Hell in a Thai Handbasket

Despite the logistical features of my job and my apartment, I live in Hell.  I won’t call it indescribable because I will surely describe it.  I simply can’t do it justice. Living here is like constantly living in that one fold of the brain; that dark, polluted fold that is dank and dirty from alcohol poisoning and smoke inhalation, that fold of the brain where those memories of trauma live and fight every day for survival…fight to be continuously recognized by the rest of the brain who every day fights equally as hard to forget them.  Pattaya is the sunspot of my brain, the part where nothing glows, there is no beauty only constant reminders of my past battles fought and lost.  Like walking through Dali’s La Persistencia de la Memoria, Pattaya is bleak, with time melting away as if tomorrow is the same as yesterday is the same as a year from now.  It is brown and dusty, a backwards frontier, a prairie of memories I would rather leave dead and lifeless but instead I have to trudge through every day to get to work, trudge through like I would trudge through piles of bodies after a massacre…piles of grey bodies with not even enough dignity for blood.  This place, bleak, misty, black, cancerous, manically depressive has sucked the air out of me, leaving me at times physically unable to breathe.  I am like one of Ursula’s soulless sea creatures, waiting in a cave for the sun to come out and knowing that tomorrow will come and the sun will stay in yesterday, the sun will stay in Malaysia, the sun will stay on the train, the sun will stay in that giddy perception I had of stability and strength in that time years ago when I was looking forward to this day (this decade, time oozes slowly like a dying wound in this town, doesn’t it, Dali?).  I have taken the stability and strength that I once felt, on that 20 hour train ride when time was understandable and I have drunk it down, like a rabbit going through the hole I saw as I emerged from the taxi that this was no Wonderland, but rather a neglected god’s pipedream.  Everyone here has flat affects, no bursts of sunlight or smiles, they are just sweaty and slow moving, cactus-like entities in a gray sky-lined sunset.  Colorless. 

 I won’t go into the unbelievably necessary detail of what I’ve seen here, or maybe I will, we will see how quickly my fingers can move across the keyboard before the night comes and I re-enter my captivity.  I am triggered every moment I am here.  I am strong, but no one, no one with a heart and a story like mine, should ever ever have to withstand this pressure.  I felt I was ready and now I am confident that I am ready, ready to finally make a decision for myself, to see that some things that make me sick are indeed unhealthy.  Yes!  That is the truth, the one truth that is here is that for me, my strength would be in leaving, and letting this town be this town and understanding that my biggest priority is to save myself.

Dirt, dust, noise…there is no beauty here in a time when I need mostly beauty in my life so that I recognize it’s similarities inside of my soul.  Hmmm, I have found the ugliest place.  Self-proclaimed Sex Capital of the World, I have no idea why I even set foot here.  I will figure that out later. I must have not known myself then, two months ago, like I know myself now.  Pattaya is populated with elderly white men, mostly overweight and of Eastern European descent, who have come here to have sex with Thai women.  This can vary from the men who come for a few weeks to the men who come here to live, find a wife or a girlfriend and a job, and settle down.  The town itself is ugly, and now, after mass expatriation, it’s occupants are too.

I live a little bit removed from the crazy sex-tourism scene, in a neighborhood where the men who live here with their Thai wives have relocated, or at least it looks a bit more permanent.  Still though, a ten minute drive to town and I’m right in the middle of Sin City.  Literally.  Las Vegas doesn’t compare.  Women linger outside of every bar, waiting.  Men roam the streets with or without t-shirts on, looking.  Women dance in plastic boxes, waiting.  Women of all colors, Thai women, African women, European women.  This terrifies me….the process that the sex-workers endured to be in a small plastic box dancing for fat Russians in this dark corner of the world.  A subtle rage has been brewing inside of me.  I’ve only gone out two nights in the month that I’ve been here and for the next day after each of them I lay in bed all day, recovering from what I’ve seen.  It makes me physically ill and depressed…in bathrooms of bars I have vomited from the sights and also cried.  This from just two nights out.   Jenna and I receive little to no attention here and have made no friends.  To put it bluntly, we are not what the clientele want.  

The second night we went out, our co-worker Lokki (the youngest teacher at the school besides me and Jenna) took us to a go-go bar.  Lokki informed us that the women would have their clothes so, nervously, we went in.  I won’t divulge exactly everything what I saw in there but it was not, by any standards, what would normally be seen in a bar like this.  The dancer’s eyes were silent, their heads detached from their bodies, and I could only hope that they had developed the intricate ability to black out the present and shove their minds into a blissful and imaginative future.

As for me, I went blank.  I couldn’t move, except to go into the bathroom to cry.  I couldn’t communicate anything to my mind about my desire to leave.   My mind was lacking the ability to create memories and I became suddenly exhausted.  The synapses in my brain had stopped firing and sat quietly with me, trying to slow my heart rate to normal.  I remember feeling hot and dark and wishing I could burn the building down.  I remember wishing I had a lighter with me and planning where the fire would go, grateful that my mind had found some sort of visual escape from what was in front of me.  Knowing I was free to leave at any moment was too much of a burden for me; in that situation years ago, in that voyeuristic and assaultive phase of mine, I was not allowed to leave.  

Looking back on that night, two nights ago, I remember flashes of heat and cold and of faces.  I remember feeling like I was drowning in a Jacuzzi, and I remember, unfortunately, some of the things that I witnessed. Later, I will analyze reaction, later.

Later, meaning when I leave.  I put in my notice at work and have only two or three weeks left here.  I will try my best to shorten my time to the end of this week.  I have decided to travel and apply for jobs that begin in August or later.  But first I will travel and get back to myself.