Bangkok Busted:
You Die for Sure
by
William John Stapleton
Copyright 2013 William John Stapleton,
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-1502-4
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
LANDING WHERE?
Where are we? he asked one of the hostesses on the Thai Airways flight after he woke from a brief alcohol induced sleep.
His reputation for instability, so ably fanned by those he had offended, already preceded him. Michael was surprised the airline's crew had let him drink at all, much less knock himself out.
“We are one hour from landing, sir,” she responded in a politely dismissive tone, clearly aware of his identity.
“Landing where?” he asked.
“Sydney,” she replied, shaking her head and saying loudly enough for him to hear, “no wonder”.
Michael’s heart hit the floor as he watched the hostess continue her way up the aisle, collecting the detritus from yet another of the traveling herds which had filled the world's skies and beaches since he first began traveling half a century ago.
Sydney!
Now was the time, fractured, out of the story line, an unplanned curve in history. He had never felt so lost. No longer bound by children, a regular job or the various therapeutic programs which once kept him functioning as a semi-normal individual, he had no idea of his next move, his motives, or in a very real sense even who he was.
Once satisfied with observer status, even that no longer survived.
“I suppose he will end up in the harbor one day,” a man had commented on the plane, dismissing as absurd the audacity and stupidity he showed in daring to comment on the regions criminal organizations; perhaps driven beyond all normal boundaries of self-preservation by the suicidal bender he had embarked upon.
Michael had never wanted to see the so-called Harbor City or the beauties of its much spruiked beaches, Opera House or Bridge everagain.
The claim Australians regularly make that they live in the best country in the world never rang true for him.
He had not felt at home there for years and experienced no sense of home-coming, despite the extremity of the circumstances.
When the job evaporated and the children grew old enough to look after themselves Sydney, the city he had once loved so much for its wild parties and peculiar sense of having never meant to be there, walled as it was by sandstone cliffs and perched on the edge of the most ancient of continents, became nothing but a brightly colored trap.
Christmas and New Year in Australia sounded romantic enough.
But as the London papers crowed, the Great Southern Land's famous summer of sun, sex and surf had disappeared.
The plane taxied through squalls of cold rain to exactly where he did not want to be: home under leaden skies.
As things turned out, it did not stop raining for weeks over the Christmas holiday period, when Sydney's beaches are usually crowded with sun lovers from all over the world, baking themselves brown. In contrast the Thais do everything they can to lighten their skin tones, tanned skin being associated with peasants working in the field.
The reality of thumping back into the homeland to which he had determined never to return struck quickly.
After some time pacing around the terminal trying to locate the shuttle bus driver, he endured the ride through all too familiar landscapes, from the cluttered industrial and commercial mishmash of buildings in Sydney's inner-west to the barrenness of endless miles of neat, heartless suburbia.
While he stared blankly at the landscapes through which they passed, his spirits sank even lower, if that was possible.
For a start, particularly after his acclimatization to the heat of Asia over the past two years, he felt cold, the last thing one expects of an Australian summer.
Michael was still fleeing something he could not see, the false accusations of pedophilia concocted by Aek and the bar X-Size in Bangkok and Surai from the Happy Café in Phnom Penh, the handsome, charismatic, sex mad and money hungry bastard he had slept with briefly and who subsequently kept breaking into his apartment and rifling through his belongings and his computer. Anything to please the criminals of Bangkok.
Their first attempts at denigration, driven by the fact he had dared to write about a routine experienced by many foreigners, of being robbed and deceived by one of their sex workers, had turned his life in Bangkok into a living hell.
They had, without any evidence, called him Thailand’s number one drug driver. He could barely walk five feet without being abused.
The “Spiderman” accusations came later, in Cambodia, where such accusations were immediately life threatening amidst a population which already distrusted foreign tourists, most particularly older men on their own.
Because of the country’s history of attracting foreigners who liked their prey younger than young, they already glared at single foreign men as if they were about to eat their children.
Spiderman or drug dealer, his enemies couldn’t make up their minds. Neither claim was true but they did prove one thing. That the claims he had made were true.
The criminal thugs who ran the sex trade in Phnom Penh and Bangkok, so blatantly linked to the drug trade and protected by the respective country’s police, would stoop to any level to attempt to discredit someone who had dared to tell a common story from personal experience about being robbed and deceived.
His head swirled with exotic images and question marks over what had happened and why; how much he was to blame and how much he could shift responsibility onto the astonishing bastardry which had been directed at him.
"You die for sure," was one of the most common threats he received.
There were many things Michael still did not understand about the events of the previous year; including why he had suffered such excessive levels of surveillance, harassment and vitriol.
Warren Olsen had already put it far more simply than he could in his book Confessions of a Bangkok Private Eye: “How do you tell when a Thai sex worker is lying? When their lips are moving. What if their lips are not moving? They’re planning the next lie.”
All the surveillance proved was that he was not the most orthodox of tourists, as if Thailand was full of saintly visitors who came there to look at the country’s many beautiful temples. The country was full of foreign men there for one purpose only, to party to excess. Some of these men were truly disgusting creatures, and he shared the locals distaste for them.
For
