time to do some serious cleaning of the kitchen area. It was getting pretty nasty and needed a ‘spring cleaning’. The problem with these outdoor (sorta, it is roofed, and a wall encloses one end) village style kitchens is the damned dust. It is everywhere and hard to keep up with at times. Also the stove has no vent, fan or hood to draw off the cooking steams and oils. It’s a typical Isaan village cooking area. So my wife and I hit the kitchen with a vengeance, soap, water, and elbow grease, the works. We were at it for hours, and jumping blue Jesus was it hot work. Sweat just runs off you when doing any sort of physical labor this time of year. The rains have come, but that is mostly in the late afternoon and evening. It cools the airs down some, but the humidity before the clouds release their welcome cooling H2O is incredible. I sweat gallons I swear and must have drunk at least ten bottles of cold water in the hours we were at work. It feels good to do a bit of manual labor, but the heat drains the hell out of you. Washing stuff outside in the sun was like standing in a blast furnace. Luckily I tan rather than burn.

My wife is the type that once she starts a job she will not stop until finished. Have a heart honey. Let’s take a break! “No. I want to finish.”

“Well fuck me, I’m taking a ten minute breather and grabbing some ice water and sitting a spell. You go on if you want.” With that, I took a break. She just kept on. A little energizer bunny she is once started.

Around noon the neighborhood gals come strolling in, little kids on their hips or trailing behind, colorful pasins wrapped around their waists, all smiles and wai-ing me as they walk by. They were here to set a spell in Mama’s house (which is attached to our house by the exterior kitchen) and play a bit of cards. To tell the truth at times Mama’s house looks like a goddamned casino. I’ve seen twenty or more gals sitting around their card cloths (a piece of felt-like material used as a card table on the floor). Mama’s house has a raised tiled floor with like twelve-foot ceilings, so it stays cool through the heat of the day with just a couple small fans on. I have a good sized freezer in the village and keep it stocked with these ice things with a weird name, something like ‘freeze-pops’, long colored and flavored liquid sticks in plastic that you freeze in the freezer. I give them out to the kids on the hot days like this. They are cheap as hell and you can get dozens for a hundred baht, and the kids love them.

Under the aluminum stove lays a piece of green linoleum, placed to keep the tiles clean around the cooking area. It was one of the first things I wanted to clean, along with the stove itself and the area behind the stove. My wife and I disconnected the stove from the gas canister and took the stove outside to give it a thorough going over. The hose outside and some plastic tubs with soap and water make it easy to do with little mess and fuss. We then grabbed the linoleum and took that out as well. The linoleum when under the stove had curled down some, forming a small tube at the back end. When it had been first laid down someone had decided to have the linoleum go up the wall about six inches. In the heat it had just folded down over itself. As my wife was opening this I heard her yell and saw here jump back away from the linoleum. There, when she once again lifted the linoleum with a stick so I could see what had excited her, sat a medium sized black scorpion, which had made the small tube tunnel its hiding place during the day. Ugly beast, I hate the damn things. I still can’t figure out how the hell they get in, as the kitchen is surrounded by steel grating and covered with chicken wire three feet high from the ground. This is one reason I am careful when walking around barefoot. You never know when you’ll run into one, or step on one in the dark. The night previous I had gone into the kitchen in the dark, and was thinking I should turn on a light to see if there were any varmints cruising about in the dark that might do me harm. There is one less scorpion in the world now. Serves him right, the bastard, for invading my space instead of hanging around outdoors where he belongs. We continued our chores and got a lot done that needed doing. I was happy to get this finished, as I had been meaning to do it the past few weeks. Tired and sweaty we knocked off around four p.m. and showered up while Sis made some food for us all.

After eating our fill of delectable foods my wife joined the casino girls in some card playing and won a couple hundred baht, which prompted her to splurge on a couple large Heinekens, which I thought nice of her… considering I don’t like Heinekens. That’ll cost her in payback one day soon, damn her hide.

As I sat at the table I have for my decidedly farang ass and spine, which cannot take hours sitting on the damned floor on woven rice straw mats, it started to thunder and the afternoon winds came. The sky darkened and the clouds piled up on top of each other building fairy castles in the firmament. As the sun sank lightning flickered and flashed and the rumbling skies let down the collected day’s moisture, briefly cooling the air. The kids played a Thai version of hopscotch in the kitchen (it is rather large) using the tiled floor squares as their checkerboard. After a while they ran around outside doing something, collecting something, what I had no idea of. Later they came to me and showed me a large pink plastic bowl filled with water, and also filled with a gazillion small black beetles. They seemed pleased with themselves and I assumed these were ‘eating’ bugs. Christ, these people will eat anything! Once fried and salted I guess they taste okay because everyone seems to want a handful. I call this ‘Lao Popcorn’. The kids think it is funny as hell when I make faces when they offer some to me. Never have, never will… unless I am starving to death, maybe not even then. I’m from Boston and we just don’t ‘do’ bugs. We swat them, we spray them and bomb them, we set traps for them… but we do not, under any circumstances, eat them. It’s just not done you see.

It was time to open the bar and have a cooling alcoholic refreshment. I had lucked out the day before when I was in Big C. It seems someone has started stocking cranberry juice. Hurray! Finally. This is one of my favorite juices to drink, and also one of my favorite mixes to make cocktails with… Cape Codders. Yummy! One of my absolute favorite mixed drinks. I grabbed my ice bucket and went next door to Sis Mun’s shop and grabbed a couple bottles of tonic water and ten baht worth of ice cubes (you get a lot of ice cubes for a mere ten baht). I had a bag full of limes in the reefer already, and a full bottle of some vodka I’d bought months before and stashed for just such a moment. I was set to go. There is nothing so delicious as an ice cold Cape Codder, glass filled with ice, and a couple good squeezes of fresh lime juice on a hot, no sweltering, day after finishing your homely chores. I fixed myself a stiff one and made one for my wife and her cousin. They had never tasted one before and stated this concoction was definitely ‘arroy mahk mahk’ (very tasty).

I hadn’t had my ass planted five minutes and sipped more than a couple sips off my delightful refreshment when who shows up, that’s right, sister Eet’s husband (another cousin). The man is some kind of friggin’ mutant I swear. I believe he is one of the X-mens evil villain mutant adversaries. The man has hearing like Superman and can hear a beer bottle open from a kilometer away. He can smell alcohol from the same distance and follow its scent like a prize bloodhound unerringly to the source. And worst of all the man is a fucking mooch and always comes empty handed. Lacking any sort of shame he makes the motion of a glass being filled toward me. I grimace and give the leech a hard look. How the hell does he do it? It’s uncanny the way he appears as soon as booze hits the table, any table. I’m still trying to think up a cool super-villain name for him. Liquorman? Supermooch? I’m open to suggestions.

As I sit there at my table I notice the sun is nearly gone and switch on the lights to the outside. One of the lights can be seen from my perch at the table and I notice as the light turns on the wall beneath is covered with about two dozen small salivating geckos. This is their suppertime and they have been patiently waiting for this moment. Another thing I notice as the florescent flickers on is an incredible sight. As the light comes to life a huge swarm of bugs rise off the ground and head toward the light, like, well like moths to the flame I guess. The geckos, licking their chops in anticipation, start to fight each other to gain the best position on the wall for dining on this fast approaching feast. It is a funny thing to see two geckos go at it. It’s like watching one of those old sci-fi Saturday morning movies where dinosaurs fight each other, only in miniature. They are vicious little buggers when they go at it. Two million B. C. battles erupt all along the wall; the losers at times fall to the ground and start the climb all over again. Yes, I guess I am bored maybe if I find these real life nature happenings interesting. And I do. I feel like a little kid again at times. I’m charmed by it all.

But hell, it’s just another day in Isaan.

Cent
(The Central Scrutinizer)
© Cent. All rights reserved by the author.

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For more stories from the author and over 1200 stories about Thailand by many authors, visit: www.thailandstories.com

‘Mickey, what you do?’ says Sis coming into my bedroom and flopping onto the corner of my bed.

‘Eh? What’s it look like I am doing? I’m working on my computer,’ I crack to her, my usual reply when asked a foolish question of the obvious.

She laughs her infectious laugh. Even when she is annoying she still makes me smile to myself.

I know what is coming. She only does this when she wants to talk about the family, my daughter, maybe some financial issues, or, when my wife is pissed off at me for some reason that usually eludes me until it is pointed out to my dense-assed male self. Sis is the go-between in the family, the one who knows the protocols and approaches needed for these things, to be correct, polite, and socially acceptable and done the Thai/Isaan way.

Instead, she surprises me.

‘Mickey, I just come from teacher’s how (house) next door,’ she says in an excited undertone.

I hear something there and stop my typing and turn to face her. Something is going on; I can hear it in her voice.

‘Okay, what were you doing there?’ This teacher’s house is the house that attaches to ours in the block of townhouses that make up our part of the small soi. She, the teacher next door, is the friend of the owner of our rental house in Surin.

Sis grinned; she knows I am interested in this stuff.

‘I kill snay!’ she grins proudly at this statement. Sis is kind of macho.

‘What?’ I exclaim, ‘Where?’

‘In teacher’s how (house), in her living room.’

‘In her living room? But, that is where she teaches her classes!’ I exclaimed. Teacher has two classes a day in her home during after school hours. About fifty kids come there daily to learn extra, which is great custom for our neighborhood restaurant as well.

‘Yes, but today she not have students.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ I mumble. Once again I have lost track of the days of the week and forgotten exactly what day it is. ‘So, what kind of snake was it?’

‘Cobra!’ she growls, ‘Big cobra this long!’ she spreads he short arms in measurement, then shows me her not inconsiderable forearm and tells me the snake was that big around in diameter.

Even taking her short arms into consideration this obviously was no small damn cobra. I shiver, estimating the snake was about four to five feet long and a good five inches in diameter at its thickest. I am not fond of large poisonous snakes. As a matter of fact I don’t like anything large or small that is
poisonous, with or without legs. I am concerned. Where the hell did it come from? How the hell did it get into her home? What if it had come into MY home?

‘Eh, so how did you kill it, Sis?’ I ask to get the whole story and figure out if there is a problem here for me and mine maybe.

‘Take big piece of steel (some small building angle iron we have from previous construction of the shop) and stab him dead like this.’ She demonstrates using a long piece of metal like a spear, stabbing downward. ‘I chase he snay into hong nam (bathroom). Boy next door to teacher help me (a
college student who rents on the other side of teacher’s home). He hold snay with door to hong nam and I kill with steel!’

‘Are you crazy?’ I ask her, ‘What if the damned thing bit you? Why not call the police and stay the fuck out of there until they come and kill it? That’s what they get paid for!’

She gives me a look like I am crazy and not all that bright too.

‘What?’ I ask, seeing that look. I’m used to it, but still.

‘Why you think police come and kill snay?’ she says disgustedly, ‘Police scared of snay. Police not come to kill snay. Say not their job.’ She nearly spat in her dislike of and disdain for the local constabulary of Surin. They are not the cream of the crop for sure, at times.

‘But, they have guns! Shotguns even!’ I said, somewhat exasperated at this information. ‘They can just come and shoot the damned thing with some birdshot or varmint load in the twelve gauge and be done with it and keep the citizens out of harm’s way like they are supposed to do.’

‘Not do,’ was Sis’ reply to this mini tirade of mine.

‘Me and boy kill dead,’ she said again, rather cockily and with some pride I might add.

‘Well, good for you,’ I said, ‘Why didn’t you come tell me so I could help?’

‘Ha!’ Sis yelped, ‘You scared snay!’

‘Yes, well, that might be so, a little at least maybe, but I’d still help kill the damned thing if need be. But it’s not on my list of fun and sanuk things to do this week. It’s not something I grew up needing to do on a continuing basis, and besides, I have weapons back in the states which I’d easily and quickly use to kill a fucking big cobra in my house.’

She laughed again at this, pantomimed stabbing/spearing the snake vigorously, and said, ‘Kill snake with steel. Teacher happy too mutt, scared too mutt.’

I got the full story from her from beginning to end; how the teacher spotted the snake in her house, how the snake hid behind the TV stand, how teacher freaked and ran outside to our restaurant to get Sis and tell everyone about the snake. A posse of two was rounded up, Sis and college boy next door,
weapons of sorts procured, and the chase of the big assed cobra was on and the humans eventually were victorious. The snake made the wrong choice of home to invade.

Sis left, story told. Me, I was a bit freaked. How the hell did it get in her house? Where did it come from? Why did it come here? I mean, this is a large city, a well-populated area, and an urban area, not the damned rice farm. I just can’t imagine my walking into the house and being confronted by a large cobra in the living room, but just one house away, a house that is joined to mine; this is exactly what happened to the occupant.

I went around checking for ways for cobras to enter my own home. Finding nothing possible I went across the street and asked Sis how they thought the snake, not a small one either, had managed this.

‘Teacher have lady clean her house.’

‘Yes, her maid, I know her,’ I say.

‘Think she leave door in back open all day when clean house. Think cobra come in back door.’

‘Okay. Our back door is never open, and it is screened as well on the inside door. So this should never be a problem for us I’d think, right?’

‘Yes/Chai, no problem, Mickey. Not do same like teacher.’

‘Yeah,’ I muttered, walking back to the house a little more at ease now I had an idea of how the poisonous creature got into the house.

o0o

The next day I was sitting at my computer. I heard a bit of a commotion across the street but thought nothing of it, as my wife and Sis and the neighbors and clientele are a boisterous lot at times and prone to much laughter and horseplay. Hey, it’s a sanuk shop and everyone likes the staff, my wife and
Sis. There’s always some sort of teasing or joking tomfoolery going on there all hours of the day and night. They open up at five in the morning and close at nine in the evening. At various times of the day the place is packed with customers, and at other times it is slow as hell. At the moment the lunch crowd should have been packing the place, so I thought little of the noise from without my door.

Maybe an hour later a knock came at my door and I bade whoever was applying for entrance to come within. It was Sis, and she was grinning from ear to ear. She immediately plopped her ample derriere on my bed and whooshed out a deep breath. Something was up, dammit.

‘What?’ I queried.

‘Mickey, today have another big snay in teacher’s how!’

‘What? Again? I thought you killed it!’

‘Eh, not same snay. New snay! Mama snay, lady snay. Ooo! Biiiiiiiig snay!

‘Great,’ I said. ‘So what, you think this snake was the wife of the snake you killed yesterday?’ (I’ve heard or read somewhere that the female of the species is usually larger than the male I believe, if memory serves, and that they mate for life.)

‘Yes, think so. Mia (wife) from other snay. Come look for Sammi (husband). This snay bigger than snay (from) yesterday.’

‘How much bigger?’ I ask, thinking what the hell, yesterday’s snake was about five feet long and four or five inches in diameter at its thickest.

Sis gave me another foot with her hands apart to show how much bigger.

She proceeded to tell me how her and two of the college boys next door chased down this snake and killed it.

Teacher had once again come into her home to find, in her kitchen this time, this big mother of a cobra, and once again ran out of the house screaming to our shop to alert Sis and the others there. Once again Sis and the boys armed themselves with whatever makeshift cobra killing implements were at hand and went off to slay the varmint for the venerable and beloved neighborhood ajarn (a tiny lady of great charm and good heart that everyone here adores).

Sis and the boys made their way into teacher’s house and chased the creature around before finally cornering it. At one point Sis says the snake, cornered, turned on her and reared up to its full height (cobras can raise about two thirds of their body off the ground) and opened its hood menacingly as if to strike out at Sis. One of the boys took that moment to haul off and bat the snake with a large stick he was using right in the puss, knocking it down and stunning it. The other boy then pinned it with his own weapon and Sis used the mighty angle iron snake-killer sword of hers to stab the cobra in the head numerous times, slaying the beast before it could harm anyone. Sis said that part had scared the shit out of her and she was happy the boy had used that moment to strike the beast down before it lashed out at her. Sis is rather short, but sturdy, and she says the snake, when it reared up, was nearly as tall as she was; a frightening experience which a friend of mine had told me about when he encountered a much larger ‘king’ cobra on a Thai golf course once years ago.

Once the tale was finished I sat there thinking to myself that I didn’t know if she was the sort that lacked fear, or that lacked a brain. Maybe it’s a mixture of both? I know that if I was in trouble and needed someone to stand by my side in a desperate fight I would surely want Sis at my side. Maybe it is just the inculcated Buddhist thinking that death is just a step toward another life, possibly better, possibly worse, that let’s them seem to have no fear at times. Or maybe, much like our own ancestors who fought the wilds and its dangers throughout our own history, doing things we now think brave or foolhardy at times, it’s just that they grow up with these dangers around them and think nothing much of them. They are used to this stuff, inured to it, and just do what needs to be done to protect themselves and their own family and friends and neighbors. It’s just all in a day’s work.

After a while I asked Sis where the hell she thought these cobras were coming from. Why here? Why now? (We’ve lived here over five years and never had this problem before. Yeah, we’ve had a few scorpions, and even a huge tah carp (a poisonous centipede of huge proportions.) The only thing we could figure out was that in the block behind ours there had been a rai of empty wooded land left undisturbed for years. Recently the land was bought and cleared to make room for a new apartment building. All the trees and brush were cut down. These two cobras may have been living there, undisturbed, hunting rats, mice and lizards at night unseen and unmolested. Teacher has a small wall in back of her townhouse where she has a couple square meters where she raises many plants and flowers. Her wall is a low one, maybe four feet high, which the cobras could possibly get over (they were large snakes) when they were looking for refuge once their home was obliterated by the new construction. The maid leaves the back door open when cleaning, the snakes explore the new territory left open to them, and man and beast clash, sadly.

The Thais seem to have little use for the cobras. No one is grieving for their loss and no one is talking of their conservation or maybe trapping them and releasing them back into the wild where they belong. Actually they are almost always eaten at these times, and their skin taken for curing and sale even. They are a danger to the children, elderly, and even full grown healthy adults. In Thailand it seems there is an ‘Us or Them’ attitude toward these marvelous, yet dangerous, creatures. The Buddhist concept of live and let live doesn’t seem to apply as much as you would think it would, considering the country is like around ninety-five percent Buddhist.

And for those thinking this only happens up here in Isaan, well I hate to disabuse your notions, but I have known a few friends living in Bangkok with small yards who have also ran into poisonous snakes in their property. I also know a few people in Pattaya who have run into this as well. So, it is not just in the hinterlands this stuff occurs. It can happen right in the ‘big city’ as well. You are warned.

Another exciting week in Surin it was. One of these days I am going to be in for a big surprise I fear. I hope I can comport myself manfully and not go running out of the house screaming like the little old teacher from next door. But, it remains to be seen. One of these days boy…

Cent
(The Central Scrutinizer)

© Cent. All rights reserved by the author.

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For more stories from the author and over 1200 stories about Thailand by many authors, visit: www.thailandstories.com

The sun in the weeks before Songkran is the worst up in the Isaan. It scorches the earth; it empties the lakes and reservoirs in thirsty draughts, the streams and the fishponds, the water buffalo wallows and the small muddy frog ponds. The water is close to gone. The Thais keep on smiling though, but it is the smile of the slightly mad. The laughter has an edge of hysteria lurking about the dark corners you can’t see, even peripherally. It’s there, you know it is, but you can never quite glimpse it. When it breaks through for an instant it is incandescent and full of a maniacal intensity. Even the animals seem to be a bit off mentally. It’s the heat. Every creature is heat crazed. Out of the shade the sun broils the uncovered brainpan of all alike. I can almost see the straw farmer hats worn by most ready to burst into flame. It’s 98 degrees Fahrenheit, in the shade. The bugs themselves, those Borg-like creatures of mind-meld propensity, have all gone insane as well. It behooves a man, or a woman, to tread carefully now in this season of the sun. Bad shit can happen, and here, now … it’s the norm.

Surin is known throughout Isaan, and all of Thailand, as having some of the worst drivers ever … anywhere. I can attest to this through my own vast experiences driving, in Boston, and around various parts of the first world, and third world. I thank the gods every time I drive here for having at least having had the intensive training of driving with idiots and assholes for many pivotal years in the Beantown. It was excellent training for driving in Surin. It is, I believe, the only reason I have survived so long here: Defensive Driving Skills. As my father, that wise old improper Bostonian, told me when I was learning to drive all those years ago, “Just drive as though everyone but you is a total idiot and/or a complete asshole and you’ll do fine.” I took that sage advice to heart and have lived to pass it along to my own children. It is good advice, and here in Surin, the land of many ‘licensed to drive’ idiots, and quite a few assholes as well I must say, it pays to be hyper-vigilant. They’re all out to get you … they are (it’s not considered paranoia if it is true). True driving skills and proper driving etiquette are rare indeed here. Driver’s education in Thailand is nothing more than a fiction. I suppose that if we took half of the 15 to 19 year olds in Boston and let them drive 125cc motorcycles in any manner they deemed appropriate to drive them, and threw them into the mixture of idiocy and asshole-ism that is Boston’s traffic, we might come fairly close to what you have here in Surin, but it still wouldn’t match it totally. Even 16 year olds in Boston would balk at some of the stupid shit I see done here every five minutes on the roads of Surin. It is truly mind-boggling. Even teens in Beantown know what is basically suicidal and will get you eventually splattered on the tarmac, most of them at least.

I have tried to instill the teachings of my dear old Dad, God rest his soul, to my Thai lasses. I know my wife and daughter at least know that all the other drivers surrounding us on the sois of Surin are idiots and assholes. I’ve said it enough times God knows, and they do understand what I am growling about, and agree most times. Somchai wants to die. It seemingly is that simple here. Sis has certainly benefited from my tutelage. She does half the driving chores here with me, and I have drilled it into her head.

Sis is a good driver, slow, but rock steady, most times anyway. I know I can trust her enough to let her drive while I sleep a couple hours and I will eventually get to our destination in one piece sometime before the second coming of Christ. She agrees most of the drivers up here are kwai (water buffalo) and therefore dumb/idiotic and not to be trusted behind the wheels of their vehicles with ‘our’ lives. We alone are intelligent beings trying to get from point A to point B without getting killed by these silly bastards or trying to keep from splattering them all over the soi and our vehicle’s grill. Laws should be passed, but here it wouldn’t matter anyway. No one would pay any heed to the law; they already don’t follow a passel of them, so what would be the point really.

This week Sis forgot she needed to be hyper-vigilant, not just wary, of the idiots and assholes. She met the worst of the lot, Somchai’s idiot bastard son, the human kwai (water buffalo-an endearment Thais use for stupid people) without a brain, or a heart.

Near Death Experience

Sis was out and about a few days ago (Monday-today is Friday) doing some errands on my wife’s shiny red Yamaha Mio automatic. We were staying in the village this past week and Sis and I were down Surin to do some errands, pay some bills, and myself to check my e-mails and websites. Daughter is off from school for the next few weeks and she loves to stay upcountry in the village house playing with family and friends. We have a ping-pong table on the front veranda and the kids will play half the day on it. Next I want to buy a Foosball table for them. I have the room out front and they are cheap here really and the kids love to play the game. It keeps the kids busy and exercising and out of the adults hair for hours at a time, and out from in front of the damned TV. Plus the adults will later in the evening play the games themselves and have a laugh. Good clean fun for all. I’d love to one day buy and set up one of those portable basketball nets for the older boys in the neighborhood in the soi (street) in front of the house to give them something else to do besides play badminton and Dak Graw (the game that uses the woven wicker ball-excuse the phonetic spelling). Most of the Thai kids know a bit about basketball it seems.

Sis was on soi Tanasan near the Surin Post Office slowly driving along. She saw a Toyota Vigo 4×4 in front of the Post Office letting off a middle aged Thai woman. She saw the lady get out as she was approaching the truck, which was at the curb. As she came abreast the truck it suddenly just pulled out at speed, hitting her and knocking her and the bike down. The rear right wheel of the truck ran over her left leg, hip, back, shoulder and arm, and, helmet and face. The tire went right over her! She lay there stunned, not really knowing what had just happened to her. The truck stopped, the driver knowing something bad had just happened. He must have looked (finally) in his mirrors and seen Sis and the bike laying in the soi, and, he sped off and left her for dead. Heaven forbid he might be held responsible for maiming or killing someone. Perish the thought he might have to spend some baht making things right. Being the good Buddhist he is, (I can see him making merit, going through his short monk hood, lighting his incense and saying his prayers for possible lottery winnings, bowing three times to a large golden cryptically smiling Buddha and receiving water blessings from a revered monk, and begging/praying for everything to go good for him in this life and the next, and the next, ad infintum,) he saw what he had inadvertently done in his mirrors, through his own ignorant, arrogant, neglect, and drove away as fast as he could, not knowing if Sis was alive or dead, and … not caring. God damn his black, uncaring, evil, stupid, kwai soul. May he come back the lowest of creatures for many lifetimes. May his daughters marry destitute bisexual Frenchmen and be sold into an Algerian French pimp’s Parisian stable of streetwalking whores. I could go on in my curses, but I think you can see the depths of my feelings for this piece of scum.

Onlookers were horrified, people were stunned; Sis lay there unmoving on the tarmac. This could have been one of the many young school children you see driving about the Surin sois on their motocykes now that school is out. It could have been one of the little babies you see riding with adults on the motocykes everywhere. If it were he would have likely killed them. As it is, Sis is a husky lass of sufficient padding, and she was lucky, lucky as all hell she hadn’t been a few inches further along, lucky she had been to two tambons the past two days before making merit, lucky she had her amulet of Luang Paw Bun of Wat Bahn Plat fame around her neck. Maybe her protective three ‘Baby Pii’ were riding with her. Lucky for her I have been stressing for years the necessity of wearing a motocyke helmet at all times when driving a bike anywhere in this land. I get very angry and show it (fuck ‘face’ and Thai politeness) whenever I have seen her drive off helmet-less. Rather than face my wrath all my family now always wear a helmet, even when I am not in country from what I have heard (I have my spies). The helmet saved her life; even she said this right off after I saw her straight after the accident. “If not wear my helmet I be dead now!” she told me right off. The rear tire had actually run over half her head. The rubber and pressure from the tire tore her left check open, and the helmet cracked. Rather the helmet, than her skull. Her bruises show the tire track of the truck across her leg, back, shoulder and head.
Miraculously, she received minor injuries considering what had happened. It could have been much, much worse.

People rushed to her aid as she lay there. Many thought she was dead. They exclaimed in surprise when she moved, groaned, and then stood up cursing the receding driver in the Toyota Vigo 4×4. The man’s wife was still inside the Post Office, but was forgotten about by Sis during the excitement/trauma of the accident. The police were called and some bystanders helped Sis onto the sidewalk and moved my wife’s bike off the soi. Strangely enough, the bike had no damage.

(To be continued)

Cent
(The Central Scrutinizer)
Copyright © Written in the year 2007. All rights reserved by the author.
Website: www.thailandstories.com

So what’s the deal, this funny experience of ending up happily entangled with a Thai ‘girl’ young enough to be your daughter? How does it work exactly?

First of all she clubs you down with her consummate charm, then she grabs you by what remains of your greying hair and she drags you off to her cave. Well actually, maybe quite willingly you will walk, run to the cave even. But having got there and having decided to stay, your obligation is then to get out a-hunting… to provide the means of survival in a harsh environment for your lady and all those near to her. That’s how it always used to be with marriage before the days of Germaine Greer, the condom and equal earnings for guys and dolls… and that’s how it still is here. And there’s nothing so extraordinary about that. She’s not with you for the purity of your intellectual ability and you can’t expect to discuss Nietsche and Kant or the romantic poets over the som tam and soda. It’s not necessarily that she’s not your intellectual equal… it’s also the inevitable language barrier.

Whenever I meet some poor farang guy alone and palely loitering through the lofty aisles of Big C and I ask him what he’s doing in these parts, invariably he’ll say he’s building himself a house. By which he means of course that he’s building a house for his Thai girlfriend and her family! Is it going to be expensive I ask him and here he glazes over. Frankly he simply doesn’t know yet.

What I daren’t tell him is that although there are no lawyers’ fees for buying the land (and so nothing to prove ownership), there will be a number of other substantial and unexpected expenses. First, come the rains, lest the house ends up knee deep in water, he’ll have to spend good money bringing in tens of tons of soil to displace the monsoon floods onto his neighbours’ land. Next he’ll have to provide the rice farmers doing the hard slog of construction with iced water during the day and something much stronger such as lao khao at night. Then when it’s finished he’ll have to throw a three day house warming party during which he’ll keep half the province fed and happily inebriated for at least three days, accompanied by ear-splitting music starts at four in the morning.

And last and certainly not least of the costs, he’ll have to build a big, big wall all the way round the ‘garden’. This will be unnecessarily high and made of cement rendered blocks, usually painted a pale colour so that it discolours with the rains and has to be repainted every year. It will probably be built before the house is started because it’s very important, and it could cost as much as or even more than the house itself. Often the poor farang gives up on the whole affair, having only built the wall and having run out of money and romantic energy and endurance. Or he starts building the house but runs out of cash having only completed the roof. (At this point it should be noted that while in most normal places the roof is put on last, in Thailand it is common to do it first.)

A final shock expense is that at the front of the house, as the ultimate statement of vulgar opulence there must be erected a deeply embarrassing wrought iron gate of Buck House proportions. It will be a tall and elaborate confection of uprights and twiddly bits with little gold arrows on top that is totally unrelated to any concept of reasonable utility. Not least of the problems, it’ll need constant repair and repainting which, true to tradition will never be done… Thais just don’t do maintenance… and accordingly it’ll degenerate into a dusty, rusty mess in a matter of months.

People ask me what are the biggest stresses in this my marriage and I always answer the same… it’s ‘the wall’… or to be more correct the absence of one. A few years back when I was digging my toes in about not building a wall and Cat was threatening to leave me to look for a less mean and unreasonable farang, (I think she was joking!), we compromised on a fig leaf of a wall at the front only but with concrete posts and chicken wire, topped off with barbed wire around the back. So that’s what we finally did and I, at least, think it works very well indeed. I thus thought the matter was now settled once and for all, but in our most warm and intimate moments, Cat cannot restrain herself from gazing into my eyes and sweetly saying, ‘Teerak, I want one more thing to make me happy jing jing.’ I block my ears and turn a stony face. Not the wall again!

Is it possible for the farang outnumbered as he is, ever to win? Well, I admit I gave in cravenly on the big issue of the gate and there it now is in all its glory at the front of the house. For a dusty soi in a poor rice village in Surin, it really is a bit outrageous when others are living in hovels. Nor is it very functional. It’s pretty difficult to open it as it’s so heavy, bits keep needing to be welded back on and, Forth Bridge-like it needs constant repainting. I’m determined to keep it decent just to show the locals you should… and I’ve even been known to wield a paint brush myself and perhaps occasionally to feel a few swellings of secret pride at it’s showy splendour.

There’s one thing though I forgot to mention about this and other Isaan palace gates, namely that it’s customary always to leave them wide open! To do otherwise would make it look as if you and your massive walls and gates are actually intended to exclude old friends who have always been used to freely wandering in since time immemorial.

Nobody could thus possibly suggest that these walls and gates serve a useful function. So do I mind this extravagant madness that allows more than a little farang money to trickle down, should I say cascade into the community where I now live? Of course I don’t, perish the thought! If I did they’d all call me kee nieow… which means I’d be ‘as mean as sticky shit’, and for the resident farang that would be the end, a social fate worse than death.

About the Author

Andrew Hicks is the author of “Thai Girl – A romantic and touching story that tells what happens when young travellers meet Thais”. For more information visit his site at thaigirl2004.com

Isan, the Northeast of Thailand, is the driest and most seasonal area in Thailand, thus the geographical features of the region are mainly dry dipterocarp forest, savannah and stony soils.

Isan attractions are, undeniably, affected by these features, including the two kinds of mountains, flat-topped mountains, and Cuesta mountains, which is similar to the blade of the machete.

Most travelers are attracted to the charm of pine forests and savannah on those flat-topped mountains like Phu Kradung, Phu Luang, and Phu Keaw, which are mostly over a thousands meters high.

However, Cuesta mountains also produce such attraction as Phu Phan, Phanom Dong Rak, and San Kampaeng Mountains. These mountains are generally 500-1,000 meters high. They occur from the unevenly liftings of earth layers, so that they have a steep cliff on one side and a slope on the other.

From these two kinds of mountains, the Northeast owns many view spots from the cliffs and on the hill, sa sandstone waterfalls, natural stone gardens, and numerable stone temples, which were built since ancient times. All of these natural and cultural attractions are really unique, and it is indeed an amazing experience to explore this region, at all times.

“Cocka-fucking-doodle-doo my fucking ass!” I mutter to myself, upon being awakened by the mellifluous tones of the next door neighbor’s scrawny rooster’s excuse for Foghorn Leghorn. I am going to poison that damned bird one of these days. Can’t even kill it and eat it really, friggin’ thing’s just a pile of feathers and bones, and larynx and beak. Why the hell it starts crowing at 3:30 a.m. every morning I don’t know.

I roll over and reach for my cigarettes, time to kick start the lungs for another day. I notice, as I’m lighting the butt, that I’m drenched in sweat, like I had just emerged from the river down the street after a swim. What the fuck? Looking down at the end of the bed I see the fan is turned off. Goddamn it, why the hell did she turn off the fan? I glance at my watch on the headboard shelf, 8 o’clock. I yell to my lass, wondering how long I had been lying there sweltering in the bedroom now turned sauna. She appears in the doorway, smiling as always, and says “Good morning darling. Haew? (hungry?) Want bleakfass?” She always seems so happy in the mornings. Not being a morning person myself this sometimes irritates me. “Errrr….darling,” I grumble, “Why did you shut off fan while I’m sleeping?” “Oh sorry, I foget!” she apologises chuckling to me. “Have ab nam (Took a shower), too cold change clothes, me nooowww (she was cold), shut off fan, foget open fo you. Sorry darling!” she chirps, still smiling. What is it about her that makes me bite back my retorts? If that was my falang ex-wife I woulda chewed her ass out. Instead I smile and say, …. you guessed it, “No problem, darling.”

She asks again if I’d like to eat. I reply, “Sure! I’ll have two eggs sunny side up, with crispy bacon and well done home fries. Oh, and english muffins with butter and strawberry jam, lightly toasted please, butter on the side. Fresh brewed Turkish coffee too, with light cream and unrefined sugar. Okay?” She looks at me, smile slipping from her kisser now, and says, “Huh? No have! Wha…What you say darling?” I sigh, I am a mean bastard sometimes, and say, “What have we to eat darling?” “Have kow tom moo. Okay?” she answers. Fucking pork soup for breakfast, again. I’ll never get used to that. “Yeah, okay. Have egg for kow tom?” I query. “Have.” she says.

“Okay, I’ll shower first though.” I inform her. She leaves smiling and goes back to doing whatever she has been doing, since god knows what time this morning. She’s an early riser when in the village. Says the other ladies will talk “mi dee” (no good) about her if we stay in bed all morning.

I groan, drag my ass out of the sack, and walk to the bedroom window and open the wooden shutters. The sun comes blazing in the room like the fires of hell, causing me to cringe like the Vampire Lestat in an Anne Rice creepy novel. “Jesus H. Christ!” I exclaim, throwing my arm up to my eyes to protect my eyesight. “It’s like a goddamned oven out there already!” Four more hours to noon and it’s already a scorcher in Isaan. The sunlight bites the flesh on my arm with it’s radioactive choppers and forces me into retreat. Jeezus! I make sure the fan is on high and rummage through a drawer to select my day’s clothing. Definitely a tank top and lightweight shorts kinda day methinks.

Throwing on one of the silk, wrap around, plaid skirts my Thai family has presented me, I cover my nakedness, and head out the backdoor through the kitchen. Walking out to the patio, which seperates Momma’s house from ours, I go to the pump for the well and hook up the hose for my temporary cold shower connection that I’d installed for the time being until the bathroom plumbing is finished. Hey, a cold shower is better than no shower I say. Fuck that ladle shower shit! To hard to rinse yer ass crack and nuts that way. I connect the hose, throw the pump switch on, twist the faucet on, and head back in to the bathroom. A few minutes later it sounds like a wounded buffalo has been trapped in the hong nam. Ahhhh. The joys of village life. The water is invigorating though, and brings me to full consciousness in a relatively short amount of time. This will be the coolest I’ll feel today until the next shower, that’s for sure. I shower, dress, and eat my boiling hot pork breakfast rice soup, sans the requisite quarter pound of crushed red chilli peppers.

After eating breakfast I enquire of my lass what her plans for the day were. She tells me she is going to the temple down the road to see Mama, who is there taking care of some old sick monk. I swear I’m beginning to think Mama has a boyfriend at that temple she spends so much time there. My lass was going to go take some food for her, and help clean and do whatever. Seems I had the day for myself. I tell her I’ll figure out something to do to amuse myself while she’s gone when she asks me if I’ll be okay. She leaves a little while later and I’m alone in the house. I listen to some music and lay about reading a book for a while. Damn it’s hot! Even with the fans on full blast.

I decide to take a stroll about the village. Well, actually I decide to walk down to Sis Mun’s shop a few doors down and suck down a beer Chang or two with all the old drunk broads under the shade of the funky plywood and thatch hut they have in front of her make-shift “shop”. I wander down the road, ball cap shading my head and a pair of nice, soothing, dark sunglasses on to keep my eyes from fryin’ out of my skull. The dog from across the street runs up and challenges me to a stare down, growling a bit, until I grab a small rock and chuck it at his retreating, flopping, ball sack. I hate that mangy mutt. Fucker’s got balls that hang down nearly to the ground. Never seen anything like it. Fucking obscene it is. It would be like a guy who had balls that hung around his knees! He’s the top dog around the neighborhood, but this old dog ain’t never been afraid of dogs. This brings a few laughs and comments from the peanut gallery out in front of the shop.

I amble over to the gaggle of early morning lushes and say my sawadee krups. Seems they’ve already broken out the mekong and coke. Gotta love these ladies. Girls after my own heart they are. I wave away their offers of a whiskey and ask for a beer Chang. They all chuckle and giggle with each other as Ming goes to get my beer, as though discussing about what a wimp I am ordering a Chang when I could have had a free mekong coke. I’m hip to these old biddies though now. They know that if they get me buzzing on whiskey this early in the day that I’ll be springing for a bottle of black for all of us by noon. Didn’t take me too long to spot the methods of their madness on their free drink offers. Ain’t nothing free in this world. You pay for it one way or another. At least I always seem to. They should be ashamed of themselves for trying to take advantage of a poor old tipsy falang. Scheming wenches. We chat and drink, and fill in the gaps with sign language and slightly drunken laughter.

I love days like this. Nothing to do but relax, have a beer, maybe an early snooze in front of a fan. Sharing food with the ladies as they chat and sing songs. Watching the older lasses mix up their batches of betel nut chew while they all laugh and tease each other, and me. I still haven’t found a better way to leave the rat race of the so-called civilized world behind. My cares evaporate like the streaming sweat on my skin, I mellow out and kick back. I don’t watch the news, or read the paper much when in the village. What for? Same old shit, just a different day in falang land. I dread leaving.

These times in the village always seem to remind me of the long hot summer days of my youth in southern New Jersey. Farm country, broiling hot days, endless groves of fruit trees, the smell of the trees and grass, the musky aroma of the dusty dirt hanging in the air, the smell you can almost taste of water from a distance, the crackle in the air of the electric heat expanding the molecules of a lone, massive, thundercloud as it’s shadow passes overhead and cools the sweltering air for a brief few seconds, the taste of a fresh picked fruit in your mouth, the juice running down your chin and hands, the flashing of the fireflies at dusk, and the sound of children laughing and playing in the yards with their flashing smiles and sturdy legs blurring as they run while chasing a ball, or just each other in some game they’ve made up for the moment. The chatter of the women as they gossip, and the booming raucous laughs of the men as they joke around while playing a game of cards and drink their beers after a long, hot, sweaty day of working at whatever job they’ve done that day, fill the air at different times of the day.

The sounds of the village envelope me and take me back in time to the days when nothing much really mattered, except the ringing bell of the good humour ice cream truck, or how many frogs we’d caught down by the streambed, or how many bottles we’d managed to find and cash in to use on the next day to see a scary horror movie at the matinee, the air feels the same as it did then, the smells are all so familar to me, the sounds are the music of days long gone where I come from, the days and nights all blend together like the dog days of summer, which always felt like they would never end, like we’d never have to grow up, never have to go back to school, never lose our best friends, or our favorite dog. It’s a place where time seems to stand still. The village to me is a time machine, it brings me back to where I long to be, that one hot summer’s day that seemed it would never end. It hasn’t. It’s there in the village, in the middle of nowhere, somewhere in Isaan.

A lot of guys I know who have Thai wives and girlfriends don’t like the villages they visit when going home to their ladies families. They are bored, don’t like the lack of creature comforts, miss the city life and excitement, can’t wait to leave and get back to their civilized world, the first world, the realm of modern reality. The high rises, and busses and cars, and planes and trains, and asphalt and concrete, sirens, honking horns, endless traffic, the crowds of humanity, the poisoned air and starless, bible black, night skies, awash in neon and the glare of the multitude of lights that turn the night into a false day, and blot out the sparkling universe above their heads. I’ll take the village over that rat race any day.

After a couple of beers with the ladies I decide to take a longer walk and excuse myself. Taking a fresh beer Chang with me of course. I strip off my tank-top shirt and tuck it into the back of my shorts so it hangs behind me like a bright red tail. I walk down the road, stopping now and then to say hello to people who I know, but don’t know their names. The sun beats down, darkening my flesh as I stroll towards the river. There on the riverbank I spot a couple of kids fishing. I stop and watch them awhile. I wish I had a pole of my own so I could join them. I vow to buy a fishing rod next time I see one for sale in Surin at the stores.

Further down the soi along the river I spy sisters Sow and Sai, part of my lady’s extended family, although exactly how they’re related is still a bit of a confusing mystery to me. They call me over to them and I stop and chat some, sharing the rest of my beer Chang with them. They have filled in a piece of the riverside with arable soil and have a plot where they grow chilli peppers along the water. Their faces are wrapped in black cloth, and their heads are covered with straw hats, to hide their skin from the burning rays of the relentless sunshine. They think me mad to go shirtless. I laugh and wave goodbye and continue on. Reveling in the sunshine and soaking in it’s heat. They’ve never spent four or five months of snowy, freezing, winter in Boston.

I’m here, in my village, the Village of the Sun. Sun Village to you.

Cent (The Central Scrutinizer)

Copyright 2004. All rights reserved by the author.

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For more stories from the author and almost 1000 stories about Thailand by 150 authors, visit www.thailandstories.com.