The streets are dark enough to harbor monsters and/or ghosts. At two in the morning, the storefronts, gated shut, look deceptively the same, which is a problem. Actually, it’s a huge problem. Kelli went to bed about an hour ago, Josh and Riley are busy “playing ping-pong” with a couple bar girls at place called Ying Yang Bar in Hua Hin, which leaves me to myself. So here I am, wandering the pitch black streets and alleys trying and failing to find our guesthouse. Every now and then, a human in a tight dress and three inch heels steps out from the shadows of an awning, asks where I’m going. In the day, it’s hard enough to tell the sex of sex workers, but at night it’s practically impossible. Normally, Kelli would be with me, her presence a greatly appreciated protective bubble against the men and women of the night, but tonight I’m on my own.
“Mai aow, Mai aow,” I say, hoping the boy/girl understands me well enough to let me be. I don’t want a blowjob, I want my guesthouse. Where the fuck is my guesthouse? I turn left, right. Nothing. I turn right again. Nothing. Where am I? I decide to backtrack, which proves to be the wrong decision. I have forgotten the path I came here by, which unlit ally I turned down first, which street connected to the street I thought I walked just fifteen minutes back. Christ.
The last time I was this lost and this afraid was in the mountains of Northern California, hiking the PCT with my friend Bill. There it was only cougars and the darkness they infested, the shadows of the trees and the opening between them where I imagined all kinds of angry animals, lurking there with their teeth and claws and hunger. But here in Hua Hin, having walked past the same frail prostitute for the third or fourth time, I’m afraid for a reason real enough to have a body, an actual face, and she/he is now aware that I am lost, which means that I am helpless, prey, which also means I am being followed. I quicken my pace, try to walk with more authority. Why the hell did I leave my phone in Kelli’s purse? Finally I find a street down which I can see the lights of the part of town where there are bars. That’s where Josh and Riley are playing ping pong. I need to find them, start over, try again, which is what I do.
At the Ying Yang Bar, a very drunk version of my friend Josh is being beaten badly in ping pong by a busty Thai girl in a low cut shirt. Ning has yet to loose, which obligates him to continue drinking, trying, failing. I’ve been gone an hour, looking for a place roughly four minutes from here. He looks at me, he shakes his head.
“Really?” he asks.
“Really,” I respond.
Riley gives me directions and I set off again, meandering past the girly bars where the heavy thumping of the clubs blends together with the holler of the girls in dresses lined up on the sidewalks. A half hour later, I’m back at Ying Yang.
“Really, again?” he asks.
There is nothing I can say for myself. I sit down on the linoleum floor of the Ying Yang Bar and sulk. I am very very tired. Also, given that Josh and Riley and Ning and Nook are “playing Jenga,” I’m absolutely in the way. Drunk-Josh knocks the tower over. A cockroach scrambles across my foot, disappears into a crack.
For some reason, my sense of direction is totally retarded. It has always been like this, but here in Hua Hin it matters more than it does, say, in any other place I’ve ever lived or visited. Given the nature of these shadows, the specific hunger of the animals which inhabit them, more is immediately at stake. Thankfully, Riley has pity in his heart and we steal off into the night, the two of us. My hooker friend is exactly where I left her, but now I’m not alone. Everything is going to be ok.
In Thailand, one of my guilty pleasures is girls in heels on scooters. With them, I don’t stand a chance. They get me every time, their legs gripped tight around the small machine and zipping past me. When one of them passes us, I always look. This time, the girl in the scooter stops ahead of us. Slowly, very very slowly, she gets off. She turns around. Good god, what the hell is that! Riley stops dead in his tracks. He looks at me, and I at him. This time, the question is not of sex, but species. Can a human being look like that and still be human? The face is sunken in and I can hardly see her eyes. The way her shoulders cripple forward at awkward angles make her chest cave in like someone dropped a heavy rock on top of her and crushed it. Her neck is long and crooked. This is either AIDS or meth or both. Now she, whatever she is, is hiking down her skirt and walking towards us making noises. We cross the street immediately.
Back at the guesthouse I’m leaning my head against the door, saying Kelli’s name until it opens. She’s half asleep.
“Where’d you go?” she asks.
“Don’t ever leave me,” I say, “ever.”
“Sorry,” she says, “I’m sorry I had your phone.”
Safe in my room and behind locked doors, I close my eyes. Next to me, my friend is making sleep noises. It is nice this way, in bed and not in the alleys of Hua Hin being chased by zombies on scooters wearing tiny skirts. If I were to look out the window, right now I’d see Riley zigging and zagging back and forth in the street below me, the zombie with her arms outstretched in slow pursuit. If my ears were better I’d hear the gurgle coming from her throat like something died in there, some kind of plague infest rat, and Riley’s frantic “Mai ao! Mai ao krap!” ringing out in the empty city night. Now, at the edge of a shadow cast across the street, the zombie woman’s arms are wrapped around him, which he doesn't like. The dead thing in her throat lets out a groan and so Riley, in the darkest dark, is running, fast as he can, following the lights of distant bars where he and Josh will last until the sun comes up above ocean. It’ll be two whole days before I see them. Sometimes these things happen, things I can’t repeat. And so it comes, and so, at least in Hua Hin, it also seems to go.
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