Dog Story

My dog sometimes gets a mention in my stories but I never considered writing one about him until tonight. Even his enemies the chickens got a story the other day so tonight he gets his just deserts.

Last year my brother in law asked me to share the price of a street front block in the village. The price was better than good so I agreed and he built a karaoke restaurant on it. This was the brainchild of his new son in law, a former high school drug dealer who had seen the light for reasons that will soon become apparent.

Pen, the brother in law, had a daughter whose beauty took your breath away. At fourteen she could literally stop traffic. Every day she got on the bus and headed off to high school like a good little girl, going to one of the better schools about fifteen kilometers away on the Chiang Rai side of the village. One day the proud parents received a letter saying she had been expelled. Like parents anywhere in the world they waited anxiously for her return home and put her to the question.

The conversation went like this:

You’ve been expelled from school.
Good, I hate that school anyway, they all hate me there.
But they must have had a reason to expel you.
No, they just hate me, don’t you worry about them I’m sick of school anyway.
Hold on, we think we should go down and have a talk to the head master.
(Sweating) No No, it’s because I’ve got a boy friend, they don’t like my boy friend.
Boyfriend? What boyfriend, we don’t know anything about a boyfriend.
(Now really sweating) Just a boyfriend at school, I’m not going back there anyway.

So like parents anywhere in the world they headed for the school to be told “boyfriend? What’s that got to do with it, she’s expelled because we haven’t seen her for three months.”
More intense questioning immediately after revealed the existence of Nat, a cheerful, spindly lad of twenty who had been pushing a little Yah Bah (Thai amphetamine) over the school fence.

A vindictive Pen immediately called in his contacts with the local police force and had Nat thrown straight into the slammer. Anyone here who’s thinking that the age of consent law is not taken seriously in Thailand take note. Nat’s father appeared on the scene and had to lay out some serious baht to get him out of slam, a fact not unnoticed by Pen.

So what’s this got to do with my dog? Hang on, hang on. Nat and his Dad appeared one night and a council of war was carried out. The kid’s were in love we were told, they wanted to get married, Nat (looking at two to three years) would move in with Pen and Pen would drop the charges. I took the wedding photos.

Nat had seen the presence of two Farangs in the family and probably dreamed of an easy ride; he had barely arisen from his marriage bed before being presented with a spade and a bush knife and pointed at tracts of uncleared family land.
Son Nom Nar, Nat. (Serve you right).

I eventually came to like Nat; one of his jobs was washing my car and I would bring out a couple of bottles of Leo beer and share them with him after the job. He would attempt to talk in English, having no more qualifications than any one else in the family, but less worried about losing face when making a mistake. He loved animals and would come down and play with my wife’s rabbits before they departed the planet for various reasons.

Nat had a culinary skill that involved burning strips of buffalo hide black,
(don’t ask me about the fucking dog again, I’ll get around to him)
and hammering it flat then serving it up to unsuspecting customers; I’ve eaten most things in Asia but the taste of it took my breath away. So a restaurant was built by Pen and Nat, who by this stage had almost come to like hard work, a karaoke machine was hired and business commenced. As a half owner of the land I took a proprietary interest in the project and would walk down with my dog every night after dinner,
(there, satisfied now?)
and have a beer.

Noticing that the villages lads would congregate there I would send a bottle across to their table and soon it was agreed I was “Chai dee.” (Good heart). No worries walking home drunk in the dark you see. They sold lao khau (moonshine whiskey), some coloured an attractive pink for the more discerning drinker, and it soon became the most popular watering hole in the village.

I was down there tonight with my dog and attracted the attention of a group of Thaïs, strangers to the village, who were really drunk. A conversation commenced in which my atrocious Thai/ Lanna Thai/ Lao reduced them to hysterics and they became impressed by my dog’s one party trick which consisted of sitting when told-“Nang long!” and asking for food by raising a paw-“Koor gun!” He happily ground up all the available chicken bones, even he wasn’t keen on the crispy kwai hide, until, deciding to leave, one of the drunker Thais, and they were all legless, staggered over to shake my hand farewell. I get this occasionally, even deep in the countryside men will shake hands with me to show how westernised and sophisticated they are. The little dog let out a shriek of outrage and bit him on the thumb of his outstretched hand.

There was nothing personal in this, he had been allowing them to pat him while he wagged his stump of a tail in appreciation, it was pure and simple- keep your hands off my boss. Stunned, we all looked at him unable to believe the transformation; sure he looked like a Doberman, well about a third the size with a gentle hound face and large floppy ears but he had never bitten anyone other than in play and then accidentally. Mystified, the drunken Thais departed after a short discussion on who was the least incapable of driving their pick up.

The dog came to us as a second hand dog; another of my wife’s brothers was in the habit of bringing home pets for his six year old son. This was a guilt thing (if Thai men suffer from such a thing as guilt) as he had kidnapped his children off his estranged wife and dumped them on his seventy year old mother where he rarely saw them, having a girl friend in another village. The boy was casually cruel to animals and eventually the old girl kept it tied up under the house all day, a common practice with more excitable pups. My wife started bringing it home so she could play with it and eventually I resigned my self to the fact that we had a dog.

His name was Yoyo, (look, I told you it was a second hand dog) and this became Ee-Yo, an affectionate diminutive for names in this part of the country. I decided that if we had a dog he would conduct himself as a gentleman; regular baths and he would walk on a lead. He would avoid the company of the village dogs, at his size he wouldn’t have lasted five seconds anyway, and would be regularly checked for what my wife called “insects”.

A few years ago I had a steady girlfriend in the Philippines. The barfine system in Angeles city is different to Thailand. There a single payment, usually about 20USD, not only releases the girl from the bar but covers any sporting events that go on afterwards. A gratuity the next morning is appreciated but not compulsory. People who go there regularly often take advantage of the steady girlfriend system which involves a single payment of about of about 400USD which the girl receives half as she does with any barfine. This means that the girl can leave the bar on your arrival without further payment- to the bar anyway, the girl comes to a private arrangement with the man. A lot of people ignore this system, guys who live there full time who wish to live with a girl will just take her out of the bar and this rarely causes problems. However a girl who regularly leaves the bar, without a barfine, to stay with tourists will find it difficult to get work once the word gets around.

We were talking in bed one afternoon with the TV on, she was one of those girls who liked to watch it over your shoulder during the action, and she said, “See the dog?”
Some mutt like Lassie on a lead. When she was a little girl she told me she had seen a dog on a lead for the first time on TV. I’d been to where she grew up, some filthy squatter’s camp on the side of a mountain in a shithole called Boulacan Province outside of Manila.

Anyway one of the neighbours bought a TV; probably a lottery win as people are never too poor to gamble, and entranced she headed home and rounded up one of the family fleabags, tied a bit of rope around its neck and took it for a walk. The minute she hit the street, she said, every dog within half a mile flipped out. Taking advantage of its disadvantaged condition they rushed up the road to either fuck it or fight it. She flung the lead away and fled.
I like the good words, and I didn’t need to look very far to find poignant for that story.

Short Time Girl

Short time girl
do you ever remember
back to when you were
first in love?

When the fat drunken customers
fail and cry
and beg you
for so many things.
You can barely remember them all.
Things or customers

When you were twelve
you knew
that there would be only one
for you
and you the only one for him.
He has been and gone,
you one of many
and now him.

When the customers want to talk
it should cost
more than the sex.
The sex only wearies
the body,
the talk wearies the soul.

Short time girl,
What do they seek?
The orgasm
that makes them sad?
The company
that makes them more lonely?

Soon, the bus home
for Songkran.
The only long time
in a short time girl’s year.

The Chickens of Chiang Rai

The chickens are having sex out side my front door. Chicken sex involves little, if any, foreplay; it is rape pure and simple and the victim is very vocal about it. The act rarely lasts long, if anything it is quicker than my first sexual experience, surely a record in the human field, but the hen continues to announce her outrage to the world for several minutes after and her sisters join in sympathetically.

My dog wakes immediately and heads for the staircase; “wuf wuf wuf”, he’s at the top of the landing, “Erf woof, Erf woof”, he’s on the outside balcony. OWOWOWOWOW!!!! He hates the chickens and the sound of them fucking is an anathema to him.
Coming down stairs he heads for his food bowl and scoffs his fried rice that has sat there all day. No chicken will get any of that.

I was watching a program on bird flu the other day; it was on one of the twenty four hour news channels. Not Fox-
(“I may not agree with eating sick chickens
but will defend to the death your right to sell them”),
but one of those that try to pass themselves off as independent. A panel of experts were discussing bird flu, one said it was only passed on by handling infected chickens, one said it wasn’t and the other three didn’t know. I make sure mine is well cooked.

While I was building my house I lived in a small single roomed bungalow a few metres from the site and I came to know chickens quite well. I even considered doing a thesis for a doctorate on their culture and lifestyle. In the morning I would sit outside with my ginseng laced tea, when your girlfriend is a number of years younger than you she does things like that, and watch them at the serious business of survival of the species. They belonged to my father in law, as far as free range chickens can belong to anyone, and the main flock stayed up near his house and we got the refugees. Usually hen’s with too many chicks for them to watch in a crowd and the young roosters driven from the flock by their seniors. The roosters had daily crowing practice outside our window at daylight; they had play fights and kept well clear of the mother hens. Some days one of the serious roosters would wander down to make sure that none of the young hens had sneaked there and to give the lads a few boxing lessons. They hid in the rice field till he left.

Eventually their number was whittled down to two. The old man took a couple to sell or eat, the neighbours’s dogs got a couple more and a few just disappeared. The remaining pair were very likely from the same nest although one developed colourful gold and black plumage and the other the standard Thai red. Chickens are rarely monogamous and I doubt that if bargirls regularly gave birth to triplets that one black, one white and one brown baby would he considered unusual.
They were certainly as close as brothers and foraged together, slowly putting on the weight that would be vital to their survival later. The black and gold bird was the dominant of the two and inevitably his eye turned to the fair sex. His choice was little short of amazing, one of the resident hens was a large bad tempered creature who had beaten the crap out of him for getting too close to her chicks on a number of occasions. She rebuffed him frequently but he persevered and eventually, possibly because of his handsome colouring, she allowed him to hang around as long as he never attempted to eat any thing she scratched up for the now large chicks. His mate, however, took his life in his hands every time he attempted to enlarge the family group. Then one day she deserted the horrified chicks, the handsome chicken attacked and thrashed his brother and they retired to the rice field for their honeymoon.

You can only hold a reader’s interest for so long when writing about chickens, Richard Adams enthralled us with his rabbit stories but Richard Adams I am not. I would like to give this tale a happy ending but the handsome chicken was too arrogant to run from the neighbour’s dogs and they reduced him to a state that took him several months to recover from. A year later he’s still not quite right and his brother now rules down around our house with several wives including his bad tempered former nemesis. I did notice though that her latest clutch of chicks included several with gold and black coloring.
Perhaps the old flame never quite went out.

Having a Drink with the Girls

One of the things I really enjoy about living in Thailand is having a drink with the girls. I’m not talking about bargirls here but the ladies that run the country, those in their thirties and forties that have done the real work, children raised, homes built and every job available taken. If they were American they would be from the South and Larry McMurtry would write about them. Most of them are stocky, small breasted and have husbands who screw around on them.

The best time and place to catch them is before a party, they come around to chop the salad, slice the barbeque and organise the extra plates and glasses and eventually a bottle of beer and a bucket of ice will come out.
The men rarely join in on these lady drinks, one will wander in occasionally, accept a glass but move on, the only ones who are really welcome are the larp makers, always a man’s job where I live, raw meat finely chopped with chilli and herbs is a special party food.

After the work is finished they will sit in a circle and drink beer with ice, talking about what their kids are up to; whether their daughters are having sex too young, if their sons are doing drugs or why their husbands stay out all night. Nothing like the important things Western women talk about. A Farang is always welcome, they can’t believe he’s interested in them, after all he turned up with Sen’s daughter who hadn’t been seen for years and built a house and now he’s coming over with a couple of bottles of Leo beer.

The ladies immediately go a little coy, brushing at their hair with work hardened hands and giggling as they hold out their glasses for a top up. They insist he sits down, a chair is brought up by the youngest and a glass placed in his hand. They inquire about his health, he informs them that he has a hangover and his wife has beaten him up the night before for being drunk (Mia boxing).
Real victims of domestic violence they go into hysterics at the thought of a women beating a man up. Sex is always a popular topic, another bottle is opened and they inquire if the Farang was cable of the act after being beaten. Not knowing the Thai for saying that it was always an essential part of the act, he acts it out with symbols, causing more hysterical laughter. Everybody sits and sips at the beer and ice; they will have a drink at the party but they will have to make sure that the drunken husband gets home alright or doesn’t sneak off to his girlfriend (mia noi).

Their faces would pass in the West amongst women half their age who spend a fortune on creams and moisturisers, hard bodies from real work and magnificent hair usually tied in a bun. It will be allowed to flow free at the party.
They don’t only work the rice fields and markets, they can be seen in the cities selling tee shirts on Beach Road, cheap watches at Patpong and stir frying on the Sukhemvit Sois.

Their daughters turn up in the afternoon in expensive school uniforms and help chop onions, their sons pull up on Honda Dreams with university girls sitting on the back, eat for nothing and depart with pocketfuls of baht. Their husbands arrive after closing time and relieve them of the real money. God help them if they hold back or even if he’s just in a bad mood after losing at cards all day.

If you walk past in the small hours of the morning you will see them sitting in group sharing a bottle of beer with ice, some of the older bargirls finishing work will stop and join in, sending to the nearby Seven Eleven for an extra bottle. They will talk about whether their daughters are having sex too young, if their sons are doing drugs or why their husbands stay out all night.
Stop and have a talk occasionally, you may be asked to join them and eventually you will get to know some real Thai people.

Thoughts On turning Sixty or Why is the Rice Cooker Never Turned Off?

I’m sixty tomorrow and I don’t want to be.

I never wanted to be thirty, forty or fifty either. Twenty was OK, it was like a rite of passage along with the first car, the first serious girlfriend and getting laid for the first time.

Sixty is different though, it was easy to pretend you were young when you were statistically middle-aged but there’s only one word for sixty and its OLD.

Still there’s nothing that can be done about it, it will come tomorrow whether I like it or not. It can’t be hidden from or diverted to another person; tomorrow it’s all mine.

I’ve lived through what was probably the greatest period of change in the history of mankind. The Renaissance was a hiccup compared to the last sixty years. I just missed World War Two, which shaped and molded my father and his destiny, but was fully alert and looking around for the second half of the Twentieth Century. I grew up under the constant threat of nuclear dismemberment but we rarely thought about it. I could walk to school, (later I rode in a school bus that was a dangerous museum piece even back then), stay out all day and half the night without any one realizing I wasn’t there, eat as much fried food as I liked and Coca Cola and bought ice cream was a treat.

Later I left school and people sought to employ me. It wasn’t only me they sought to employ, it was anybody. There were jobs for anyone who wanted to work, and strange as it may seem these days, everybody did. There was no alternative. You left school, got a job and worked until you were given a gold watch and sent home the day you turned sixty five. People who change jobs too often were considered shiftless and unreliable.

I’m sixty tomorrow and I haven’t done a days real work for twelve years.

That was it, retired at forty eight.

Mind you I’ve done plenty of work, some of it was quite lucrative, but it wasn’t a real job.

Personally I’ve always had my doubts about working. If it hadn’t been the only option available to me to make money I’d have probably avoided it.

My father was different, he loved work. A child of the depression, his father died when he was young… a late victim of the “War to end all Wars” , and he received little formal education. This never stopped him reaching senior management level before he retired; and not only that, he worked when he didn’t have to. He loved community service. War veterans organizations, local government, voluntary magistrates, widows and orphans of servicemen, sporting bodies, fundraisers for charities like the Miss Australia quest, his political party of choice…. And he didn’t only join them, he ran them.

I was always a reluctant conscript in that type of thing. I wasn’t lazy, there were always other things I’d rather be doing.

A lot of them solitary.

Not that I’m anti-social, far from it, I have that many friends I’m reluctant to consider new ones. I’ve reached a point where I already know enough, if not too many, people.

This enjoyment of a little solitude has created problems in my relationships with the opposite sex. Few of the women I knew enjoyed being on their own and were deeply suspicious of anyone who did.

Strangely enough my current partner, who is a member of one of the most sociable races on the planet, seems to understand my habit of disappearing into one of the spare bedrooms with a book, or wandering off with the dog far better than my more sophisticated former companions. The thought that she may not care occasionally crosses my mind.

When I sum up my life one of the conclusions I draw is that I’ve been selfish. Wasteful is a term that comes to mind and failure sneaks in there on bad days as well. Failed husband, failed father, several jobs failed at because I couldn’t be bothered rather than lack of ability. Even failed patriot, my country is far behind me now.

I’ve lost count of the people I’ve disappointed without even meaning to do it.

I’ve got to the point where there are very few questions I still want answers to. I’ve worked out why people damage each other, either personally or en masse in war. I know what really matters in life and what doesn’t.

I’m not going to share these insights with you as it’s not the point of this essay.

But.

Why is the rice cooker never turned off?