January, Cab to the airport:
Our cab driver liked the new Prime Minister so much he periodically let go of the steering wheel to emphasize his praises with stabbing hand motions.
“Abhisit good. Corruption…down down!”
Jab Jab
“Thaksin…Samak! Corruption up up!”
Pointer finger pokes at heaven.
“Now corruption, a littin’ bit (pointer finger and thumb become a set of tweezers holding a nugget of air). Okay okay. Not so bad!”
I asked him if the Red Shirts would be coming into Bangkok to shut down the city as their PAD rivals ( the yellow shirts) had done just two months before.
“[No. They will not come here],” he assured me with three dramatic sweeps of his head.
Good, I thought. The Red Shirts number even greater than the Yellows; the latter populates the city where the former finds its power in the countryside. It’s rumored they could pour down in the thousands. But the unreliability of rumors in Thailand is the only reliable quality about them.
November, Fresh and Spicy (a local restaraunt):
The lunch time conversation has taken a turn towards pathos. Dressed in ties and white blouses we worry about the escalating anti-government protests as dishes of fried rice and stir fried noodles make their steaming debuts from the kitchen, and we stare into the food or exchange strained looks with each other. For two days scenes in the news have shown young men carrying metal rods and machetes as they protect road blocks and shake their fists at television cameras. A motorcycle driver has either rushed or crashed into the road block and more young men hold him on his knees with a machete to his neck, his face tear stained, his lips imploring silently from the muted television screen which hangs in the corner of the restaurant and we shake our heads some more. Elsewhere women are holding up their children to give flowers and food to the police dressed in black riot gear as a thank you (or insentive) for not charging the protester barricades with tear gas.
I’m staring at my reflection in the mirror, which is actually the wall, and there are mirrors on the opposite wall as well, so my reflection goes on and on, smaller and smaller until I stop looking and eat my fried egg noodles with chicken, instead. Everything in the restaurant is white and pictures of red, yellow and blue flowers hang on the wall above the mirrors, which is white clapboard. Outside the sun is screaming and a lucky breeze pushes the baked leaves along the gray brick tiled sidewalk into the road that is heavy with “lunch-time traffic” from 11 a.m. – 2 p.m. That is only a rehearsal for the epic “after-school traffic” from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. That in turn very impolitely infringes on the “after-work traffic” that gets started at 5 p.m. and wraps up six hours later — just in time for the nighttime street sweepers to come out and push the leaves and trash into the gutters with hoses that spray horizontal jets of water, arcing out from the center like plumage.
“Did you hear the protesters have taken over the airport?” Cho asked me after lunch. Jettapat is trying to show me the poem he’s written for Father’s Day about the King but he has written a paragraph by mistake. Since I don’t want to talk to Cho about the seizure of the airport, I ignore him and try to think of how a real teacher might convey the difference between a paragraph and a poem. Cho sees a boy without his book who is standing on his desk so he bellows off to the other side of the room. Jettapat just grins, and I can’t help but feel grateful that he smiles all the time.
December, Railay Beach, Hotel Room:
“Wow, these beds are much smaller than what I had last time,” says Ashley.
The room we’ve managed to arrange after days of failed phone calls to hotels all over Railay beach contains two comfortable looking twin beds — a paradigm of comfort for two people — which will have to support four of us.
“That’s okay,” Arlee says. “We’ll fit.”
Unfortunately I have a bright idea, and like all of my bright ideas ( which seem to have the suddenness of a cough or sneeze) I have a compulsion to express them out loud.
“Let’s push the beds together and make one big one!”
“That won’t do anything,” says Arlee. “At least with the two beds each person as an edge.”
As it dawns on the other girls that I had somehow meant for the surface area of the two beds to increase as we pushed them together — an impossibility — the giggling starts.
I blush, probably, and feel suddenly tired because being an idiot can really take it out of you.
“Well I guess I would have slept in the crack,” I offered.
December, The road home from Christmas dinner:
The cab driver left the car and slammed the door. Nervous laughter rattled in the backseat where Maria, Christi, and Erin paused their conversation to see what he would do. We had refused to let him use the expressway — a faster, much more expensive route — and now the traffic was impossible. It was Christmas. How could so many cars squeeze into this one lane road? How could so many drivers push, push, push so stubbornly like fat building up in an artery until it explodes? It’s traffic like this that made people dream of flying cars. Or replacing headlights with rocket launchers. Or the power to sleep on command, because I was obnoxiously, unforgivably tired, tired like…dreaming while awake. On our left the beer gardens of Central World Mall writhed with people. They ran across the road in twos and threes, drunk and laughing, holding hands. Revellers seemed to be climbing over each other. (I thought of bees in a hive) Music thumped at our windows. Jokes were made about abandoning our cab and its vexing driver for the beer garden. I chuckled unenthusiastically. I was broke. I was borrowing money from Christi just to get home. An ATM ate my card and the last baht in my wallet went to pay for a Christmas dinner I hadn’t really wanted to attend. But I felt like I would be seen as cheap and miserly if I didn’t. Besides, pay day was tomorrow.
The cab driver paced back and forth like a caged animal, throwing wild looks at the winding river of metal, rubber, and glass ahead. It was strange how nobody seemed to be using their horns.
“This guy’s just a little crazy,” said Maria.
“Maybe we should have let him take the expressway,” I said.
“Have him turn back. Make a right and then another,” Christi offered.
“Traffic’s the same in every direction. We just have to live with it and so does he,” said Maria.
“Exactly,” I thought.
The door opened and he sat back down behind the wheel (heavily) stirring up the air which smelled like baby powder and slightly sour…like a person who shook baby powder on himself to cover up his sourness. His head was balding. He wore jeans and a flannel pattern collared shirt with a white beater underneath. His hands grabbed the steering wheel turning his knuckles white; he cursed in Thai under his breath: “Tlaffick, tlaffick…[indecipherable]…mai mai tlaffic, too mutch.” Frustration. I felt a wary tingling in my muscles. I imagine if I had fur it would be getting ready to stand.
There are points when a person needs to release what is inside of them. Slowly is preferable, but immediate release happens. I like to think I understand this about people — their resemblance to teapots. Nevertheless, when the cab driver screamed “Fuck!” (the word carried a spike of elation, as if he were trying it out, searching out new niches of feckless foul-mouthedness) I still reached for the pen in my shirt pocket to stick in his eye in self-defense.
“Right. We’re getting out now,” Maria said.
“Uh huh. I think that’s what’s gonna happen,” I said.
We put money on the front seat and evacuated the vehicle, entering the metal river as revellers waded across to the other side.
