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A Delicate Gamble
Hanging out with a prostitute in Bangkok
At Tracy’s Club in Bangkok I was greeted at the door by a young man wearing a retro white sailor’s uniform. The imagery inside was more decadent: a painting of a naked woman smoking opium from an indigenous opium pipe, an erect six-foot penis carved from a teak trunk, and two dozen girls in skimpy dresses or skirts. The girls were cavorting or posing salaciously – sitting with their legs open, deliberately leaning down to tantalise the men with suggestive views of their white underwear, and hovering around the pool table, propping their legs open behind the pockets where the men were aiming the balls.
But I was spared the girls’ attention thanks to Nan, a friend of a friend who I had gone to Tracy’s to see. Nan is extrovert, bubbly, confident and, like most of her peers, young and sexy. She comes across as a natural showgirl. “My brother,” she exclaimed when she saw me. As my patron Nan buffered me from an assault of enticements from her colleagues – so I could sit back and watch the girls seducing the men. The Western men were business types respectably dressed in black polished shoes and ironed trousers and collared shirts; the few I spoke to were staying in expensive hotels.
The girls outnumbered the men four to one, and some of the girls were writhing to loud pop songs such as Sex Bomb. The girls’ job was to keep the men smiling with their antics, to encourage them to drink recklessly, and to turn them on – subtly and not so subtly, including “accidentally” touching their crotch. Quickies could be had in a backroom, but most men opted for the full service: to take a girl for the whole night to their hotel, at a cost US$37 including the bar’s thirty percent commission.
The girls, who formed loose freelance alliances with the bar, get paid a basic salary of US$60, and in return they are expected to coax the men to ‘buy the lady a drink’ – and ‘lady’s drinks’ are worth a third more than men’s drink. The rest of the girls’ income comes from direct sexual services; on average, the girls’ earn more than they would if they waitered in restaurants or worked as sales people in shops. Nan slept, on average, with one man every week.
In her hometown in Saphanburi Nan started her working life at a vegetable stall at the local market. Then she found something that paid better – driving a tuk-tuk – something that gave her a reputation in her hometown as she was the only female tuk-tuk driver in town. Eventually she opted to take a gamble that many Thai girls take: move to Bangkok and search for a Western male benefactor by using prostitution as a cover. Her parents didn’t ask questions as they needed the money Nan remits to them, and in Bangkok she lived frugally by sharing a room with another working girl, eating cheaply in street stalls, and making sure someone else would pick the bill when she went out. A couple of times that someone else was me – that was how I became her ‘brother.’
I used to go to Tracy’s occasionally for a change of scenery. The spectacle always reminded of the Italian word for debauchery – bordello, which has no equivalent in the English language, and has been adopted in American English. But the true roll of the word in the mouth is better applied to the series of clubs round the corner from Tracy’s, a lineup of more explicit girly clubs in an alley called Soi Cowboy, which is probably the most intense sex strip in the world. It is full of clubs, and inside the clubs the young sexy girls romp naked on a stage. Soi Cowboy is a veritable bordello, not in the meaning of a brothel as it is used in America, but in the Italian sense: a bubble of alter and comical madness and debachery. But the dynamics are the same – the girls use it as a covert attempt to attract a benefactor.
These girls aren’t prostitutes in the Western sense; they can be more precisely defined as ‘professional girlfriends’. For, even as they give a sex service, they offer themselves whole with immediate effect: a servility that extends from the bedroom to the kitchen. Their aim is to attach themselves to a man. It doesn’t matter if the man has another wife, or if he is absent for long periods – what matters is the monthly royalty.
When I met her, Nan had been engaged in the profession for two years, and in those two years she had been all over the country with foreigners who tugged her along. A man taking her with him on his travels constituted a lucrative assignment – he paid her expenses and gave her money. A couple of times she called me from far-flung corners of Thailand to boast about her acquisition. “Brother,” she would say. “Bring your girlfriend. My man will pay for everything.” A few other times she was luckier still by winning a certain man’s endearment to the point that he would continue sending her money after leaving Thailand. He would be paying her, in essence, to buy her loyalty – the monthly royalty she asked for was US$400.
When I asked her how she could make a man care so much in one or two weeks, she said: “Men want more than sex. They want intimacy. They want a lady who enjoys the sex. And they want a lady who looks after them. I give them all of this from the first night.” Each time, however, the royalties would peter out after a few months, and Nan would return to Tracy’s.
Then I went away for one year and lost contact with her. When I returned to Bangkok I looked her up and she invited me to visit her new place. She sounded excited, and indeed I found a person who had struck gold. She had met a single Australian businessman who visits Thailand a few times every year, and in between, when he feels lonely in Australia, he asks her to visit him for a holiday. He’s something of an art buff. “The last time I was in Australia,” she told me, “I said to him, ‘If you can afford to have paintings that are so expensive, can’t you afford to build me a house?’ You know what brother! He gave me money to build a house, so now I am building a house in Saphanburi, near my parents. You have to come and stay.”
As she talked she was sprawled on the sofa, drinking beer and eating crisps. She had her own room now in Bangkok, and a large flat-screen TV on which MTV was bleating music. I noticed something else: she was growing fat.
(C) Victor Paul Borg 
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