Best of Asian Erotica, Volume 1

Mad For It

So I’m in Phuket, Thailand, just a few weeks and I get a job teaching English.

I need a clock to remind me to wake up. I want a big damn clock on the wall ticking like crazy. I go to Tesco in my tie and blue silk shirt and see an amazing Thai girl, about 27. Hair cut to the shoulders, wide mouth, a narrow waist that makes her hips and heavy breasts pull your eyes. Some women have this sexual power, like a love potion that people drink up. Karl Jung says it is a projection of the soul or anima. Walt Whitman says steer for the deep waters only.

Enter Goy and my first chance at exotic True Love. A long neck.

Yearning in the face and dark eyes. A relaxed, nurturing vibe amplified by our struggle to communicate as she shows me how to work the clock. My arm brushes against her nipple as she winds up the mechanism. I’m happily swimming out to dark waters. A puff of her cream and cinnamon smell rises to my nostrils. But when I take the clock home, I just can’t get it to work.

A few days later I come back, see her in jeans and a red blouse with SAME SAME on the curvy front. Somehow I get her in the mood and a short while later we’re upstairs in the cafeteria eating Japanese dumplings and fish sauce. She crosses her legs and laughs at me staring. Her toes are painted black. Even her feet are candy.

Her ex was a butterfly. She has a 3-year-old daughter back in Isaan.

Phuket has all the decent jobs, but she misses the rubber tree farm back home.

She’s been working at Tesco five months and dealing with 12-hour days. She sends roughly one hundred dollars home each month. Half her salary.

She lives in a one-room apartment and eats cheap dinners. She’s looking for the right man to save her. Show her the good life. And she’s a swimmer.

Her one day off: Sunday. She doesn’t believe I’ll take her to the beach, which is just as sweet as milk, so we find a shop and I pay for a white bikini. She puts it on at the back of the store and pulls the curtain back for three seconds to let me peek. Time slows. I see deep into her eyes. I see the dark circles of her nipples. I think red wine and French movies. Deserted beaches. Crazy, deep sex. TL.

Time goes on and life is paradise. Better than selling hard drives and meeting co-workers for after-dinner mimosas at Bennigans in America. I never think of the NFL or sitcoms or politics. She teaches me Thai. I teach her English. I feel deep, emotional thrumming in my stomach when we fuck.

Until she comes home one night a different woman. Wouldn’t talk. Shrugs off my hands. Pouts like a little girl and it isn’t sexy. There’s a cold, white pallor to her face that just looks mean. Says she doesn’t like work. The other girls gossip about her because she’s with a

farang

and not married. She wants to quit work and take care of me. She wants money. Maybe move back to the farm and build a house in a rice field. Her parents need funds for everything: hospitals, food, booze, happiness. And then there’s a dowry. A big one. I can’t live without beaches and the ocean. I don’t eat much rice.

And I didn’t leave California with my pockets full of gold. About 20k in the bank and an old Taylor guitar on my back. I chew on dowry for a week or two, but she doesn’t like delays. I came to Thailand because I can live in a bungalow near the beach, swim every day and eat mango, coconut and banana. Drink red wine. She locks herself in my bedroom and talks on her cellphone for hours. Comes out in a denim mini-skirt and heels and leaves me alone until midnight. I’m licking paint off the walls. She gets distant. Starts the going out thing a few times a week. I try to follow her once, but get lost in the mountains. I’m on a steep, dark incline. No streetlights. Weird sounds from the forest. A cool and ominous wind shakes the trees. I’m the only man on the planet. On the way down, I crash into a guard rail. Call her for help, but she doesn’t answer. I know she’s fucking around. But it feels like a way out. I didn’t come to Thailand to be a wingman.

That night, I put her on the couch and yank at her twenty-dollar satin panties until she cries. I want proof. I want revenge. She buries her face in my shoulder. Tears soak through my shirt. I find her lips. My heart thumps.

She sits on my lap and does this squeezing thing she can do with her vagina I don’t understand and I let it go.

But it isn’t back to normal. So I give her 500 dollars for her parents to do whatever. It makes her happy for a while. Pancakes and cheeseburgers fly out of our little kitchen. She buys a bus ticket home to deliver the money and quits her job. Which isn’t exactly what I want, but the sex is so damn magical.

She’s so high on things, so full of trust that she brings me a piece of paper with ‘You’re a very special person. I don’t want to lose contact with you’

written on it in her handwriting. She says her friend got it as an SMS and she wants to know what it means. Yeah, right. I tell her what it means and wave goodbye as she climbs on the midnight bus to Korat.

I can’t let it go. When she gets back, I demand to see her cellphone messages. She is good with the phone and when she opens the inbox, she deletes the first two before I have a chance to read them. Everything else is in Thai. I make her drive to DTAC and get the phone records. I read them standing in the mall and the names are all Thai. Maybe I was wrong. I feel bad.

So I walk through the mall and see a travel agent. A lot of colorful brochures and long-tailed speed boats. I buy two tickets to the Phi Phi islands. Promise I will teach her to SCUBA dive. On the way back, she says, ‘If you ever catch me lying, throw me out.’ That really hits me. I was all wrong about her. She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known inside and out.

I buy two gold rings and carry them around in my pocket for a week.

There is no place I can hide them in the house. She knows every spot. I walk around with my fingers in my pocket and dream.

On the night before the trip, she asks me when we have to leave. I say 7 a.m. She says she needs to go to the market before we take off, about 6. I ask her what she needs to buy. She says I don’t know. Doesn’t sound right at all. So in the morning, she’s getting dressed and so am I. What are you doing, she asks. Going to the market, I say. She has a fit right there. Throws a coffee cup against the wall. Coffee splatters all over my art books. Glass on the floor. I think love is going to kill me. She goes alone and I just know what it is. I know.

When she’s gone, I check my mail and the Internet saves me. She doesn’t flush her cache from the night before because we were packing and eating and talking and I see where she was browsing: on this hook-up site called Tagged. Her profile just pops right up. She’s got pictures I took of her in that damn bikini at the pool in the clubhouse. Says she likes a man who knows what he wants and hip-hop music. She’s got friends. Lots of young European dudes with crew cuts. They look like football stars.

When you’re 53, you know what’s good for your soul. I’ve got a long history of great failure and great success. Western Digital paid me buckets to run the marketing. And I had a network of clients that locked me in. Took eleven years to go from copy writer to Big Dick. And when I got to the top, I didn’t want to be there. I couldn’t stop thinking about teaching music to kids or learning to sail, diving the reefs off the Catalina Islands. The trend went all the way back to Little League baseball. Best player on the team and then my mind turned to reefer and sci-fi novels which turned into a stint of guitar playing and modal jazz. I’m good for ten seconds at everything, and then it’s over.

So I have my life-size epiphany in Stowe, Vermont, at this big marketing dinner paid for by Compaq with too much wine. I raise my hands to silence the table, then throw the question out. What’s the absolute best thing in life?

Everyone quickly agrees: true love.

It was all the proof I needed. Proof that the one thing I really wanted was TL. A deep, serious, honest connection with a fantastic woman was the one consistent theme of my life. And I admit Thai women had a certain appeal, a promise of youth and good odds. But I wasn’t taking the exploitation angle seriously. Have you ever known one thing to be the way you hear it on the news or in the hallways at work? For me, never. I have to see things for myself.

But I’m not angry with Goy. What’s the point? I just want to get rid of her now with as little conflict as possible and get on with my quest. I do love her, but I can’t live with her. She’s a devil. You know what I mean. We go to Phi Phi and I have the best three days of my life. Snorkeling in the glassy water. She takes me into the bushes behind the beach. Not a soul around except us and she fucks me as I sit on a pile of sand. She sucks my cock right there and her mouth is wet and shiny. She looks up at me with those tender eyes. And I lift her into my lap. Her cheeks feel damp on my fingers. I spread them and pull her close to my bulge. She groans and puts her hands on my shoulders. My cock juts out to find her hole. I feel her muscles squeeze in on me.

When she pulls my head down to suck her nipples, I see two Thai girls behind a coconut tree watching us. Goy looks, too, and she twitches somewhere deep inside. She looks back at me with a lewd smile on her face as I explode to the rhythm of a frantic popping sound coming from her groin.

This is one woman it will be hard to forget.

On the last day, we’re sitting in the restaurant. I’m drinking from a coconut.

She’s nibbling at sour mango. ‘Goy,’ I say, ‘I will never be a rich man. You deserve a rich man who can take care of you and your family. I’ll help you find this man. I can help you decide.’ That’s when I did become a wingman, but for a woman.

She confesses to wanting more on the financial end. It isn’t her exactly, but her family that demands she marry someone wealthy to take care of them back in Isaan. An American woman just wouldn’t think this way, but Thai women do. It’s a different culture and you can’t fight it. I wouldn’t fight. I would use it.

When we get back, I look over her profile on Tagged. She shows me her friends, which ones she likes. We feel closer than ever now that the truth is out between us. I even read her messages from hundreds and hundreds of men. We’re a desperate bunch. When I look at those messages to Goy I see us as conniving, weak, blathering wimps. It’s just as ugly to me as it is to Goy and I imagine any other woman who reads such junk. First, I change her pictures. Not so sexy, more Bambi-esque. She really can hook you with those big eyes and smile. I re-write her profile. She wants a little danger in her life and she can’t afford it on her own. She wants sunset cruises and a candy-apple red Honda Jazz. Are you the man for her?

The replies flood in. The liars are easy to spot. As we read the messages, she sits on my lap and I put my hands on her breasts and pull her big nipples.

I get hard every time we do this. She tells me I have the biggest cock she’s ever sucked. She can be so nasty. We read messages from doctors who can’t spell simple words. CEOs who offer to send money right away. They offer plane tickets to Ireland, Norway, California, Geneva.

It’s the moderate replies that I read with interest. The guys who want to know more and don’t tout money. If you have it, you usually keep quiet about it or at least don’t think about it too much.

I steer Goy to a retired, South African internist. Fifty-six. Says his wife died six years ago from cancer. He’s retired to Phuket. Been living on the island one year. Knows just enough to want a cute Thai girl haunting his condominium hallways and bedrooms. Looks to be in good shape. Gray hair, but lots of it. A wedge-shaped haircut full of expensive gel. Big shoulders.

Deck shoes. An honest smile. It is the smile that gets Goy. Says he looks kind. Whatever.

Goy agrees to meet him at the Natural Restaurant in Phuket Town. I drive her there and drop her off at the corner. She wobbles on her white heels up the sidewalk and I feel a terrible pain at the thought I’m making a crucial mistake I can’t fix. Too many of these crucial mistakes and life kills you for sure or gives you psoriasis.

I’m up all night staring at the guy’s profile on Tagged. I click the pictures over and over, looking for something and I don’t know what. I walk up and down the living room floor with a hard-on and keep looking at my cellphone to see if I’ve missed a message. An hour is like five thousand years.

We didn’t talk about sex. We didn’t agree on any rules. It’s about her.

About her finding the right guy. Two-thirty, there’s a little knock on the door.

I’m wide awake. Savage in the eyes. She walks straight past me. I smell wine on her dress, the ocean at midnight. I call to her. I want the story. I want the details, but she shakes her head no and goes to the bedroom, shuts the door and locks it.

I go back to the computer right then. I know all of the buttons on Tagged and whip up my own profile. I post the picture from Phi Phi when I looked away from Goy in disgust as she happily snapped pics with the digital camera I bought for her. You can see the beach and the waves as a reflection in my Ray-Bans. I have my hands clenched in an expression of ultimate confidence.

I find three more pics and load them up. Nothing sweet. They are manly, active pictures of the beach, a sailboat and me feeding rice to a neighbourhood stray dog. I have one pic with a Toyota 4x4 behind me and the door open. It looks like mine, but it isn’t. I load that too.

Then I write a message. I cut and paste it and send it to almost fifty women who live on the island and grade at least a seven out of ten. It’s a theory. The Wild 7. The tens are too beautiful and in Thailand, their beauty is a major asset. Perhaps all they have. And a lot of the other important qualities may not be there: humility, wit, sincerity. It’s the slightly under-appreciated woman who has long-term possibilities. I want a girl who isn’t a slave to her family. Who swims. Who doesn’t worry if her skin gets too dark.

Then Goy appears from the bedroom. She sits in my lap and stares at my new Tagged profile on the computer screen. A wounded look appears in her little-girl eyes. I feel her satin panties against my thighs. She slides her arms around me. She lifts her brown nipple to my mouth. Her skin is soft and sends pulses of light through my body. I take her nipple in my mouth and it swells. I love the brown color, the rubbery feel of it in my teeth. Every part of her touches a part of me. She kisses me deeply and I regret it all as her hand pulls my throbbing cock out. I love her. She has it all. She pulls at it and I feel her long fingers curling around my head. We finally agree to stop torturing each other. She says she won’t meet any more men on Tagged and I won’t meet any women. She takes her soft fingers away just before I come.

She’ll get a job at one of the hotels and save money. I promise to help her more when I can.

She shows me an SMS from the doctor that proves they didn’t have sex.

The doctor says in the message that he wishes they had made love in the hot tub that night. Next time, he says. But there won’t be a next time for him. I’m taking his next time and the next one too. TL isn’t easy. But you have to hold on to it when you get it. She pulls her other leg over my head and lifts her ass.

I guide her down onto my shaft and moan as I enter her. I am young again and will be inside of her forever.

But the truth is, we are living in a romantic dream that lasts only a few more weeks. Because she can’t turn away from her own damaged search.

And I know every good romance ends in death. It starts with a love potion.

And the potion confuses everything that’s real. The potion makes you do things that just don’t make sense. Then you have a story and the story is full of lies and full of truth and there’s no way to untangle it without a lot of difficulty. True Love. Whitman says, I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

Six months have passed, and Goy has what she wants now. She was on Tagged all along and that’s no surprise. She lives in a mansion at Nai Harn Hill just above my favourite beach with a retired millionaire. He’s Dutch.

The owner of a shopping mall. He’s overweight, hideous and shrewd. Goy hates him and gets everything she wants: a monthly salary, cooking school, that awful Honda Jazz and driving lessons. When I swim out to the bay, I can look back at the hill and just see the silver top of her water tower. I float in the bay and look up at it shining.

I’ve seen her a few times since she moved five months ago. We have sex sometimes and she cries after, but won’t tell me why. When I see her, I feel elated, and when we part, I feel relieved.

On my 54th birthday, I get an SMS from her. It says: I will always love only you.

And I will love only her, but she is gone from me and we will never have those beaches again. My madness is wanting her again, but knowing she is all wrong. What have I learned? Whitman was right about everything.