What was I doing in 2009?
I was whoring on the Commonwealth Coin, that's what I was doing.
I was finding myself.
Looking for inspiration.
Thinking about writing.
Writing a book.
Writing anything.
Garuda's Travels was a few years ahead.
I always wanted to be a writer.
But did I have what it took?
No.
I was chasing too much skirt.
Not enough discipline.
Sure, I had written a few.
A few too less.
About the time I was whoring at Thermaes and fucking at short-time hotels, a book came out on Bangkok called Bangkok Days.
Fast forward to 2020.
I have just got around to reading it.
I didn't even know about it until I chatted with its author Lawrence Osborne.
I just felt I didn't want to read it.
I had already read his Hunters in the Dark.
It wasn't until Mark Rogers asked me if I had read it.
Mark is a hardcore gritty writer.
He king-hits your senses.
No bull shit.
He might give up a few jazz sentences, but that's about all, and that's when he's feeling expansive, which is very rare.
'It's kinda like your book Valium Daze.'
Well fuck a duck.
I had to check this out.
I had recently interviewed Lawrence Osborne with Mark Rogers and I did ask about Bangkok Days.
Lawrence wasn't going to give too much away.
I got it.
Read the book and find out for yourself.
I've got about seven more pages to read until I finish the book.
Do I dare finish it?
I don't want to.
I want the book to continue on, literally unravel its DNA until it descends to our baser instincts on the evolutionary tree.
I want it to dump the universal truths.
What I like about the book, is that Osborne relishes in writing about the nefarious characters.
He seems to normalize them.
Obviously, if you are one of them, they are more inspirational than nefarious characters.
Speaking about myself here, of course.
There's been a lot of crap written on Thailand.
Most of the books are pandering towards the Thais.
That asswipe Jerry Hopkins gets a mention.
Osborne doesn't even tell us what book he is reading of him.
I'm sure Jerry Hopkins was a nice guy.
But it seemed to me, everyone who was in the 'cool' crowd wanted to befriend him and partake in a placenta soup.
But I give more credence to Lawrence Osborne for getting it right.
He says it was a book he wrote for himself.
Teeth problems brought him to Thailand.
Who can't relate to that?
It's his Down and Out in Bangkok.
He's not doing it too hard.
But he's not doing it easy.
He's that Transcontinental drifter.
Who isn't drifting in the Far East, asks Osborne.
No one is spared in this novel.
Osborne has a hawk's sense, observing everything going on around him.
He's on the lam and tells us about the book in a recent podcast :
'I was given a contract to write that book by Farrar Straus Publishing in New York in 2005. And I was living in New York, not very happily, as usual. And I shipped out to Bangkok. I already lived there, spent some time before. I was living on Soi 51 in a house belonging to my friend Chris Wise. They went to go live in France for a year. And he gave me a house. I lived in this little house with this HI-SO mad person who had parties on the weekend. It was quite a scene, I must say.'
Wasn’t the 90s amazing?
‘Much better than now. I think Bangkok in 2005 was very much a different kind of city than what it is now. It was much wilder. It was actually the first time I had been in a house by myself in Bangkok. I didn’t know the culture very well but I decided to not make the book some kind of study of Thai culture that people would criticize for being inaccurate. I said at the beginning, I’m just rolling with my ignorance. I’m just rolling on my inexperience on the premise that sometimes your first impressions are more interesting than your second impressions. I wanted to do a type of book set at the equator.
Bangkok Days was intended to be a comedy. I wrote something that would make me laugh.'
The book delves into the lives of a few ex-pats while exploring the Thai-centric view on life, love, politics, and living in Bangkok.
The author does follow-ups, many years later.
Helix the artist in a moment of desperation, shows how low he has fallen.
Did the author predict that he too would eventually become a lifer?
Bangkok Days is a literary feast that celebrates bohemia on the edge of town. It documents 'a crazy time and a crazy place. That crowd has largely dissipated now. Bangkok became too expensive.'
The final question, how many whores did you fuck?
The other ex-pat admitted to over a thousand.
That summed up Bangkok for me.
It was a question that is rarely asked.
