I had only been in Bangkok for a couple of hours when I stumbled upon its notorious sex scene, a remarkable feat of misnavigation considering that I had sworn to spend my entire time there carefully avoiding its notorious sex scene.
I was warned about Bangkok of course – everyone is - though the cautionary tales seemed to owe more to popular myth than the voice of experience. According to various friends of mine, some less travelled than an antique Trabant with a flat battery, Bangkok would be full of scantily clad ladies openly cavorting with overweight Europeans in their late fifties, most of whom would look like Benny Hill (the men I hoped, not the scantily clad ladies). There would be girly bars strung along the entire length of every street. Lascivious women would accost me the moment I set foot outside my hotel room. If I wasn’t robbed, drugged, or carried off to some hellhole prison, I would almost certainly be offered good seats to a live event involving the mysteriously skilful flinging of ping pong balls.
I decided to risk it anyway. After a quick shower and a change of shirt (I confess to wearing the same underwear as I had arrived in. One of the great unsung joys of solo travel is that you can freely wear the same socks and underpants for days on end) I left my hotel for an amble down Sukhumkvit road, central Bangkok’s lively main artery. It was a warm, fragrant evening, and I was immediately taken with the simple joy of being able to stroll around after dark without a balaclava helmet and mittens; I am from the North of England, where the only evening warmth we get is when someone sets fire to a stolen car.
It occurred to me that the sex scene in Bangkok was possibly more elusive than I had been led to believe. If you wanted to discover it, you probably had to follow subtle signs and obscure clues, perhaps even engage the services of some shady underworld character loitering in a doorway with a fedora on his head and a cigarette jutting from the corner of his mouth.
Just as I was thinking this I spotted a huge neon sign above a side street that said: SOI COWBOY – THIS WAY TO THE SEX SCENE!
It didn’t quite say all that but there was certainly no mistaking what lay beyond the neon sign. Along with Patpong and Nana plaza, Soi Cowboy was one of those places I had sworn to avoid. However coming face to face with it was a bit like discovering one of your Christmas presents hidden away in your partner’s underwear drawer. You think to yourself, 'My God, how the hell did she manage to get a pool table in there!'
And a conspiratorial voice also whispers, look, you’ve found it now. It won’t hurt to have a little peek.
Soi Cowboy, a street that seemed to consist entirely of bars and food vendors, was much smaller than I had imagined. In an odd sort of way I seemed to recognise it, too, or at least find something familiar in its showy promenade of garish lights and slightly clunky attractions. The colourful lights, the competing music, the rousing smell of frying food, the mildly illicit thrill of it all, was very reminiscent of a night time stroll past the amusement arcades and funfairs of the English seaside towns where I took my childhood holidays.
“Hello, welcome, sexy man!”
The sultry voice drifted my way but I didn’t think it was directed at me. I turned my head, expecting to see Johnny Depp or one of the sprogs from McFly. It took me a few seconds to realise that the three pretty Thai women sitting outside one of the bars were indeed speaking to me.
“Hello, welcome, sexy man!”
I paused, checked an imaginary watch, and then pulled one of those faces you pull when you are trying to convince three young Thai women that you haven’t fallen for their simple trap faster than you can say ‘magic beans.’
“Oh, go on,” I said out loud. “I’ll just have one drink.”
I went through a red curtain, ignoring my seafaring grandfather’s advice about never going into a pub that has a curtain for a door, and into the darkest barroom I have ever been in. It was also completely empty but for me and the three Thai women who had followed me in from the street.
I stood at the bar just as a large, Scandinavian-looking man appeared from behind another curtain.
“Heineken please,” I said, and in a way that I can’t really explain, was served a bottle of beer by four people. It moved between them like a coin winding through the knuckles of a magician. I was now pretty certain that under some ancient Thai law I was legally obliged to tip all four of them.
All at once, as if acting on a secret signal, the three women attached themselves to various parts of my body. It was very slick and instantly immobilising, like being ambushed and cuffed by a SWAT team. One of the women slid around behind me and draped her arms over my shoulder. I never saw her face again. Another took up position on my left, coiling her arm around mine and snuggling close to my side. The third stood on my right, pressing warmly against me. All three of them took up slightly more of my personal space than I would comfortably allocate to my own ear, nose and throat doctor.
I smiled weakly at the bar tender, hoping for some intervention. None came. He merely stared back at me in that unseeing way of bar tenders and ceremonial guards. The three women said nothing either. We just stood there in the sort of group hug that suggested the end of an intense therapy session. There was no jukebox, no chat, no music, nothing whatsoever to distract from the fact that I was locked in a frozen embrace with three women.
“This is funny,” I said to the barman, just because one of us had to say something. “The last time I went into my local pub, I didn’t even get a bowl of nuts with my drink!”
He said nothing of course. Neither did the women. I tried to shuffle away from the bar, just to see what happen. What happened was that everyone shuffled with me, so we shuffled back again. I squeezed my eyes closed and tried desperately to think of something to else say, but in all honesty I was at a loss for words. I felt like a man who had finally returned to the buxom of his loving family after long years at war, with presents
“I better get going,” I said limply, after what seemed like another hour of being embraced. “Yep, busy day tomorrow. Lots of temples and stuff to see.”
I tried to move but felt a force of resistance similar to that of a small but determined rugby scrum. The two women either side of me were smiling placidly. The one behind me began to massage my shoulders.
“You like massage?” left head purred.
I smiled politely but eventually shook my head. “Under the right circumstances,” I started to explain, but left head cut me off with a screechy reprimand to the woman behind.
“Stop massage!”
The massage ceased at once. I couldn’t see the face of the woman standing behind me but somehow knew she was pouting.
“I should get off home,” I repeated. My smile ached. Still nobody moved. Actually that’s not quite so, because a soft hand came from somewhere and began to squeeze my groin. Stop massage, I thought unconvincingly, and closed my eyes in a confusing moment of shame and excitement.
“Sexy man,” a dark voice said, and all three laughed smokily.
“I really should go,” I repeated.
“One more?” left head asked, indicating my beer bottle. “Same same?”
The hand was still at my groin. I thought it impolite to draw attention to it. A similar thing once happened to me on a crowded London underground train. I just stood there and stared unblinkingly at a poster for Dollond and Aitchison while a mystery assailant groped me around the Marble Arch.
I wondered how long it would be before another customer arrived and at least one of my clinging hostesses peeled away from me, but the answer, like the customer himself, never came.
“This has gone beyond a joke,” I muttered in a quiet, marvelling sort of way. In a moment of uncharacteristic assertiveness, I shrugged myself free of the human straightjacket and slapped a 500 baht note on the counter. “I don’t want to be a sexy man anymore,” I said in a voice quivering with tearful determination. “Take the money, and…look out, what’s that behind you?”
I crept away into the night. Well, in point of fact I got tangled up in the curtain and had to be freed by the barman, but afterwards I crept away into the night.
