Chapter Two

Two

Suvanaburi International Airport serving Bangkok, Thailand is less committed to air transit then to commercial sales. The passage ways gleam with luxury product from around the world and as strange as it is to make a place of transit an outlet for high end electronics and sports equipment people were actually buying the stuff. Lonny shuffled along with the herd of disembarking passengers, his fresh passport, boarding pass and immigration form gripped tightly as he searched for a sign, a hint as to where he should go. The masses crushed him to the wall, passing him by, knowing something he didn’t, how to process through the system and enter the country.

Lonny moved up ramps and down stairs and finally found himself at a gate that separated long lines of impatient transients tracing out to distant booths topped with the grim faces of immigration officers sat beneath digital signs that declaimed Foreigner, Foreigner, Foreigner almost as far as the eye could see.

After a long shuffling wait that ended with a grimacing official photographing, finger printing and stamping Lonny's passport with a 30 day visa then moving him on with a jerk of the head; he followed yet more signs to baggage claim and transport. Another enigmatic walk through a maze of shops and outlets selling booze, chocolate, cigarettes, cameras, until finally he found himself without ceremony in the seemingly endless hall of baggage spewing conveyer belts surrounded by edgy travelers vying for position, ready to pounce on their bags if they ever cycled around. The crowd elbowed and eyed each other with exhausted, suspicious eyes.

There was an organization to the seeming chaos of circulating bags. Signs above the conveyers scrolled through flight numbers and destinations. Walking along the far wall he recognized a group of people he had just shared the last twenty five hours with, breathing the same processed air, attempting to eat the same pre-packaged meals of unrecognizable dishes devoid of any flavor but the mildest hint of plastic.

Most of them wandered around looking like he felt. Like they had paid thousands of dollars to endure the most unpleasant day imaginable, like they wanted to fall to the floor and sleep uninterrupted for a week to try and rid themselves of the constipation and hammering head that came with long haul commercial economy seating.

He stood and watched the cases and bags and backpacks diminish in number as the black belt went round and round until finally there was nothing left from flight #1175e.

He found a young woman in a business suit with a clipboard standing between two of the belts. She was pretty and looked official even though it was 2 a.m. Her hair was done up in a bun and she smiled at Lonny as he approached her. There were two pins on her chest one said welcome to the land of smiles, the other I farang. The meaning of which escaped him totally.‘Excuse me.’

‘ Yes sir?’

‘My bags didn’t come out.’

‘Where you go?’ She asked.

Lonny, guessing she didn’t understand, re-stated.

‘No, you see my bags, they didn’t come out of the machine. I don’t have my bags.’

‘I understand, where you want to go?'

‘I want to go to my hotel but I don’t have my luggage.’

‘You want good hotel?’

'No, I want my bags.’

‘You don’t have your bags? Go to lost baggage please.’ She pointed away down the far end of the darkening hall.

‘Right, thank you.’

‘Ok, you go to lost baggage you tell them you bags not come.’ She continued to point.

In the lost luggage office the chairs were full of other unfortunate travelers holding sheets with generic drawings of baggage types and filling in circles that further described their items. Color, size, weight, brand, age. So he did the same, squinting at the form with his braised eyes, trying to concentrate through the hammering in his frontal lobe.

Lonny handed over the sheet to a manicured boy behind the counter who asked him. ‘You have baggage claim, sticker on boarding pass?’

He handed that over as well.

‘You put name on bag?' Lonny nodded. The boy held up a blank airline name tag by its elastic string.“You use this?’

‘Yeah; name, number and address.’

‘You have copy tag, photo copy tag?’

‘Photocopy of the tag? No, of course not, how could I have photocopied the tag?’

‘You no have?’ The boy squealed accusingly. ‘Ohh. You no have photocopy Asian Air Express not responsible for bag, you wait two three day we can send to you hotel.’

‘So you are responsible? You’re sending it to my hotel meaning that you take responsibility.’

‘No, not responsible, we do as courtesy, but no have to and not responsible for you belonging and personal.’

‘But you lost it.’

‘No, you not document, you must to document bag for responsibility. No we cannot responsible. I am sorry sir for you inconvenient.’

At customs he walked through the nothing to declare lane and had the exit doors nearly at hand when he was stopped by a sour faced officer who looked as if he had been asleep. Lonny stood with his single small bag on the table watching a steady trickle of Asians pass through the ‘Nothing to declare’ exit; trolleys piled high with luggage and boxes of all sizes. The Customs agent pulled on a pair of latex gloves and pulled back the Velcro flap of the cheap, fashionable looking bag Lonny had bought a couple days earlier.

The agent went through the few items in the bag. A tech thriller novel set in Bangkok Lonny thought might be informative but was so dull in its first few pages he had put it down and fell into a trance watching movies. Toothpaste and brush, crumpled pages of a New York Post, Sleep mask-odds and ends; nothing to declare.

The customs man closed the bag and asked why Lonny had no other luggage, suspicious behavior. Lonny showed the man his baggage receipt and told him his bags never showed up. The agent nodded and asked him to empty his pockets.

The departures hall was thronged with shills, touts and scammers immediately identifiable by their business suits and official looking neck tags. Lonny knew airports, had spent the greater part of his adult life driving either to or from any of the three major metropolitan hubs of New York and knew they were the stomping grounds of ruthlessness in all forms.

He was to meet Jerry’s contact here, a Mr. Drabzyck, but reckoned from his own lateness no one would be waiting for him. He had the name of the hotel jotted down on a slip of paper Jerry had given him. ‘NANA’, simple enough, and pushed through the men and women with pamphlets accosting him with shouted names: Pad-ya, Pu - ket, Who Him.

Outside in a taxi rank that stretched forward, bending towards the vanishing point, the heat and fuel soaked air was choking and sweltering at 3 a.m. Lonny shuffled in line for a half hour, sweat running down his legs, filling his shoes.

When he was ordered towards a car he was surprised to be met by a driver who helped him with his bags, took his chit from dispatch and even opened the rear door for him. Plunged from the intense heat outside with sweat damp clothes into the frigid air of the taxi, he instantly began to shiver.

The taxi was newish and full of up to date conveniences. He saw a read out on the dash board that showed the interior temperature at 17 against the outside 36, numbers that reflected a significant spread but that he couldn’t convert.

He'd booked a window seat thinking he could winnow away the long hours of boredom by watching the landscape below change from one extreme to the other, mountain to desert, sea to endless plain; it was not a small world and he wanted to watch what was down there. He boarded early and waited with nervous expectation as the other passengers moved slowly down the aisle for who would be his seat mates. As the plane filled the two seats remained empty and he thought luck was shinning down on him but just before the door was sealed and locked a huge form rambled on, grunting and huffing, laden with four bags hung around his neck and one in each hand.

Lonny scanned the plane, it was full, the only seats remaining were the two next to him. He shut his eyes and exhaled. Ok, he thought, still only two of us in three seats. But when the heavy breathing man wedged his bulk up in the aisle and jammed his bags into the overhead anyway they would fit and collapsed into the middle seat Lonny saw that he was not alone. His girth had hidden a small Asian woman who boosted herself into the aisle seat, stowed a small bag in the seat back net, spread out a blanket and curled up against the big man as he lifted the adjoining arm rest to let his torso spill over into her seat.

The man shimmied as far back in the seat as he would go and though occupying most of his companion’s seat, nearly engulfing the tiny woman in his side fat, his left arm still violated Lonny’s space. The elbow hovered at chest height, pushed out by the bulging underside of his porcine breast.

The fat man sat in a bilious MMA shirt that read 'Bring it' in florescent letters and weight lifters pants gasping for breath, wiping sweat from his face and neck with a damp terry cloth tied around his wrist. His chest heaving, air rasping in his lungs. He squirmed and wriggled throughout the trip, his legs overlapped both sides of his allotted 33 inches. The sharp reek of cigarette smoke covered a deeper sour smell of old cheese that never faded over the twenty plus hour trip.

Once the plane launched itself off the ground and was speeding through the atmosphere Lonny could feel the weight of the fat mans eyes on him. He was waiting for Lonny to flinch or move, to make some sort of contact that would give him a conversational opening. Lonny just wanted to sit and watch the world speed by beneath; there was already too much talking on firm ground In thin air, he thought there should be silence. But not more than ten minutes after the plane had leveled off one of the flight attendants strained over all three seats from the aisle and with a defensive, warning smile etched into her face slid the shade down without a word. The commercial air equivalent of having the door slammed in your face.

The effect was twofold; it cut off Lonny’s escape and gave the fat man the perfect opportunity to engage.

'Oh man, he drawled, these women boy, they don’t give no respect. It’s like anything they can do to make these flights worse they go ahead and take care of. Seats too small and he ran his eyes down his own torso engulfing the seat to emphasis the point. Can’t get a drink no more, food, shit… food is terrible and you see the size, like a mouthful of this and a mouthful of that and nothing more.'

'And I got to make this flight twice a year, take her to see her family.' He indicated with a nod the woman fast asleep, curled into his layers like a kitten finding comfort with a hog.

Against his better judgment Lonny asked, ‘you’re going to Bangkok?’

'Naw,' the fat man giggled, 'naw she aint Thai, Filipino. Speaks English. Naw I tried them Thai girls, they’re treacherous, can’t understand a word a what they say and just slippery as eels. No, give me these Filipinos, they Christian, speak English, poor as shit; this girl's family, I wouldn’t let my dogs sleep in their house, so they watch themselves when you take care of em, they real good, this here is my second one.'

The taxi jumped, hopped and halted in place for twenty minutes at a light going through its tri-colored retinue not more than two hundred feet away. All around motorcycle taxis flashed by. Men in white gowns walked hand in hand in lines of four and eight weaving through stalled traffic. Africans in international soccer gear strode arrogantly amongst the lanes jamming up cars vying to make a left on the arrow.

It could have been Rockefeller Center at noon on a Wednesday but it was nearly 4 am and the streets were packed with every hue and sect of human in existence.

The driver kept pointing ahead to the light saying ‘hotel, hotel.’ Just ahead Lonny could see a big, old looking complex looming above a gas station with a convenience sized McDonalds attached. The light went green and the taxi found a break and made it through the choked intersection.

Though the four open air bars around the entrance of the hotel were closed, the street and parking lot were full of women and transvestites walking in packs followed by men of all ages carrying large bottles of beer bartering and dickering with them. A procession of heavily made-up faces peered in through the window of the car smiling, long painted finger nails tapping at the glass. The women ranged from teen to middle-aged but they all had the same harried, menacing look behind their smiles.

The car pulled to the glassed-in entrance were there was a group of four middle-aged men in uniform leaning against a pedestal. They made no move to approach the car, but since there was no baggage to carry Lonny simply paid off the driver and headed straight to reception. In the seconds it took him to pass from the taxi to the hotel door he staggered under the force of the heat.

The place was not exactly what Jerry had promised him when he was given the hotel information. It had a worn, thread bare look and reeked of cigarette smoke, stale beer, fried food and strong cleaning fluids. Still, it was brightly lit and thriving in the early morning.

The lobby was deep, out fitted with cheap looking furniture, low seats and couches upholstered in plasticized material set around aluminum based tables with thin smoked glass tops. It was high style circa 1982. The restaurant was still open, was in fact full of beer drinking foreign men and bored looking Thai women. Lonny’s stomach turned over in a complaining gurgle. What little food had been served on the plane was inedible and tasted like the containers it was served in. Even the fruit, three grapes and a slice of dry melon, had somehow been rendered tasteless.

‘You have reservation?’

Lonny managed to form a timid smile to meet the woman’s grim grin. He placed his small bag atop the counter and reached to get his wallet. ‘Passport please’ the woman said, already filling in the blank lines of a check-in form. Lonny produced his passport.

He nodded.

‘Reservation?’ She looked up from the counter.

‘Yeah, I got a condo room, uh reservation made for me, guys name is Ed, em something or other; Drabzyck, not sure of the spelling.’

She snatched the passport from the counter, leafed through it once quickly and then began pecking the keys of a twenty year old computer.

‘You have?’ She asked.

‘A reservation?’

‘You have or not?’

‘I have a reservation, a condo room, made last week.’

‘Condo room?’ She gave him a curious look. ‘Con-do?’

‘I don’t know.’ Lonny shook his head which pounded with exhaustion and hunger. People did this for a vacation, he was thinking. To relax.

The woman walked away with his passport. He leaned fully against the counter and let his head rest across his folded arms.

‘Mao, mao.’

He looked up at the two women nodding and repeating the same word.

'Mao, mao.’

‘Excuse me sir you have reservation.’ The second asked.

He put his head back down and said ‘yes, I have a condo room reserved for two weeks. My friend Ed reserved it.’

‘You have receipt, confirmation.’

Lonny raised his head. ‘No, my friend made the reservation from here, he gave me the name.’ Lonny fumbled in his pocket for the slip of paper Jerry had given him.

The second woman took it, read it and handed it to the first and they both started to laugh. Not a mean spirited laugh but a pitying sort, like chuckling at a dog with its head caught in a bucket.

The first women handed back the slip of paper. ‘Our sister hotel, yes. You have reservation, this Nana, that Nana mansion.’

‘NaNa mansion?’ Lonny repeated, and that sounded more like it. He could see the NaNa probably wasn’t a bad place, cheap enough and popular but it didn’t fit into what Jerry had described, a full service, four star condo. A suite with a full kitchen, large bathroom, sitting area, balcony- that sounded like mansion. The second woman got on the phone and in a language that sounded like cats fighting confirmed his reservation.

‘Not far they, we can get you taxi.’ One of them told him.

‘It’s not far?’ he asked.

‘No, not far, end of street only.’

‘Can I walk then?’

The two women looked at each other and laughed again. ‘Cannot.’

‘Oh, so it’s far?’

‘No, not far, 300 mete only.’

‘300 meters? Then I’ll walk.’

‘ No, taxi come you cannot walk to there.’

‘ It’s not far, but I can’t walk?’

‘Yes’ They both agreed.

In front of the hotel a boy on a motor scooter waited for him. One of the men in uniform that had previously ignored him opened the door and pointing at the idling bike started to chirp ‘taxi taxi’ and made motions with both hands as if he were revving a motorcycle throttle.

‘That’s a taxi?’ Lonny asked.

‘Taxi’ The man answered and went to the boy on the bike, said something to him and waved Lonny over.

‘It’s not far right?’ Lonny asked.

‘Not far.’ The man agreed.

 Lonny took out a wad of multi-colored bills he had gotten from an ATM at the airport and started sorting through them. The uniformed man pointed to a bright red one. 'One hundred', he said. The bill had Arabic looking writing across it but the man put his finger under 100 written in blue next to what Lonny assumed was a portrait of the king.

The bike sped into the crowd of hookers that had thinned out in the 30 minutes he he'd been in the hotel, made a right on to an empty side street and blasted down the center, narrowly dodging whatever came their way with deft flicks of the handlebars, barely clearing the oncoming lights.

Lonny had spent nearly twenty years driving a 24 foot truck through the jammed streets that grid the five boroughs of New York but this was unlike anything he could imagine anyone doing for any amount of money.

The ride lasted no more than a few minutes, but it had drained him of whatever mental energy that remained from the trip and so when the kid pulled up to the curb, at the mouth of a dark enclosed entrance way he didn’t hesitate to get off and away from the bike. He Swung his bag over the seat and the kid driving the bike thrust his hand out yelling ‘one hundred’ through the visor of his helmet, pointing a single finger.

‘I paid at the hotel.’ But even as he spoke he could see how the scam was going to play out here in a dark side street, in a city he had only just arrived in, so he flicked one of the bright red bills out. The kid snatched it and gunned the bike up the street, the ringing of the exhaust echoed off the dark buildings that closed him in.

A blue neon sign ran vertically down the side of the hotel emitting a faint light but it was written in Thai and made no indication where an entrance might be. Lonny walked into the dark underpass which sloped downward and opened into a large car park. Here there were some bare bulbs that glowed strong enough to outline random vehicles parked at all angles. In the darkest corner there was a muddled conversation happening in the same feline tones he had heard at the hotel.

‘Hello’ he called into the dank, the notes echoed around the bare concrete. There was the sound of chair legs scraping across concrete and the swishing of shuffling steps coming forward. ‘Hello’ he called again. The figure emerged from the background but was still obscured in the subterranean gloam

‘Hello, you want?’ The voice answered.

‘Is this the NaNa Mansion?’ Lonny ventured.

‘OK, you, come on.’

Lonny looked back and up where the dim lights of the street showed through the narrow mouth of the parking entrance. ‘I can’t see.’ He said.

‘Yes, you come see.’ The voice mimicked back. ‘Come, you come.’

The place smelled of grease and garbage, smells Lonny was familiar, even comfortable with from his years of working in warehouses and on loading docks but as familiar as the smells were they were wrong for a luxury hotel. The situation felt like the opening of some tragic travel article abridged for The Readers Digest where each move the victim made was dumber than the one before. But he was too tired to think and blundered forward towards the voice in the dark letting whatever fate awaited him be.

Up a narrow circular stair well the air was hot and thick, like a sauna fueled by urine and decomposing animal flesh. Lonny was pulled by the man who had taken him by the forearm, babbling. ‘Coming with me, you take a look, OK you come and see the room and decide after.’

‘I have a reservation already, I think.’ Lonny said.

‘ No need, have room, many vacancy. Not so many tourist come now, you OK, check room and stay have relax, you want dink, like lady?’

They came through a steel fire door into a dank hall somehow hotter and even more humid than the stairwell. It smelled like every ash tray ever emptied in the city since the innovation of the pre-rolled cigarette had been dumped just there, ground into the thin nap of the carpet and sprinkled with rancid oil as if it might someday yield a kind of twisted, cancerous crop.

The width of the hallway was crowded with a dark blue leatherette furniture set of two arm chairs and connecting love seat, all of which appeared to have been airdropped in their places and left in these sagging broken lop sided conditions. This arrangement faced a hole cut in the unfinished concrete wall which was covered with a steel screen and burned with a single bulb. A small hand lettered sign on cardboard distinguished this as reception. Otherwise the only source of light was a small television imprisoned in a welded steel cage and bolted high up near the ceiling. Its bluish white static gave the space a flickering, nightmarish glow.

His guide let go of his arm and disappeared down the hallway into a murk so dense that Lonny couldn’t see its end.

Lonny thought about turning around and trying his luck at getting out of the place. It felt like some kind of human impound lot where the only way out was all of your money and a pound of flesh on top of that.

‘Can I help you?’ The voice was relaxed and casual but still Lonny leapt before turning to the caged opening in the wall. Behind the hexed wire screen a young woman held a pen and an open ledger.

‘I was looking for the NaNa Mansion, but I came here by mistake.’ Lonny was trying to locate the steel door that led to the outside world in his peripheral. ‘No mistake this is Nana Mansion, service condominium do you have a reservation?’

He thought to say no, but the man already told him all vacancy, no tourists these days. ‘I think it’s a mistake’, he said again.

‘Come with me please.’ The girl disappeared from behind the steel fortification and then appeared in the dim light ten feet further down the hall. As Lonny followed he was amazed to hear his shoes squishing in the sweat trickling down his legs. His shirt was soaked and his hair wet as if he had just stepped from the shower. Sweat streamed off his brow and into his eyes and he could taste the sour salt of it at the corners of his mouth.

‘Hot tonight.’ The girl quipped without turning around.

His bag seemed to weigh a hundred pounds and every step was a strain nearly beyond his power to manage. They rounded a corner and the girl opened the door with a key attached to a piece of wood almost the girth of a 2x4 with the number 13 burned deep into its flat side.

The air in the room was musty and felt old in his nose as the girl clicked a few switches and a row of fluorescent lights came on exposing the squash court sized room. The air conditioner came on with a roar like a small plane warming up and a trickle of cool air slid down the back of Lonny’s neck. The girl pulled back the blackout curtains that hid sliding glass doors which led to a balcony occupied by a stove, sink and some wiry apparatus that looked like a garment rack. The first gray light of day was breaking, reminding Lonny that the heat, the debilitating, sapping blanket of hot and humidity he was experiencing was through the night. What could day be like?

The balcony looked out onto a canal with a raised walking platform and a huge park beyond. The canal sides were already crowded with people and food stalls and Lonny’s stomach sent up a powerful groan that he was too tired to obey. ‘Nice park,’ he offered the girl who was testing the water in the bathroom.

‘Park?’ The girl asked.

‘Out there, it’s nice.’

‘Oh yes beautiful, not park, Thai National Tobacco Center, they make cigarette.’

The girl pointed towards three airplane hangar sized buildings that fanned out in an arc around what he thought to be the parks' drive. What he took to be early morning walkers enjoying some exercise were actually workers gathering for the morning shift.

‘Ok you tired, you just arrive na? You go to sleep, can register later no problem.’ She handed him the chunk of wood with the key attached to it and stuck her hand out.‘500 baht.’

Lonny dug the wad of bills from his pocket and fanned it out looking for a 500, the girl pointed at a bill just a shade different from the other pink bills, pinched it between her fingers and made her way out.

Just for today Lonny thought. Just to shower and get some sleep. The musty cool from the noisy air conditioner had brought the temperature in the room down a little. Lonny re-drew the heavy curtains across the glass doors, dirtying his hands with the grime collected in their pleats. A shower he thought and some sleep. He sat on the bed, then lay back and could feel lumps and divots from forty years of use in the mattress but before he could roll over he was dead to the world.