Chapter 23 - Stoned Writer in Thailand 1979
B's luck is about to change. For five years now he has been living in a small Thai village as far away from the maddening crowds as could be found. He has cut away his matted hair and bead that could have been reincarnated as someone's doormat and dresses himself in modest loose clothing. He has learnt Thai to semi-fluency and goes about his business as quietly as possible, making every effort to fit in with the paradigms of rural life. In all the time he's been here, he's been invited to eat by another family on two occasions.
B could not really care less, though and doesn't mind being the butt of everyone's jokes. They are cracked out of his earshot now that they've caught on that he understands their language. Anyway, most of the time he is quite out to lunch on a diet of 100 bongs of strong grass a day. A few bananas thrown down his neck every now and then as a token concession to the demands of the stomach.
He has a woman who understands. And the twenty dollars a month that the Australian girl still sends, are made by her to go a long way. He shares her bed at night, along with a thousand mosquitoes and, when she goes to trudge up to her shapely calves in the rice paddies in the day, he settles down to his life's work.
He has hardly spoken to anyone about his time in the caves, knowing that conversation could hardly do it justice. So now he chains himself to a typewriter that has been taken apart and reassembled so many times that less than half the letters are where they should be. His water bong sits faithfully by his side and it's put to use each time he completes a page. The grass numbs the bruises inflicted as he must punch each doddering key home.
He is immersed in the bliss of the poverty-stricken artist who dreams that true creativity can only flower from grass-roots destitution. His manuscript grows to a preposterous length and he is happy to be lost amidst the whole process. For as long as the book is yet incomplete, he can convince himself (and anyone else who might ask) that he's chiselling away at the key that will open the gates of Future Opportunity. Never mind he'll end up just hoarding his book under his bed for the next twenty years, the pages becoming increasingly dog-eared and yellow. Better that than degrade himself in the prostitution every artist must endure to tout his masterpiece in the marketplace.
And while he's not held in any appreciable esteem in the village, he's not exactly bothered about his personality ratings after so many years of a fan club of only one. He likes the Thais. As he weans himself off of his familiar solitude he could not have found a better people to live among.
They are mostly quite content to just be. They have no need for the ravenous pursuit of knowledge, much less consider such an appetite to be a virtue. Evening time does not find scissors being industriously applied to clipping out excerpts from newspapers to fill in the pigeon holes of their minds. Instead they're largely content to relax into the moment until the next one arrives. They are unruffled when life gusts in their face and can turn playful as children in a moment, full-grown daughters squeezing their mother's breasts in fun. No opportunity is missed to laugh at life as, when someone burns himself with scalding hot water from a radiator, everyone in the room rolls around in laughter - Including the guy in pain. At their best, everyone takes no one seriously, least of all, themselves.
However, Thailand is changing at devastating speed, leaving the culture dizzy asDwhen a motorbike misses him by inches on the outskirts of the village. The rider didn't even see him as he urged his good-on-acceleration, bad-on-brakes metal machine to distant glory. The handlebar mirrors were, of course, angled only as to reflect the driver's hairstyle. Maybe more gel.
The corruption festers within the village also. Radio sets become more numerous and deaf elders leave the things on at full volume all day. And the thing is, it only seems to be D who gives a fuck. The real preservers of ethnic tradition are rarely the indigenous themselves. They want washing machines, TV's and wristwatch calculators. It seems to only be the disillusioned children of the Western automatic treadmill, parachuting down upon Asia with billowing hippy flags in search of bamboo gurus. The locals want plastic. And why? Because the radio says so.
B scowls behind his typewriter as he watches the evil media winds that poison his Eden. Short of returning to the caves, he has no chance of escaping the flashing in neon fact of the modern nightmare. No matter how remote he hides himself. In every isolated idyll across the globe, there are clocks ticking towards its eventual demise, its saturation into the mass market heralded by the first television set.
And then one day D receives a letter three months late informing him that his grandfather has died, leaving him close to half a million bucks. What a drag. How is he supposed to pull off the starving artist routine now? Anyway, what could he possibly want that he doesn't already have? The rich man is he who has enough. D sits cross-legged in cocksure serenity that he needs nothing and could give away this fortune without a moment's regret.
His pose is interrupted by a tingling at the base of his spine and he squirms to get comfortable. The sensation crawls up his back and widens to irritate his back but this is no surge of Kundalini. His fingers grab at his skin with involuntary urgency and he leaps to his feet to see if an army of ants has assailed him. He can see nothing but tears off his clothing in desperation. The tingling becomes a violent throb that stretches out to toes and fingertips, intensifying into an all-over body itch somewhere within the marrow of the bone, far from the aid of scratching nails that scrape his skin to red blisters. D writhes on the floor in agony that is almost epileptic and his convulsions send his chair and writing table to the ground with a clatter of bamboo.
And just when it can get no worse it continues to do so. Every cell is focused on the unbearable and mystifying torment he endures and so intense is his misery that he loses track of his physical location. Images flash before his eyes like the death routine until he realizes that he has never seen many of the sequences that become clearer with each moment. The shapes take on clearly-identifiable forms and he at once recognizes their erotic content. A parade of strobing females flash before his eyelids and he realizes that he never had a girlfriend with really wide bell-jar hips. Somewhere distant from his attention, his body continues to jerk and jive in a thousand directions, but D is busy previewing all the kinds and shapes of women he has never had. The visages become more sophisticated and the raw content of breasts and thighs evolves to include settings of cocktail parties and spacious villas on tropical islands, milkshakes in the fridge. He visualizes himself stepping out of sleek automobiles with flaming beauties at his side.
A bucket of water splashes over him and he's shaken out of these dreams. His girlfriend stands over him with the empty pail in her hands. She looks at him strangely.
"You have ants in your pants?" She asks with suspicion.
"No!" He gasps, scratching at a more leisurely rate now, "But I did just inherit a lot of money." He grins for want of a more intelligent response.
"Oh." She says, understanding what that means a whole lot quicker than him and walks out of her hut. She guesses that she'll soon be needing a new lover.
A few months later, and D is acting out all his fantasies. He's had a BMW especially imported into the country and such a car has never been seen here before. He cruises through the streets of Bangkok in the night hours, drifting with no clear destination in mind. He coasts on this new way of life and watches to see where the currents take him. He still sees, hears and tastes things the same as when he was poor and, though the external settings in which he finds himself have been revolutionised, the inner view is much the same.
Rich or poor, he must still wake up in the morning and find reason for living. His money cannot explain existence to him nor help him come to the essence of it. He is now thick within maya, the illusion of life and his desires wrap around him like steam. As he unveils each one he discovers there's actually nothing there. Like the vacuum of feeling that can follow orgasm. In this jungle of chameleon possibilities, D intuits that nothing in itself will bring him satisfaction. Many years later, he tells me:
"Slowly you'll come to be disillusioned by everyone and everything. Then you'll either end up enlightened or a weary old cynic like the rest of us."
Whilst his money does allow D to fathom the depths of his charlatan desires, which promise so much and deliver so little, it does also create a number of distractions that can make him forget to take the perennial perspective. But boy, what distractions.
For, naturally, his popularity with females has increased and now he gets to find out how it feels to be with all the women he never thought he'd have. A little disappointing, actually. The most enjoyable moments of these experiences are just before the bedding when he is consumed by anticipation of the pleasure to come and hours afterwards, when he runs the playback in his own mind. The beauty of these nymphs is somehow too human in the flesh and their maddening magic is never something that can be possessed, no matter how close they let him come.
But he can try, damn it. His bodily irritation has become less intense now as the hornet's nest of his desires calm down with the first tastes of long-awaited luxuries. In regard to this, Ali will tell me fifteen years hence:
"We gotta scratch all our itches. No way round - Only through!"
