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Antler's Plaza. That night I went back into cheerful, loud, barroom entertainment mode and did better. I finished the Hornblower novel in my room, bear free.
Jintana, The Love of my Life
I first came to Thailand on a cruise ship in the 1980s. It was the Royal Viking Star, and we docked in Sattahip. The passengers went on tours up to Bangkok and the crew and entertainers headed for Pattaya. Pattaya at the time made Sodom and Gomorrah look like church camp. You could go to a different girly bar every night for three years and never repeat. You could find every perversion imaginable.
We got there at a time when the U.S. fleet was in town. Ten thousand sailors and every bargirl in Southeast Asia. Awesome!
We took songtaws into town. They are red pickup trucks fitted with two bench seats in the back and a cover over the top.
It was 40 years ago and I don't remember much. There was a lot of nakedness on stage. Thai people laugh a lot, even while performing lewd acts in front of drunken idiots. There was audience participation. Take any U.S. strip club you've ever seen and multiply it by ten.
I, of course, was morally outraged. "This is wrong!" I said, as we got really drunk and went from bar to bar. "God will punish you!" I thought as an audience applauded the finish of a hand job in the back of the room. "I could retire here!" as we staggered back to the ship.
Well, I was right. I did retire to Thailand and I first went to Pattaya to meet a golfer friend. There are lots of good golf courses in that area and we played them all, but I soon realized even I was not sleazy enough to live in Pattaya. So I moved to Chiangmai.
I played golf. I went to bars. I hung out with friends. I lived in a cheap apartment and bought a used Honda Civic. I didn't want some Thai girl to think I was rich and hustle me for my money. It worked. No Thai women hustled me and I thought, oops, maybe I've made a mistake. It would've been nice to be hustled. Oh sure, if I walked down Loi Kroh road past the girly bars I could hear women call out, "Hey, young handsome man." This was always morale building but I had a suspicion it wasn't true.