There is a massive red crab moving at the entrance to a seafood restaurant. Across the street, a large Scandinavian man with blond flowy hair is stripping down to his blue briefs to try on jeans from a roadside clothes vendor. Then there are the lines upon lines of mobile food kiosks, straddling the streets, steaming with odd-looking broth and fried rubbery meats and fruit salad kiosks with pawpaws so red they look like they are bleeding from their hearts. Metered taxis crawl down the street, rolling down windows asking if you want to go. Go where? Who knows. Gay guys walk hand in hand sharing an ice cream cone under the balmy night. The hubbub is palpable. The night is warm and soft and the sky is bruised into shades of blues and blacks and if you didn’t know already that you are in Patpong, Thailand, the ‘entertainment district’ of Bangkok, the shifty chaps who will grab your elbow as you brush past them and ask if you want to see a ping-pong show will definitely make you aware of where you are. And they don’t mean the ping pong that you and I know, they mean a show where naked women put ping pong balls in their lady parts and shoot them across the room into a small netted bowl. It’s a tourist attraction. While we are showing off our lions and wildebeests, back in Thailand they are selling you ping pong shows.
That is what I was there to see. Surely, who wouldn’t want to see that after you have visited the temples and the floating markets? Why go to Bangkok if you aren’t going to see a Thai lady in Patpong light a cigarette with her genitalia? It’s like going to Blankets & Wine without a blanket. Or a dog.
I wanted to see it because my brother kept urging me to go see it. Then when Emmanuel asked me to visit it, I thought, fine, let me go have a look. The cab pulled up in front of a squat nondescript building where several men milled around smoking cigarettes and just shooting the breeze. The door of the cab was opened by a lady in a pair of jeans torn at the knees. Her knees peeked out at me like a refugee clutching at barbed wire. She read the rules in her throaty Thai accent that was made more guttural by years of cigarettes and booze; You pay 3,000 baht, you see a show that goes for one hour and keeps repeating, your money entitles you to a free drink. You can’t take pictures or record videos once inside. Agreed?
Agreed.
Inside, in the air conditioned foyer, a very old man handed out tickets. He had specs perched on his crooked nose, the back of his hands looked like something you would use to bait a white shark. He barely glanced up as he handed out the tickets, maybe afraid that clients would see how dead his eyes had become, immune to the ever increasing oddity of the world that surrounded him.
I slipped through the doorway into a darkened room, a place that looked like an 80’s disco. If you were born in the 90’s, I don’t know how I can explain this to you especially if you have never seen a disco ball in your life. Or even heard the word “disco,” which is what the past generation called the rave. You guys still call it the rave, yes? But in short they are these numerous red glittering balls hanging over the darkened room, and red disco lights swinging above. It was half tacky and half gloomy.
You will probably be the only black face in the room if you go. You won’t feel it though. You never quite feel black in Bangkok, unless a woman holds your hand and calls you “Chocolate Man”, like one who did to me. (Sigh).
A waitress handed me an alcoholic drink for my ticket. I asked for water. The room was full of tourists mostly with a few random locals scattered about. A few drunk and boisterous young Americans (the accents!) sat in the front row hollering and whistling. True dudes. There were men yes, but there were lots of women as well. In the middle of the room, orbited by chairs in rows, was a small black stage with four silver posts. In the middle of this colosseum of hedonism stood a Thai girl: average height, very smooth skin, black knickers, terrific breasts and an ass that is only slightly bigger than my two year old son’s.
She was swaying seductively to some thudding song, like a matador weighs in the bull. Then suddenly she slipped one leg out of the panty and tied it into a knot around her thigh and proceeded to pull out meter after meter of glowing luminous string out of her genitalia. There were wows and gasps in the room. She kept removing more of that seemingly endless string and at some point she gave the end of to one of the guys seated at the edge of the stage to pull, and the guy kept pulling out this string to the amazement of everyone. When she was done more girls came onto the stage to perform various tasks using their lady parts from opening Coke bottles, lighting and, well, blowing out cigarette smoke, shooting ping pong balls, filling their private parts with water from a coke (ahem) bottle and draining off the water into a different bottle that turned into the colour of soda, shooting pins off their private parts that burst balloons overhead, putting a pen in their private parts and drawing a caricature of a man and below it writing the ironical words;, “welcome to Thailand.” And just when I was thinking this shit can’t get any weirder, a couple got onto the stage and had live sex!
People clapped.
Hell, even Imelda, or what was left of her, got her lazy ass up and clapped.
This is supposed to be art. To use your private parts to perform tricks in front a group of strangers.
I haven’t quite come up with the right word to describe the Patpong show. Macabre comes close. Crass even closer. Demeaning, not too far. But overall it was just strange. Very strange. Funny enough I didn’t find it sexual at all. Or remotely erotic. I wasn’t aroused by it physically or mentally. There was something dead about the eyes of those girls as they did their shtick. Blank stares. That thousand-yard stare. Like they had left the room long before we all walked in. They were mechanical. At some point I barely registered their nakedness but I was amazed how comfortable they were with their bodies. The other day I read this article “A very revealing interview with Rihanna” by Miranda July, New York Times where she says that she would like “to see a naked woman who isn’t aware of her nakedness” and I thought she needs to go to Patpong then. The women were oblivious of their nudity and at some point, amazingly, I stopped seeing them as naked. Does that make sense?
Most women – after a certain age – will not strip naked during sex anymore. Not completely. Complete and utter nudity is a train that left the station last year. I blame glamorous TV. And Vera Sidika. It’s amazing how a woman will always seem insecure about something or the other in her body, real or imagined. There are women who you would have to literally break their arms to get them to remove their tops during love-making because they feel that their stomachs are not what they used to be, or they have scars and are shy about, or they feel that their weight somehow congregated around their waistline or they don’t like their hip bones, or their navel – they feel- is shaped like a farm animal’s hoof. The ones with small breasts won’t remove their bras, because someone told them that big breasts rock. Then those who won’t walk naked before you because they have cellulite on their ass, or their asses move too much, or their asses are smaller than yours, which would be hilarious if the man’s ass was bigger than the woman’s, I mean, who touches who in that case: “Jim, ebu turn around, let me see some of that big ass.”
Half the time guys really won’t notice the things you imagine are off, they will be focusing on the things that excite them, not the things that you think don’t.
These Thai girls were comfortable with their bodies, but even more impressive was their Kegels: they were as tight as the last presidential race – uhm, at some point.
But I wasn’t flattered by it. (The show, not the Kegels. The Kegels I liked). There was something very “industrial” about it. You really don’t want to know the kind of things that a woman’s kegels can do, not as a tourist, at least. I mean, it’s a bit jarring to learn that one can actually smoke a cigarette with their lady parts! At this rate there is no telling what else it can do; defrost chicken? Read a map out loud? Predict the weather? Validate your parking ticket?
There were many acts that came up on the stage to do their thing. But one refused to leave my mind, it’s of this particular girl with thick legs and a flat belly, blue knickers wrapped around her left leg, lighting a cigarette with her genitalia, and then using the same said body part to smoke it!
I thought about that act at the passport control. And at Gate G2 as I waited to board. When I woke up in in the dead of the night, flying over some dark deep sea, it flashed in my mind- the smoking private. It has refused to go. Every time I smell a cigarette smoke, I think of it. When I see a no-smoking sign, I will think of Patpong.
I wondered how many cigarettes that lady “smokes” using her private in a week and if it is not harmful, all that nicotine.
It’s ghastly.
Those shows in Patpong are ghastly.
But you have to go see it. I insist. Maybe you will enjoy it. Maybe you will find it more exciting than watching elephants water, or cheetahs nap under a shrub.
Image source: Bangkok GoGo Bars