The final stages of The Twilight Soi's development can now be followed at:

www.thetwilightsoi.blogspot.com

The book is now too large to post in a single slab of copy and on the new site has been divided into chapters.

81,358 words and rising.

THIS BLOG SHOWS THE EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF THE SOMETIMES CONTROVERSIAL BOOK THE TWILIGHT SOI.

THE TWILIGHT SOI WILL BE AVAILABLE FOR SALE IN ALL MAJOR DIGITAL FORMATS INCLUDING KINDLE AND IPAD SHORTLY, AT WHICH POINT THE INTERNET COPIES OF BOTH THE BOOK'S EARLY STAGES, RECORDED HERE, AND THE BOOK'S LATER DEVELOPMENT, WHICH CAN BE FOLLOWED AT www.thetwilightsoi.blogspot.com WILL BOTH BE REMOVED.

THE TWILIGHT SOI WILL ALSO BE MADE AVAILABLE IN HARD COPY SOON AFTERWARDS.

THE BOOK IS A CAUTIONARY TALE ON THE DANGERS OF ONE OF THE WORLD’S MOST BEAUTIFUL AND MOST INTOXICATING CITIES, BANGKOK. IT IS NAMED AFTER ONE OF BANGKOK’S MOST FAMOUS STREETS, WHERE OCEAN BOYS, BANGKOK BOYS AND OTHER GO-GO BARS HUSTLE FOR THE ATTENTION OF LOCAL AND INTERNATIONAL TOURISTS.

THE PUBLIC NATURE OF THE ENDEAVOUR HAS BEEN NECESSITATED BY CIRCUMSTANCE. INSTRUCTIONS ON PUBLICATION OF THE TEXT IN CASE OF ANYTHING UNFORTUNATE HAPPENING TO THE AUTHOR ARE ALREADY IN PLACE. THESE STEPS MAY SEEM MELODRAMATIC BUT HAVE BEEN TAKEN BECAUSE OF DEATH THREATS ALREADY RECEIVED.

THE TWILIGHT SOI SHOULD BE AVAILABLE IN BOTH HARD COPY AND ELECTRONIC VERSIONS AT ALL MAJOR ON LINE BOOK SELLERS WITHIN THE MONTH AND WILL BE AVAILABLE IN BOTH THAI AND ENGLISH.

BOOKSHOPS AND INTERESTED WHOLESALERS SHOULD CONTACT WWW.EBOOKIT.COM, PUBLISHER OF THE AUTHOR’S LAST BOOK CHAOS AT THE CROSSROADS. THE STAFF THERE ARE PARTICULARLY HELPFUL.

MEDIA CONTACT ONLY AT john.stapleton@gmail.com

DRAFT:

THE TWILIGHT SOI

A True Story

John Stapleton

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to Aek and Baw from Bangkok’s Soi Twilight - to the people I thought you were and the people I hope you will become.

That you both wanted to kill me after the hundreds of thousands of baht spent on both of you, and the similar amounts deceived or stolen, was a unique learning experience. Neither of you had ever been on an air plane before you met me; yet there was no gratitude. The vicious end games played out before an easily manipulated public were something to behold. Thank you for the experiences you gave me, some good, some bad, some positively evil.

While you have made me more than angry at times over the ultimately quite large amounts of money either tricked out of me or directly stolen, accompanied by a blizzard of vilification and outright lies to conceal your own crimes, I sincerely hope that further down the track our memories of each other will be kinder.

No guest of any country, however naïve, elderly, stupid or drunk they may be, should be subjected to the systematic removal of their money and assets as if it was a blood sport. Hopefully this book will highlight some of the more dubious practices of Thailand’s go-go boy industry and contribute to its reform, moves which would improve the country’s image as a whole.

The sex industry is a service industry of a unique nature which attracts vast amounts of money to Thailand and spreads that money far more democratically through the community than say, for example, the major hotel chains. The boys should not be encouraged to think of tourists as nothing but fruit for the picking.

Thailand’s image has been tarnished by the straight forward stealing perpetrated on so many visitors to its shores by one section of the community they often come in contact with, its sex workers.

As any criminologist will tell you, there are people who are born without the normal conscience most humans possess, a sense of moral decency and perception of right and wrong, a desire not to harm their fellows. They express no shame, guilt, regret or remorse for the damage they do to others in their pursuit of personal gain. Many of these sociopaths end up in prison; and have therefore been closely studied. Others end up as prostitutes; deliberately thieving from and harming those they have previously charmed on the most intimate of levels.

The failure of major go-go bars such as X-Size on Bangkok’s infamous Soi Twilight to take any responsibility whatsoever for the dirty tricks and thievery of one of their boys, Aek, who became a national hero for having so successfully stolen and deceived a falung, is scandalous but indicative of a much broader problem.

The go-go bars take no responsibility for the thefts perpetrated by the boys they foist upon sometimes naïve, lonely or drunken foreigners. In Aek’s case the X-Size Bar which so glowingly recommended him as decent, honest boy has to date made no reparation for the blatant deceit, theft, trickery, abuse, slander and vilification perpetrated against the author. In the interests of the multi-billion dollar tourist industry it is clear that legislative reform is required to force such bars to take on the obligations to their customers beholden on any other normal business operation.

Thailand’s international reputation is also tarnished by the continued operation of well known bars where under-age boys can be easily bought or arranged for; such as Night Boys, managed by Aek's mentor and protector and one of the people most determined by his rumor mongering to discredit the author and the story he had to tell.

The initial story published on the internet brought death threats and subsequently led to the manipulation of media to create hostility and divert attention from the activities of the bar’s managers and associated networks associated, who are on the face of it in direct contravention with the United Nations Conventions on the Rights of the Child and the UN's campaigns to eradicate child prostitution in the region. Thailand is a signatory to the Convention.

To those who showed me consideration whilst living in Thailand – thank you.

Lampooning a foreigner for becoming distressed, crying and acting abnormally following the breakdown of what that individual was naive enough to be misled into believing was a relationship was an utterly tasteless display by segments of Thailand’s popular culture. The industry’s wiser heads should have known better.

For those who did nothing but dish out ridicule and abuse or took any opportunity to steal from me – may no one ever be as spitefully and childishly cruel to you as you were to that “ting tong” falang who once lived in your midst.

++++++++++

Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun:
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

W H Auden

CHAPTER ONE

LOWH TEH KOON - UP TO YOU

All William wanted was one happy year in Bangkok after working flat out as a journalist for more than 30 years and bringing up two children largely on his own.

It was not to turn out that way, descending into some of the worst
days he had ever experienced, the object of ridicule by millions of Thais laughing uproariously, the mob mentality in full flight. The words “buffalo die” were repeated endlessly in numerous popular songs, his every move followed, his house filled with cameras. Around him the neighbors kept up their constant cruel taunts: falung, the Thai word for foreigner, geur, gow, maw, ting tong, stupid, old, drunk, mad.

William inadvertently became the laughing stock of a nation for being the buffalo stupid enough to be tricked, after they had spent seven months together, into buying a by now famous go-go boy called Aek an $8000 car and a brand new motor bike. William had no intention of doing any such thing, assuming he was buying the vehicles in his own name.

But preoccupied with finishing his previous book Chaos at the Crossroads: Family Law Reform in Australia and facing a tight deadline he fell for the "sweet talk" that they were building a future together and did not query closely the false claim that foreigners could not register cars or bikes in their own or their company's names. It was an old trick pulled by many a Thai sex worker on foreigners, but William had been both naive and preoccupied; and the vicious depths of the treachery and trickery perpetrated against him only slowly dawned on him.

Within not all that many days of the car’s purchase Aek was out the door, bye bye Papa, taking the 240,000 baht car with him and not all that much later the brand new motor cycle he had also stupidly bought; along with everything else, including a brand new laptop, he had showered on him as he fell for the dream of a life together; and fell for the many practiced tricks of the Twilight boys.

Earlier the previous year he had moved into an up-market condo near Bangkok’s oldest red light district, Pat Pong, near the gay bars and go-go bars and ping pong shows, the massage parlors, saunas and brothels which attracted so many tourists.

The move into the large, romantic old style Thai house with a young man he had once regarded as charming, well mannered and respectful had come about after a friend of Williams, Andrew, a self-appointed Bangkok real estate expert, had been duly horrified at the amount of rent he was paying for the glistening grey and black polished surfaces of one of Bangkok’s many new apartment blocks, this one called Silom Lofts in the famous Soi Pipat off Silom.

Andrew showed him many alternative apartments that were larger and cheaper than the place he had landed up in. With foreigners thin on the ground after the massive Red Shirt political demonstrations which had brought so much of Bangkok to a standstill in early 2010 - the protests by which he had been particularly fascinated only brought to a close after an army crackdown costing almost a hundred lives, there was plenty of real estate on offer. But finally Andrew noticed that every time William passed a house in the web of backstreets behind those cventral avenues of Silom and Sathon, many of them abandoned and ultimately no doubt to be knocked down and transformed into skyscrapers as part of the ever changing nature of the Bangkok, a city under perpetual construction and deconstruction, he would stare at them wistfully.

“Ah, you’re from Australia, you like houses,” Andrew finally observed.

“Yes,” he said. “We’re used to space. We don’t grow up in apartments. We like a garden, lots of space.”

Tossing restlessly at Silom Lofts, nice as it may have been nonetheless very expensive for the amount of space, he kept dreaming of the house he had seen for rent on a corner up behind Sathon; one of Bangkok’s main business thoroughfares, leading past the Ascott Apartments and the Chong Nongsi Sky Train station towards Saint Louis Hospital and then onwards to the Chao Phraya river.

William regretted the car from the very first moment he relented to the oft repeated proposal. His old mentor in Australia Malcolm warned him, after he told him he had paid a 50,000 baht deposit, to just get the money back. Tam Peet, mistake, he kept repeating to Aek, depressed at being persuaded into buying a car he really didn’t need, living in the centre of Bangkok. You can catch an awful lot of taxis in Thailand for 240,000 baht.

But Aek kept reassuring him that it was not a mistake at all, that they would be able to tour Thailand and it would help with him getting to university. Somehow William convinced himself to ignore Malcolm’s advice, although he was usually right about most things. William convinced himself that it would be a kindness, considering he was living with a falang, to help Aek maintain contact with his family outside Bangkok. How stupid could he be.

The Chinese family from whom he had rented the house had already offered him a good deal with the house and a car; but Aek convinced him he could get a far better deal through his family. In the end he handed over 240,000 baht in cash. It was a con job from the beginning, a dirty dirty trick, nothing but thieving off someone who probably should have known better, but was old enough and vulnerable to fall for an improbable dream.

All that talk of touring Thailand together as soon as William finished his latest book proved nothing but a fantasy. After it became obvious they were breaking up, in an attempt to protect his assets William hid the brand new 46,000 baht motor bike he had been talked into buying only a few weeks before. He parked it innocently enough among the bikes at the Bangkok Christian House off Soi Convent near Sala Dang, the site of weekly meetings for recovering alcoholics he attended on a fairly regular basis. At one point they had agreed that Aek would at least leave William with the bike. But soon enough Aek was to trick him out of that too, on the same night that it had been arranged he would return to the house to live and everything would be the same as before.

One of the aspects of the affair William now found embarrassing beyond measure was that he had taken Aek to Australia and had been deluded enough and stupid enough to think he was introducing his new friend and partner around.

He had been determined his children, who having grown up in the inner-city had known plenty of gay people through their lives, would take a broad minded and progressive view of the fact Dad was showing up with a Thai “boyfriend” in tow.

“He’s a gold digger, it’s obvious dad,” were the very first words his daughter whispered in his ear at Sydney airport. And as only a teenage girl could do, followed this comment with a request for $500 for a dress for the end of year school formal.

His daughter was both pleased and distressed to have subsequently been proved so perfectly correct. “I’d smash the little prick’s face in if I ever saw him in the street,” she later declared. “It just makes me depressed thinking about how much money he took. Everyone could see what was going to happen, dad. Everyone.” Her list included her mother, her grandparents and friends.

“Let’s face it dad, someone his age is not going to love someone your age,” she added later.

“I know I know,” William replied. “Don’t rub it in.”

The truth was to prove hurtful in many ways.

Nor was William’s son impressed to see him with a younger man only a few years older than himself. “Now I’m going to disown both my parents,” his son said in the car on the way from the airport, and later expressed little surprise to hear of the amounts of money stolen and tricked out of him.

While in Sydney he took Aek over to meet his mentor Malcolm. It was meant to be a proud moment, introducing the new person in his life, but became nothing of the kind.

Malcolm had become his friend and mentor in a recovery program in the late 1990s; and they bonded closely when they discovered they shared the unusual characteristic of thinking in pictures. Only a small percentage of the population think this way, but neither of them could imagine how it would feel to just have one slow thought following the next, or living without the torrent of images that flowed through their own brains.

William admired Malcolm greatly, not just for the help and wisdom and often enough strong words he had dished out so freely, or because of his loyalty as a friend, but because he had turned his own life around and become one of Australia’s most successful artists.

After the debacle Malcolm was unkind enough to say: “I picked it immediately I met him dear. He was already looking around for the next warm body in case you turned sour. While you were sitting at home doing your writing he would have been off at the local massage parlor turning tricks. You just have to face it: they don’t like us. You are dealing with centuries of poverty and it is ingrained in their thinking. They hate us for our money and that is never going to change. Dear, by all means sample the merchandise. Just don’t bring it home. If you do, they will never stop until they’ve bled you dry.”

On one night when Aek was meant to return to the house to live, as an act of faith William brought back the bike from where he had parked it. All the more fool he. Uncomfortable together after all that had happened, and perhaps still in the grip of some sort of insanity, the idea arose that they get some boys together and have a party. That, too, ended in debacle and he was cheated out of yet more tens of thousands of baht, all for nothing. The so-called party never happened. Aek disappeared out the gates that night with the bike and he was never to see it again. Later he was to notice the bike key missing off his key ring. He hadn’t heard the bike disappearing, and in the morning stared at the spot where it should have been in disbelief. Cheated again. And again. And again.

“The same thing happen to me,” a European woman living in Bangkok said to him. “They take and take and take. Why? Because I not want to love somebody? Now I have not one Thai friend.”

It was a typical enough response.

There were many foreigners resident in Bangkok who said it was virtually impossible to become friends with a Thai. The extreme difficulties of the tonal language, the customs, the ways of thinking were just too different. Foreigners were just walking ATMs, and were widely regarded with contempt for their ugliness and poor manners, as morons with too much money.

As far as William was concerned he had paid for both the car and the bike out of his own hard earned money, was deceived into letting them be registered in someone else’s name and to see them disappear within days in what in retrospect was a well planned operation was nothing but straight out theft. As far as the Thais were concerned he was just an idiot, a buffalo stupid enough to fall for such an old trick.

There is nothing the Thais find funnier than something bad happening to a falung, a foreigner; and his misfortunes, compounded by his own mistakes and drunken behavior, simply fueled the laughter.

He was jeered at, put down, stared at or tormented wherever he went, as a drunk, and repeatedly as a so-called drug driver, claims Aek made against him without any evidence whatsoever and with no one bothering to check the accuracy of the claims. While he was later to admit publicly he had made up the whole drug driver story as part of his smear campaign, the admission didn’t seem to change very much. Aek continued to do his best to paint him as a drug crazed idiot, actions no one who cared in any way for the person involved with such a malady would have taken.

Absurdity piled upon absurdity. As the days passed, advice to change countries increasingly looked the better option, although William’s instinctual reaction was to stay and see how this story, amongst so many others he had written about or lived through, would end. Narrative structures have an inherent beauty all their own.

Luckily William had been in journalism all his adult life, and was used to the fame, infamy and controversy which accompanied it. He knew the world of smoke and mirrors. He knew the nature of news cycles as well as any one. Build them up one day, tear them down the next. Today’s hero becomes tomorrow’s villain.

As his personal and security situation deteriorated; and his only real friends if you could even call them that once he had dropped out of the 12-step program he had struggled all year with, advice to change countries by acquaintances both in Bangkok and overseas looked increasingly like a sensible option.

“You are a walking dead man,” one old acquaintance warned. “Once they've got their claws into you they will never let you go until you haven't got a cent left. People back in Australia already know you're in trouble, that you're not coping well, that you're going downhill.”

Why should he be driven out of a city he loved, despite the lack of a warm embrace? A wise man walks around trouble. William seemed to have landed slap bang in the middle of it. To now be walking through the middle of a sea of chaos and fear. But why should he flee what he regarded as one of the world’s most beautiful and affordable cities, all on the vicious propaganda spread by a go-go boy called Aek and a street boy called Baw, the two figures who were to wreck havoc in his life, with his own drunken and foolish behavior compounding the problems. A wise man also stays calm in the centre of a storm, but despite the anti-anxiety medication the hospital had put him on calm was just about the last thing he felt.

Prostitution, particularly long term prostitution, does strange things to people's heads, hearts and souls.

William thought he had understood all this, was tolerant if not intrigued by the whole milieu, because he himself had rarely if ever had sex except for money as he was growing up. In Australia in the late 1960s, to do so without remuneration would have been an admission you were gay. Besides, he liked having a car to run around in, William liked apartments with views of the city. He just didn't think much of the sex, that was all, and made sure he was blotto every time. He always demanded there be a bottle of Scotch in the hotel room as a prerequisite. He had no desire to remember what happened. There was a point in those heavy drinking nights in his own youth when there was an odd click in his head and the bar around him blurred. Beyond that point he remembered nothing. That was the oblivion he sought.

Perhaps it is karma, dear, his old mentor Malcolm pointed out rather unkindly one day. From what you’ve told me you never lifted a finger to make the old men who loved you happy, you were never very kind to them.

Those teenage years when, hard to believe now, he was regarded as very good looking, affected his view on life in some peculiar way. He became used to walking into a room, party, café or bar and immediately being the object of attention, admiration, lust or gossip. He also acquired a certain dislike or distaste for sex which most men found impossible to understand. Forty years on, entering a club, café, restaurant or just walking along the streets of Bangkok, he was looked at for entirely different reasons, all the wrong reasons.

The small group of miscreants he hung around with in those early days back in the 1960s were, unlike himself, usually in and out of various institutions. William was the one smart enough to stay out of trouble and get on with his dream of finishing high school by correspondence and going on to university. He was also the one who knew how to make the old queens pay and pay and pay. It was one of the strange quirks of the game. The less you gave out, the more desperate they became to win you. But he never had to resort to lying, stealing or acting, the standard tools of trade for most of Bangkok’s Twilight boys.

After the infamous Rex Hotel, then one of Sydney’s only gay venues, opened its doors each morning that little gang of unemployed youth with which William identified would often meet up at the Alemain Fountain, a spiky stab at modernism considered to be the heart of Sydney’s red light district. They were all under 18, but allowed into the Rex Hotel by midday, where they were fed cheap drinks under the watchful eye of the manager Janine.

Essentially they were the bait, they attracted the older queens to the bar. Often the drinks would queue up in front of him, it was impossible to keep up. His merry little band were often drunk by early afternoon, easy prey.

Men often declared their love; and William paid little heed and it was true enough, did little to make them happy. They were certainly not allowed to fuck him. He would lie on the hotel bed and let them suck him off. That was about as far as he was ever prepared to go. And as far as he was concerned, if they were prepared to pay then they were getting their money’s worth. Affection, sure, he often enjoyed their company, certainly didn’t mind the free restaurants and drinks. And as, at that time, he was almost invariably the youngest person in any social scenario, learnt a lot from the kindness of strangers and the wisdom of those older, wiser and better educated than he. But it was ridiculous to expect a teenager to be in love.

In his earlier years William was directly blamed for one death and two suicide attempts by lovers. The count was three if you included John Hay. Although William hadn’t actually seen JH for several months before his suicide the long, tortured and no doubt for him expensive trail between them stretched over years and had included the full sweep, cars, houses, city apartments, businesses. Yet he never once had sex with him without demanding to be paid, it was a matter of principle, whatever that principle was. Yet on one level they were quite good friends. They laughed a lot when they went out to restaurants.

Most of his professional life when William ventured into controversial arenas he was hidden behind a computer screen, a byline, a microphone, a multi-billion dollar media company. If someone didn’t like what he had to say, they were perfectly welcome to write a letter.

Bangkok, with the personal vilification he faced on a daily basis, was an entirely different matter.

Perhaps the worst public vilification of his life prior to his Bangkok experience was, if his memory served him, in 1969, perhaps the clock had just ticked over into the seventies.

The only person sleeping with him for free in those chaotic days was a skinny little Irish alcoholic called Chris who he had somehow befriended in the chaos of the bars which enveloped them on a nightly basis. Sometimes homeless, he would find himself sleeping in Chris’s tiny Kings Cross apartment. It had that typical smell of stale cigarettes and the alcoholic sweat of single men, of unwashed sheets and takeaway food. William was fond of him in some odd way; and didn’t mind ending up there as the random events of the night dictated.

But then Chris had to go all the way and declare he was in love; and for this he was nowhere near ready.

Chris dropped dead in the bar at the Rex Hotel one midday after drinking an entire bottle of Scotch that morning, the day after William had told him he didn't love him.

There was no doubt who was to get the blame for his death. "Murderer" many of the people he used to think of as friends or acquaintances would yell at him in the street, “murderer” young men shouted as they hung out the windows of passing cars.

But those days of infamy and obsession were long gone.

The impossible happened, he grew old, exactly as has happened or will happen to everybody else. Now, at 58 he was talking about an era in his life 40 years past.

William heard people laughing at the idea that he could possibly have fallen for the story that someone in their twenties could possibly love someone as old as him; and the taunts of geur, gow, buffalo, old, stupid, continued to rain down.

Many things had changed since then. Laptops, which transformed writing and rewriting from an arduous task to one of comparative ease, were invented, for a start. And his body sagged in all the wrong places while his face became lined from too many cigarettes and late nights. And he went from the hunter to the hunted; from being paid to the one who paid.

At the age of 58, in Bangkok, was his first experience of paying for sex. He fell into trap after trap. Sometimes he would put it thus: “Pom Chop Mon Thai, tahm peet mak mak tani.” I like Thailand but I have made many mistakes here. With the beauties of Google translation programs now so readily at hand, William tried to explain to Aek that he was not a complete innocent and warned him: “Watch out for your own karma”. Aek professed to understand, but as his subsequent behavior indicated clearly did not.

What had begun as seemingly such an adventure ended, and a trip to Thailand, would, he assumed, be at last some of the most fortunate days of his life. Instead they turned, at least for a while, into some of the unhappiest days of his life.

He became the subject of ridicule and parody, the object of one of the cruelest and crassest parodies on television he had ever seen; he was ripped off for tens of thousands of dollars by a go go boy who became a hero in the gay bars while he became the subject of ridicule, and wherever he went he was ridiculed and demeaned. Falang mai dee, no good, falang ting tong, on and on the insults reigned.

One Saturday morning, when the normal clutch of street stores down the road were shut, he wandered in the other direction, into the traditional neighbourhood, and when he asked the directions for “ron café”, a hot coffee, the normal woman having shut her door for the day, he was told bluntly: “Buffalo go home.”

The dismissive phrase, “Kow Chai Aek”who wouldn’t leave a falung like that, who wouldn’t rip them off for as much as they could, became the cleverest insult anyone could think of. All cheers to Aek. The phrase “Kow Chai Aek” became a subliminal echo wherever he went; a put down, a distancing phrase, which marked him not just as an idiot but utterly despised.

The Thais were never going to take the side of a falang, no matter how big a cheat, thief and liar the perpetrator of the fraud that person may have been.

But how many of the voices were true and how many were just the result of his always over-active imagination he could not tell. Some mornings he would wake up and all he could hear from the surrounding houses, streets, even the trees was that same phrase: “Kow Chai Aek”.

Well they might understand, but he would never understand why they could not have worked things out in a better way; why someone had deceived him so fundamentally, had pulled so many old tricks on him, became a hero, while he, whose money it had been and whose generosity had been so abused, became nothing but a laughing stock. It would in the end have been so much easier just to have done the right thing.

William might have been paid for sex in his earlier life, far from the almost universally professional liars, con artists and outright criminals he found at every turn and in what seemed like every go-go bar in the sleazy part of town he was at first so fascinated by, he had never found it necessary to lie, cheat, steal or deceive.

Of course, as his old AA sponsor and others unkindly pointed out, none of the drama that enveloped him would have happened if he hadn’t made the decision to pick up that first drink. But that he did. “You’ve always been drawn to the gutter,” he declared, as if it was some severe lapse in taste. Fair enough, he liked colorful characters, and that was one place to find them.

Only vignettes could help set the scene of the improbable story that was to unfold: Now you wake up? the evil little prick aka criminal queen who sold ice to the boys and acted like some Prima Donna who should have been cast in a movie about pure evil asked him. He was attached as he understood the loose nature of these things, to Night Boys, that bar on Soi Six he nicknamed the Bewildered Soi, Mr Joo Joo they called him, and he would blatantly twirl in his hands a small straw for smoking ice wherever he went.

Yes, William said. I’ve woken up. A little too late unfortunately, or I would have saved myself an awful lot of money. Woken up to the fact that words like “I love you” and “I miss you” are easy to say but mean absolutely nothing, well certainly not in this milieu.

Woken up to the fact that these boys were superb actors, but that they were just working. That just like his own experiences as a young man, they didn’t enjoy getting off with an older person any more than he had.

By now William knew that betrayal was in Aek’s nature, and in the nature of many that he had met, that nothing would change, that the kinder he was the more he was taken advantage of, the better he tipped the more stupid he was regarded.

They were sitting in the corner bar Hot Male on the corner of Soi Twilight, and Aek was being particularly cuddly while acting, and no doubt it was acting, as if he was drunk. Despite all the protestations that they were off to a new beginning and he wanted to spend the night back at the house; this, too, ended in disaster and duplicity.

William’s efforts to move on from the wreckage of this relationship were slower than at any other time of his life, partly perhaps because of his age and the fact he found it hard to make friends amongst the Thais, who misinterpreted his familiarity as stupidity, partly because the collapse of the fantasy built up around him had been so sudden, partly his resentments at the amounts stolen from him.

He received zero sympathy, compounded by the insane and life threatening alcohol and drug bender he descended into. Unable to bear being at home by himself he became often enough a public spectacle, unlovely in just about every aspect, cruising the bars and seeking company in all the wrong places.

During the 50 day bender he embarked on after Aek’s departure, William became increasingly isolated, a jerking parody of a human being. Lost, entirely lost. At first he had no idea how strange he must have appeared to the Thais, calm by their very nature. He had never been calm in his life. Humans are pack animals, just like dogs; if one of them is injured they turn on them and attack. He was about to come under sustained and unprecedented attack.

The only thing he could compare what he was about to experience, the howling, jeering ridicule of the mob on a daily basis, was one day at school many decades before when, during the lunch break, he had been taunted as being gay by the best looking boy in the school.

He remembered it thus:

The chant was loud: "Hit me with your handbag, hit me with your handbag." Around him there were a hundred or so kids, all keeping up the chant, all whooping and jeering. There wasn't a teacher in sight. The school yard had never seemed more desolate, or more frightening. He was on the ground. His principal antagonist, an astonishingly handsome boy called Mark, kept hitting and punching him as hard as he could. He had curled into a defensive ball, and the blows rained down upon him as the wild, distorted crowd kept up their jeering.

It was his worst day at school. It cemented his place as the weird little kid who couldn't fight and was probably a poofter- the derogatory Australian term for gay. The blows rained down and he retreated even further into that place he was building deep inside himself, where no one could get to. The lunch hour had begun ordinarily enough. They spilled out of their demountable class rooms on to the flat sandy soil reclaimed from the surrounding swamps. Pittwater High, it was officially named, but they all called it Ditchwater. It was a soulless, spiritless, appalling place where even the teachers seemed to be dying from lack of enthusiasm.

The kids swirled and their bodies grew and every single day was a nightmare to be endured. He felt wrong in his school uniform and wrong in his body and most certainly wrong in this terrible place; waiting for life to happen, waiting for his opportunity to escape. He argued with everybody, even complaining to the Examination Board at one time that he couldn’t answer one of the official exam questions because their teacher hadn’t taught them the subject. William didn't want a second rate education, but that was exactly what he was getting. While all his father’s friends, on similar high incomes, sent their children off to private schools, his own father was determined to do no such thing.

And on that day he would remember for the rest of his life the chant went up: "Hit me with your hand bag, hit me with your hand bag." He had exited the last class before lunch, and moved to hang out with his other nerdy mates, including Malcolm, later to die young of some peculiar disease, and Nick Minchin, who was later to become a leading light in the Liberal Party and a Finance Minister in the Howard government.

But back then they were just the odd kids who, worst of all, did well in class and didn't like football. But it started almost as soon as he exited the demountable. Mark and his gang moved cut him out of the crowd, and as he walked into the larger playground kept up their taunts, "Hey poofter, hit me with your handbag." His books, he was always carrying books, his only escape and a trait that immediately marked him out from his fellows. He fell to the ground as punched him heavily in the face, his first attack.

He was flabbergasted. He had no particular beef with this guy. They had played tip footie on the same or opposing sides for years. He mightn’t have been the greatest sporting figure, but he was a fast runner, and this trait served well in tip footie.

But this was another day; as Mark came in swinging, pounding away at his body, his head. "Fight you little c..., fight poofter," Mark shouted. And his gang kept up the chorus: "Hit me with your handbag, hit me with your handbag". He wasn't a fighter, he had never fought in his life. He wasn't a surfie, hanging down the beach and getting the girls, unlike his tormentor. And the blows rained down and the chant kept going and a hundred kids from the playground rushed to watch the drama.

It was so unexpected, so fearsome, so lacking in logic. The blows rained down and the punches and kicks just kept on coming. At first he tried to defend himself, appalled and embarrassed by what was happening. His so-called friends were, suddenly, nowhere to be seen. This was one he had to fight on his own. Then there were two, three, four of them, all punching him and kicking him and the blows kept coming and he felt as if it would last forever.

Finally, how long was it, a teacher intervened and the crowd scattered reluctantly, and he stood to his feet, tearful, bruised, bleeding in parts. To that date, this was his worst day, his greatest ignominy. Even with a teacher present the crowd of kids still flung their final taunts; "Hit me with your handbag" as they scattered.

Even from the teachers there was little help and little sympathy for the weird kid, the one with all the books who kept topping the class. On his own, he tried to clean himself up in the toilets, frightened the other kids would find him and it would all start again.

It was years later that he discovered that Mark was being picked up by the same man he was after school, and that was how he had discovered that he might not have been 100% straight.

The man, John Hay his name was, long dead now, later told him how he would pick up the handsomest boy in the school, Mark, and how he would suck him off while he looked at pornography. That was their little game. But why did he have to tell Mark he wasn't the only one? Why did he have to tell him that he wasn't the only one going for rides in John's big car? They met years later, he and Mark, and William accepted the apology that was stutteringly given. But the damage was done. He had already been brutalised and embarrassed beyond measure. He had already retreated, deep inside where no one could get to him, where no one could hurt him.

John Hay was only in his twenties but over-weight, good at business and happy to pay for boys. Hay was later to become one of his first sugar daddies, and if there was one thing in life about those years he remembered with affection it was the flash brand new black and white sports car that he flashed around town in courtesy of JH; running up a thousand kilometers a week on average.

But of course, when the affair was over the car was reclaimed.

"I thought I was street wise until I came here," William said to the psychologist whose help he sought to recover from the binge he embarked on after Aek's departure. His brain was misfiring. He couldn't tell which voices were true and which were not after the damage he had done to himself during those two months.

"You wouldn't believe the number of people who have sat in that chair and said exactly that," the Belgian psychologist responded.

At 2,000 baht an hour the psych was pricier than most rent boys, but at least he didn’t preach the gospel according to Bill Wilson and the 12-Steps, at least he talked some sense.

Later it would come to seem simply absurd that he had tormented himself, been so upset, had in fact cried for days, over a go-go boy who had already been had by God knows how many and whose reputation for deceit was already well established.

In his entire time in Bangkok William only ever met one boy who did not steal from him, and that was Pye, a waiter from Hot Male, who unfortunately for him headed off to the army for a year.

It takes a high level of emotional deception to sleep with someone you are planning to betray, to cuddle up to them and declare that you love them. if you can sleep with someone for seven months straight, as he did with Aek, and pretend to be both faithful and in love for the entire period while being neither, puts you in a Hollywood Star class of actor. But it also turns you in the end into an evil, amoral and vicious minded manipulator whose concern for the welfare of others, or certainly for their so-called clients or lovers, is somewhere below zero. But words are cheap. In the end it costs nothing to say: “I love you.”

The picture looks perfect, William said of his current relationship. He takes good care. The house is well organised. He runs everything perfectly. You can't always believe what you see, the hardened old girl he was talking to said. I don't know when Thailand went so bad. Same in Sydney, he replied. Everyone laments what has happened. But Thailand is on a different order altogether. In Sydney $100 gets you an hour if you're lucky with someone you'd rather forget; a lousy time in a diseased and dying place, an indifferent farewell. Here it bought you a good looking bed buddy for as long as you liked. They are such good actors; they all agreed. But how could someone lie in such intimate circumstances?

Easily, William soon discovered; as he was triply betrayed by the person he had helped the most. It was all such a shame. Buffalo learn slow, he thought; and while sharing a taxi with an American one morning they had agreed: when it comes to tricky relationship games, these people take the cake. Nothing is true. All is fantasy. It's just a matter of making the one you want work; or at least adhere partly to the outside world. For appearance is everything, status all important.

He missed The Bewildered Soi since he had taken a stand; drama took so many forms, betrayal was fundamental. A threat of blackmail was met with the rapid observation that it didn't take much money to have someone killed here. The person he thought was a friend ridiculed him behind his back; boasting he could control him like a television remote control. Buffalo. Gullible. He had meant to help. He had only ended up looking like a fool. He wished now he had never met Aek; never went on that wild 60 day jag, never fell however briefly for tje street boy who had cuddled up to him declaring, usually drunkenly, I love you.

Me no money you no love me, William sometimes thought of Aek’s repeated declarations; and that was one of the few universal truths in this quagmire of a place; the modern and the ancient jostling against each other, the ghost buildings, long abandoned for no obvious reason, towering over the crowds. Do you really want to live anywhere else? he shouted to a friend as they weaved through the insane Bangkok traffic on the back of their respective "motor cies".

As they will tell you themselves, at least in some milieus the art of betrayal is a finely honed Thai art, something approximating the double double cross but more subtle, more sophisticated. Thailand is perhaps the only country in the world where you can with great ease buy yourself a bed buddy, temporary lover or live-in companion that you cannot and should not trust under any circumstance.

A trail of unpaid bills leaving William finally without internet, electricity, cable television or any of the other services he assumed he had already paid for showed that the money he had been providing to pay the bills was simply being stolen. But right to the final day Aek, always slim, dark and handsome in a boyish way, kept up the "I love you mak mak" pretence and his perfect house keeping, the constant repetitions that he would take care of him forever, had no boyfriend, no desire to return to his old life in the go-go bars.

It was all part of the tale he had been lulled into believing as he struggled at the computer for up to 20 hours a day finishing Chaos, which as it dealt with sometimes particularly complex legal issues and came in at 180,000 words was a difficult achievement - of which he remained proud.

A Thai American friend of his rang and William asked: what is it, they lie and they lie and they lie, is it in the culture itself?

“Yes,” his friend declared sadly. “You cannot believe anyone.”

Even his neighbor Mr Dang, who spoke good English and had slowly become friendly towards him until a trail of dubious and chaotic people passed through the house after Aek’s departure, issued him the warning: “Trust no one. Bangkok is a very dangerous place.”

Certainly in Thailand if a boy stole money from a customer, as had happened to him on more than one occasion, including both boys from both X-Size and Nature Boys, one could never expect the bar to take any responsibility. It was a tip, the boys would protest, and that as far as the bar was concerned would be the end of the matter. It was a buyer beware market; and that was probably never going to change.

X-Size certainly never took any responsibility for Aek’s behavior and never repaid William any of the money stolen from him, despite his repeated demands that they do so; that they were the ones who had recommended him in glowing terms, eventually leading to him losing many thousands of dollars.

That they were prepared to recommend someone but take o responsibility for the outcome means logically that they were directly involved in the fraud, the lies, the thefts, the trickery and the dishonesty perpetrated against him.

Until X-Size reform their business and hiring practices or begin to take some responsibilities for the actions of their boys any tourists going near them should be extremely careful; or the bar should be shut down by the authorities.

The very first boy William picked up from Bangkok’s infamous Twilight Soi, one of Aek’s earliest predecessors, he found going through his wallet after taking a short trip to the toilet. Just to make sure he knew he would be paid he left the agreed fee out on the table. William was soon to learn never to pay in advance. He was a pallid youth who William guessed might already have AIDS, thinner than thin with his clothes off, and he disappeared quickly after a desultory performance, taking with him as many beers as he could carry.

Following his departure from the large, romantic, centrally located house off Sathon in central Bangkok Aek became a hero amongst Bangkok’s gay sois and gay bars for having so successfully cheated a falung. Nor was this fame confined to the gay milieu. William became the subject of ridicule on many a comedy show.

A complaint to the bar X-Size, where William had originally met the boy he was come to know, affectionately for a while, as Aek, about the amount of money tricked and stolen from him provoked a cascade of hostility and a propaganda war he was to convincingly lose. The Thais were never going to take the side of a falang against that of a Thai. In the end he was demeaned or became the subject of hostility and controversy wherever he went. He should have kept his mouth shut. He should have accepted, like most foreigners end up doing, the fact that coming from a land where poverty stretched across thousands of years, taking money from a foreigner was seen as nothing more than a job. The moment sufficient assets or money were acquired the pretence at love and romance, which could extend for months and sometimes even years, promptly ended.

But angry at what had happened, he issued the following complaint on the X-Size website:

"I have been systematically robbed and deceived by one of the X-Size Boys known as Aek costing me hundreds of thousands of baht over seven months. His last tricks were to steal the money I was giving him to pay the bills for the electricity, internet and telephone, suddenly finding myself without these facilities for reasons which became all too obvious. Despite the thousFands of baht I was giving him every week he stole this money... He has recently demanded 50,000 baht for the return of the car he foolishly bought him, not realising it was being registered in his name as I was concentrating on finishing my latest book.

“The final act was to spend about ten hours trying to convince me he should come back to the house, that everything should go back to the way it was, playing sentimental Thai music from a popular singer we both liked, taking me off to a bar and involving a number of other people in translating the "love" he felt only for me, only to get home and for him to admit in probably the only honest moment in the eight months that I had known him that he "lohp luhen mak mak", deceived very much, and was not going to spend the night with me after all, as had been the very public plan, involving several different interpreters, all evening.

"I have never met a more dishonest or more deceitful person in a lifetime as a journalist. Be warned. If you are unfortunate enough to pick as a customer, watch your wallet."

He also posted the complaint on the internet under the heading: “Never Believe A Word An X-Size Boy Says”.

Although he was to have a number of encounters and attempts at reconciliation ultimately William’s views did not change - Aek remained a liar and a thief for as long as he knew him.

A similar complaint to the Tourist Police achieved no visible results.

And it was from this point on that the propaganda war between them, one he was to lose convincingly, partly or perhaps mainly due to his physically and psychologically deteriorating condition, combined with those videos or pictures he had never seen, stepped up apace.

As the weeks passed following Aek’s departure he became ridiculously distressed, rarely sleeping and often drinking around the clock. William cried and he cried, although he could not have said why exactly, perhaps it was just for a dream lost, for the frustration and embarrassment of having been robbed of so much money, rather than for the person himself. Whatever the truth, whatever the loss, he found himself missing Aek’s presence around the house terribly.

At the same time, alone again, he was finding it increasingly hard to determine fact from fiction, friend from foe. A series of colourful and chaotic people passed through the house. Basically he decided there were no friends, only people whose level of deceit could be played off against each other. His ragged state lost him the respect he had once built up. He became unhappy beyond measure, in some of the worst states of mind he had ever been in.

It was hard to imagine from the angry ending notes of the relationship and the way it was to grip the public imagination that Aek and William had ever been happy; although they had certainly appeared that way at first, in what had been almost like a blissful honeymoon at Silom Lofts.

William hadn’t lived the healthiest of lives, indeed had been under extreme stress of one kind or another for almost all of it, and did not expect to live to a ripe old age. That was perhaps the main reason he was prepared to blow so much money on what he thought would be one of his last opportunities to have a good time before he descended into a dreary, frail, disease wracked and decrepit old age. He had never expected to live into his fifties anyway.

It had seemed for a while, even for a few months, that Aek was the perfect boy in the perfect apartment, that glistening new never before lived in “condo”, as the Thais called them, on the second floor of Silom Lofts in Soi Pipat. At first there was a parade of his friends through the place as he showed it off. Most of them would flirt with him outrageously, “I want what he’s got”, one declared as he pulled off his shirt; but the parade was soon to cease. While he longed to meet a network of interesting people, he was cocooned in some sort of domestic bliss. Or so it seemed for a while.

SiIom Lofts was one of the most perfect locations in the whole of Bangkok, close to Limpini Park, most beautiful at dawn and dusk, close to the night life, close to transport and crowded Silom Road and nearby Surawong, off which ran both Bangkok’s oldest red light area, Patpong, now a bustling night market during the evenings overhung with signs such as “Super Pussy” reminding everyone sex was still a major industry. It had a swimming pool on the roof, was clean, modern and had friendly helpful staff. It was the most up market place he had ever lived in.

The choice of Silom Lofts was a determined effort to become a new person; sober, happy, together; an attempt to recover from

the previous year’s difficulties at The Australian, the countries national newspaper and one of Rupert Murdoch’s flagships News Limited which after an unsought for promotion from being a general news reporter found him working up to 14 hours a day. This coincided at one point with finding himself temporarily homeless and his children, with whom he had been living for many years, staying with relatives after half the house’s ceilings collapsed. The landlord couldn not have been a bigger jerk.

For a few months it seemed as if that perfect happy year he had planned in Bangkok was coming true.

His choice of the up market condo as his new dwelling was an attempt to break from his past into a new, perhaps more modern, well dressed well versed person; an attempt to cheer himself up after the previous two months he had spent carousing around Thailand with a tricky and as he was to subsequently learn very well known Surawong boy called Baw, whose story is tangled up in this tale. Some men’s middle aged crisis involved buying red sports cars. His involved hanging out with Bangkok street boys in their twenties.

Silom Lofts was expensive, much more than he ever intended to spend seeing he was for the first time in a quarter of a century, but at first it just seemed ideal for them both. Anyway, Aek came that first night and basically didn’t leave. When he was late home he would claim to be off with friends at MBK, which he was later to discover was code for being off with a customer. He was a young man and he was not his master; he could see no reason to object or as a gay man to expect faithfulness.

He was a hopelessly restless insomniac, had been almost all his life, but like most Thai men Aek slept easily and well. For the first time in many years he found himself sleeping more than an hour or two a night, calming down next to the warmth of his slim, warm, body. And almost all Thai men smell gorgeous, wash often, are well groomed, it’s just one of their characteristics.

Nonetheless he still spent many hours roaming around the apartment, finishing off the movie script and sometimes walking the half empty streets, or going down to Limpini Park to meditate with the Falun Gong at dawn.

As he left each morning Aek would give him a big what he interpreted as affectionate hug or a classic Thai wai, repeating, I love you mak mak; but as he was to discover later, everywhere else he called him a stupid and old, later to complain about how often or how little he showered and other even more insulting things, including that he had sexual problems and smelt when he came.

Of course William was far from the only foreigner to be thoroughly fleeced by Thai sex workers. His friend Ian, a musician friend of some standing, came to stay. He was being taken for a ride by an exotic looking girl he had become obsessed with, Sexy Sar as he always called her. She was the reason Ian kept coming back to Bangkok.

But after becoming disillusioned with her avaricious behavior, ceaseless demands for money and gifts accompanied by a declining performance in the bedroom, Aek said he could introduce him to one of his friends, who he “guaranteed”.

William had met the girl before, at Aek’s birthday party, and she seemed charming, good looking, intelligent and with enough life experience to be interesting. So he also put in a good word. So much for the guarantee, she turned out an even bigger dud than some of the others.

They all went out to an expensive restaurant for lunch and then later Ian and the woman, Ohm, got hopelessly drunk on Ian’s favorite drink, "Margies", as he called Margaritas. Increasingly drunk, the pair of them had somehow ended up at the Electric Blue go-go bar in Pat Pong downing tequila shots and pole dancing with the go-go girls until Ohm was too drunk to stand. Ian, with the constitution of an Ox, got her back to Silom Lofts and onto the bed; but he wasn’t the type to want to have sex with unconscious girls. So he went out shopping, leaving her to sleep it off.

When he returned he discovered the girl missing; along with his video camera and brand new IPhone.

As a result of this experience; and a number of others, the pair of them penned a song Choirboys in Quicksand, the chorus of which went as follows:

We were choir boys in quicksand
In the land of hungry ghosts
Amongst all the back slapping and bleary late night toasts
On the streets of Bangkok, Irish pubs and Sunday roasts
We were choir boys in quicksand
In the land of hungry ghosts.

Despite such experiences, and under the much longed for illusion of happiness, William began working again, finishing a movie manuscript he had been requested to write by some overseas clients which proved a far more complex project than he originally thought, requiring considerable research and the interpretation of the other half a dozen amateur attempts which had been made. With far more writing experience than anyone else who had approached the project; he had strongly advised that what they needed more than anything else was a proper full first draft, with a beginning, middle and end.

William succeeded and the effort paid the rent for a couple of months. Then he began the complex process of finishing off a book on Australian family law, Chaos at the Crossroads. As one of the founders and the longest serving member of what was to become the world’s most famous radio program dedicated to father’s issues, Dads On The Air, and the only one with any extensive journalistic or writing experience, he was literally the one person on earth in a position to write it and because of the many injustices involved in this side of his country’s legal system, felt a moral obligation to do so.

When William first came to Bangkok he had assumed he would end up living with a woman, so beautiful were the Thais, so strong his desire to be a normal, heterosexual male. He did not identify particularly as being gay, despite having spent so much of his early life around gay bars. But he had arrived before gay pride; and somewhere in his mind being gay was part of some dissolute soul sickness which was an incurable part of his own dysfunction; another reason not to like himself.

As well the mother of his children, as he so politely called her for many years, had been such an abusive nightmare towards the end of their relationship before he became a single father in the late 1990s it had been a good couple of years before he had even able to look at a woman without the word “Trouble” immediately printing itself across his brain.'

And one thing is for sure, Thai men are extremely handsome. As far as he was concerned the Thais were the best looking race on earth.

Nothing was as it seemed in Bangkok or in Thailand, there were stories within stories, tricks within tricks. That was certainly true of the two young men he had been stupid enough to waste money on. The antics of the two tricky boys, Baw and Aek, are weaved through this tale. One, Baw, looked more or less like your stereotypical tricky boy, was sometimes good, sometimes bad. You could never tell quite what he was up to or which way he would swing. Aek appeared to him, at least at first, to be entirely angelic.

“I should have stuck to the girls,” he joked with the gardener and caretaker Mr Boon, one of the only Thais to be kind to him through the drama that enveloped him and which made him, as Aek so kindly pointed out one day, the most unpopular foreigner in Thailand. Being Thai, Boon had always known Aek was just another tricky working boy, but William had no idea.

Aek’s vicious thank you note for the absurd generosity William had shown him was to label him as Thailand’s number one drug driver, a completely false and ridiculous suggestion which was repeated ad nausea in the popular media and which would ultimately waste considerable government resources and make his life in Bangkok almost impossible. The insults would pile up against him, from complaints of his drunkenness, drug taking, how often he showered, his sexual prowess. On and on it went.

Apart from its complete lack of foundation, one of the greatest ironies of being called a “drug driver” was not just that many people told him Aek took ice and yabbah at times just like many of Bangkok’s sex workers and young people. And if these claims were not true of Aek himself, they were certainly true of many of his friends and acquaintances. Ice, as the highly refined form of amphetamine now popular in the country was called, was regularly offered by many of the bars to their clientele, along with Viagra and condoms, as simply part of the service.

If you were to arrive early or late at many of the seedier go-go bars, before or after the customers, you would see the boys smoking ice freely, either to make themselves horny for the nights sexual performances, or to keep themselves awake for the next client. If the police could be bothered to test the go-go boys they would likely find half of them testing positive. It was just part of Bangkok life, part of the industry.

The intoxicating and eroticizing effects of ice and yabbah smoked in combination are well known throughout the Thai sex industry. The rest of Bangkok moves to a far different; more professional, more sedate and more respectable pace.

His relapse on alcohol included a relapse onto this combination; that he was in little position to deny, having also had a penchant for going out late at night in all sorts of states of unrest and disarray.

Many Thai sex workers have a fondness for that peculiarly Asian drug, yabbah as it is known in Thailand, small red pills which when smoked off foil provide instant disorientation, and if of better quality and mixed with the more expensive drug ice, a level of intoxication that was similar to heroin in the way it touched many of the brain’s pleasure centers and satisfied the aching hole which lay inside the hearts of so many late night denizens, those on the fringe, those who liked to stumble out of bars at dawn.

The ready availability of ice and yabbah brought on a cascade of schizophrenic responses which also meant it became difficult to tell what was real and what was not, what voices were true and what were simply echoes in the wind. Unfortunately most of them were true. Unfortunately at least for a while, he fell to the wayward side of sanity, and everything in his life fell apart. Anyone thinking of embarking on this course, or using this combination of drugs, should think again and avoid them at all cost. They are dangerous in almost every sense. They are also difficult to recover from. He deeply regretted his mistakes. He apologized for the poor example he had set.

William was later forced to seek the help of the local hospital and a psychologist in order to recover. Anyone thinking of trying yabbah should think again. It had the most damaging affects on him of any drug he had ever tried; putting him into the worst states of mind he had ever been in. Its combination with ice may create an almost instant feeling of euphoria, but the come down is horrific. Don’t, just don’t, he would advise anyone, be as stupid as he had been. As the psychologist was later to explain, it triggers some of the same chemicals in the brain associated with schizophrenia; hence the damage.

The derision of the mob and the lies perpetrated about him, the treachery of those he had stupidly trusted and been so generous towards financially, his lingering resentments over the amount of money stolen from him by both Baw and Aek and the empty driveway where the car should have been, did not help speed his recovery, but every day was a new day.

William just wanted to feel like a normal human being.

The Thais would not make the same mistakes as he did, such as buying a go go boy a car a bike and everything else. They know all too well how dishonest these people are and the tricks they play. But he didn’t. They thought him a fool. Maybe. More accurately he had been lonely and naïve.

It was said, he did not know how true it was, that the chemist who invented yabbah aimed to wipe out the heroin market. If the story is true, he succeeded spectacularly. Thailand once boasted some of the best heroin in the world, a trade well supported by officialdom, with the army providing escort for the trains laden with opium travelling down to Bangkok for processing. The cheap high grade heroin attracted a certain kind of tourist and was readily available, for example, on Kossan Road, now much better known as a shopping precinct for middle class tourists. Those days are long gone; the only remnants the odd picture of Bob Marley or a marijuana leaf on a café wall. The only illegal drugs available are yabbah and ice; even marijuana, widely accepted in much of the world, is now rare because people are frightened of being detected for its smell; while heroin is virtually non-existent except for one notorious little soi.

Most of the time he had been with Aek he had been studiously attending AA meetings and staying sober.

He assumed the relapse would be short lived and their lives would return to normal as soon as the book was completed and his 20 hours a day at the computer ceased.

Showing how little he understood of who William was or what he was doing, Aek expressed surprise when he pointed out proudly how the book was now for sale as an e-book all around the world and would shortly be available in hard copy.

Having brought attention to the chicaneries of the multi-million go go boy industry, he overheard other foreigners saying, all it will take is one bullet. He should leave now.

Somehow on one particular day, there had been an arrangement, supposedly first at the house, for him and Aek to get together at yet another attempt at reconciliation made by the man he assumed was the ancient Chinaman. But he never showed at the house and after Aek, still looking good in his boyish clothes and perfect dark skin, sat looking very uncomfortable at the table where he had neatly laid out Pepsi and glasses and ice they eventually headed off for Hot Male at the corner of Surawong and the Twilight Soi, a particularly public spot where he liked to go to watch the circus of boys and customers and tourists pass by.

All the bars paid off the police handsomely each month in order to operate, usually, from what he was told, in the order of 150,000 baht a month, depending on the size of the operation. Joo Joo and the rest of his mob knew they were perfectly safe from the law. There was an old joke in Bangkok, that the mafia were the police. They certainly had an almost universally bad reputation amongst the Thais themselves.

Any Thai would shrug if they didn’t have a current driver’s licence, for instance. They would just hand over 100 baht. For a falang, foreigner, it was more likely to be 1,000 baht; but that was the price of being a stranger in what was coming to seem to him to be an increasingly strange land.

He himself had been obliged to pay 20,000 baht on one occasion for an X-Size boy who had tested for amphetamines to keep him out of jail, and another 10,000 baht for Laotian lad Nook, associated with Night Boys, who was having trouble with his passport. Through the computer translation programs which had only recently begun to include Thai, Nook would speak longingly of returning to the village of soft wood, the village of his parents, but saying that if he was not in Bangkok working they had nothing to eat but what fruit they might find on the surrounding trees.

Another 100,000 baht handed to the police at various times sometimes produced the desired result, at others was little more than straight out extortion; some might call it theft. His position had been compromised by his fall from grace.

On one particular day, early in 2011, a small group had been sitting in the bar Hot Male on the corner of Soi Twilight, and Aek, some time now after their breakup, was being particularly cuddly while acting, and no doubt it was acting, as if he was drunk. It was supposedly yet another attempt at reconciliation.

Despite all Aek’s protestations that they were off to a new beginning and he wanted to spend the night back at the house; this, too, ended in disaster and duplicity. There were plans to fly to Luamb Prabang in Laos the next day; sabai sabai, start all over. The Buddha was there. It was the perfect place to refresh the spirit, recover from his misguided binge, and get themselves both back on track physically, mentally, spiritually, emotionally.

Later that night, after all those many hours of being cuddly and publicly affectionate in the bars of Soi Twilight, shortly after they got back to the house, still sitting on the steps admiring the night and the garden which had once seemed so perfect, Aek declared he had to head off, ostensibly to give the keys to his flat mate. If you go, don’t come back, he said, assuming that far from returning keys, which they could easily have done in a taxi on the way back to the house, he was off to see another customer, or lover, or whatever piece of duplicity was the order of the day. And so Aek left, and no, he didn’t come back.

Not that night anyway.

Instead, he assumed from the voices he heard in the background, he headed off down to Mr Tong and Night Boys in the 240,000 baht car he had been so stupidly deceived into buying in his name.

Later that same night there were phone calls demanding several hundred thousand baht or he die. He assumed from the voices he recognized that the threats were coming from Night Boys.

But on that night people he never saw, being locked in the upstairs bedroom, broke into the house, getting in easily through the kitchen back door. Aek was the only one who had a key to the kitchen backdoor which would have allowed them such easy entry. Luckily there was another barrier for them to get to the upstairs. But the banging and banging on the intervening door kept on and on for a very long time. There wasn’t any doubt about their intention to cause harm.

Luckily, too, having found another insomniac, he was playing cards with an eccentric woman who promptly rang her gangster mates from a nearby soi. Once the banging started she made some wry comment about people who weren’t smart enough to change all the locks after the end of a relationship and rang her friends again. They’re inside the house, she declared urgently. Then, led on by the crazy lady who rarely stopped talking and another friend, they proceeded to play cards as if nothing was happening. The banging kept on and on. The bedroom was securely locked and it would be difficult, although perhaps not impossible, for them to break through, but it would at least provide another barrier for them to break through. “Everything can be negotiated at the door,” she said calmly, far more experienced in the dangers of Bangkok than he was.

As the insistent banging as they tried to break down the intervening door continued she gave him strict instructions not to look out the window or even to peer out the curtains. Perhaps, he could only assume, so as not to see if there was a body being carried out; or who was involved. In the morning she pretended as if nothing had happened. All she would say was: Don’t worry, Aek will never bother you again.

A prediction that was to prove far from true.

But in the morning there was no pretence from Aek that he was not involved. He did not bother to keep up the fantasy of reconciliation which had occupied so much of the previous evening, not ringing until some time late in the day in a feeble attempt to cover his tracks. The plans to head off to Laos together which had been so elaborately worked out the previous night vanished in a murderous wind.

However it was from that point on that he knew how dangerous a game was being played; that the Thais could be as murderous as they were reputed to be when crossed; and that he was not safe in any sense. Buffalo soup was the prediction delivered to him on the phone.

He had by accident made exactly the wrong enemies.

Not that with his excessive drinking he was entirely innocent in the parade of events or that he could avoid all responsibility for the predicament he found himself in - with buffalo die buffalo die buffalo die buffalo go home being chanted outside his house during the Thai New Year festivities, which spread over several days. The abuse was getting increasingly on his nerves.

As his former “partner”, or what he had been deceived into thinking of as his partner with constant declarations of “me no boyfriend” and equally constant declarations of “I love you mak mak”, a now famous go-go boy called Aek had picked up at X-Size earlier the previous year, spread the lie that he was a drug driver across as many media outlets as he could, his personal situation went from bad to worse.

It was not helped by the bender he had embarked upon, his deteriorating mental state, increasing paranoia and certainly as far as the Thais peculiar behavior did nothing to assist the situation. Radio and later television commentary ranged from comments on his over tipping, even down to how much he had once tipped a taxi driver, 50 baht, less than half the price of a cup of coffee in Sydney, or his need for a shower and whether or not he had ever heard of cologne. Although he had adopted the Thai practice of showering several times a day, he was allergic to almost all colognes and perfumes, which gave him instant headaches, and avoided them.

Advice to change countries by acquaintances both in Bangkok and overseas looked increasingly like a sensible option. “You are a walking dead man,” one old acquaintance warned. But his instinctive reaction was to stay, to play one deception off against another. He knew the world of smoke and mirrors. Having been in the media virtually his entire adult life he knew the nature of news cycles as well as any one. Build them up one day, tear them down the next. Today’s hero becomes tomorrow’s villain.

For some perverse reason, long past the point when any normal foreigner would have fled the country, he stuck it out in Bangkok. Some taxi drivers even helpfully pointed out the way to the airport. He ignored all the advice. He wanted to see how this story, amongst so many others he had either lived through or reported on, would end.

Luckily he had been in journalism for so long that he was used to the fame, infamy and controversy which accompanied the profession.

People always preyed on the weak, the vulnerable, the strange and the different. And in those weeks following the collapse of everything he had been deluded into believing he was building, and having finished the book and without another project immediately in front of it, the psychotic bender he was embarked upon just increased in intensity; and with the ridiculous claims that he was Thailand’s number one drug driver, he was increasingly the object of attention or hostility from all quarters, official and otherwise.

One morning he noticed a policeman reporting how much he had just taken out of the ATM machine. If he entered Hot Male, once one of his favorite venues for its authenticity and unpretentiousness, the DJ would announce: "Welcome drug driver"; and appropriate songs ridiculing him would follow. It was vicious, insulting, racist and entirely untrue, but that wasn't going to bother the denizens of these Bangkok bars.

"I don't understand why you ever believed him," Baw, the other boy whose story weaved through his time in Thailand, later said.

William shrugged. He knew and he didn't know, but all he said out loud was "I can't believe I was so stupid."

While they had met the previous year, and their rocky friendship moved between betrayal and companionship, it was at times impossible to tell which, they nevertheless remained in touch.

Only a certain kind of boy could do the sort of work of a go go boy anyway, having sex with strangers on a nightly basis, going with foreigners they almost universally did not like, cuddling up to their mostly elderly, overweight or unattractive clientele as if they really adored them. While prostitution was an accepted even some might say integral part of Thai culture it was not so in the west; and western customers were often unattractive, certainly to the Thais.

The customers were often, he was told, quite sadistic, fucking the boys harshly, pulling back their hair, doing things he did not want to think about. Sometimes he would look at the laborers on the many building sites of Bangkok, for it was a city that seemed to be in a constant state of construction and deconstruction, all the men working for miserable Thai wages, and thought, my God, you’re handsome, you could make a fortune in the bars, you are so good looking. But they could not do that kind of work, sell their body, and along with it, in the end the boys all sold their souls as well.

Virtually every boy William met was a liar as well as a thief. Aek was certainly a master.

If William handled the separation badly, he handled the aftermath even worse, embarking on one of the worst benders of his life. He could not claim to be entirely innocent in the parade of events, nor avoid all responsibility for the predicament he found himself in. His personal situation was not helped by the fact that at the end of their seven month relationship William embarked on one of the most extreme benders of his life, drinking around than the clock, not sleeping and intoxicated in an already intoxicating city where it seemed almost everything and everybody was for sale.

After little more than a year in Thailand he was jeered and laughed at, put down or tormented almost wherever he went, as a drunk, and repeatedly as a so-called “drug driver”. His decades long career as a journalist, writer and broadcaster in Australia was blithely ignored.

Much of the rumor mongering was done by Aek, someone you could buy by the hour and whose best friend and mentor was a pedophile, but he knew just as well that Baw, a straight boy he had picked up on Soi Twilight and who had preceded Aek and with whom he had also been ridiculously generous, was also betraying him. Neither person would be regarded as a reliable source of information, much less become popular heroes, anywhere else but in Thailand.

William would have liked to point out, but there was no one listening, that if he really had been a drug driver he was one without a car, because the boy had driven off with the “riot” and the tax return he had used for the purpose would have been much better spent on vehicles for his own two teenage children, now both at university, was long gone.

Every day he would stare at the space at the front of the house where the car and the bike should have been remained empty. Until time began to have its curing affects and he began, slowly, to move on with his life, the resentments began to fade and he began to get some more decent people into his life, he would find himself sitting smoking cigarettes and staring into space. Maw mak mak, he could hear the vicious voices of the neighbors echoing around them. Falung ting tong. Almost nobody was kind. Sympathy was zero.

He had always felt at odds with the rest of the world and the people in it, as well as at odds with himself; so often being the only “falang”, as foreigners were known, in many different situations did not bother him. As a result, he saw parts of Bangkok no normal tourist ever saw. There was nothing he loved more than to sit outside a karaoke bar at dawn watching the last of the night denizens wander back to their quarters, the sky changing color over the concrete phalanxes of the Bangkok Sky Train or its ribbons of expressways.

As well, he had specialized in sociology at university, thinking the study of contemporary society a far more important priority than other academic disciplines. Crowds and Power by Elias Canneti had been the title of one of his favorite books. He had always been fascinated by mob behavior, and as a news reporter was often the one sent to cover potentially dangerous crowd behavior, but what he was to witness in Bangkok went beyond anything he had ever experienced. The vitriol directed against him personally, with chants of Buffalo Go Home, Buffalo Die and various cat calls and insults including geur, meaning stupid, and “drug driver”, surrounded his house for days during what was meant to be the happy time of Songkran, the Thai New Year. As hour after hour passed his irritation began to rise; and he turned up the stereo in order to drown out their voices. The taunting was amongst some of the most crass, tasteless and cruel behavior he had ever witnessed.

But the scenes around his house were as nothing compared to what he was to witness when he ventured down to the main avenue of Silom, where thousands of people danced and cheered Buffalo Die, Buffalo Go Home. Cries of Aek! Aek! Aek! would rise up in waves as the happy, dancing, water drenched crowd cheered for the go go boy who had lied, cheated, thieved and betrayed him on every level.

Only in Thailand could the dishonesty of a male prostitute you could buy by the hour, whose best friend and mentor was a paedophile become a national hero.

He thought he was providing him with more than enough money to live on, not to mention; but such was not the case. He did occasionally wonder why Aek’s attempts at study with his textbooks or preparation for exams were so half hearted, but did not push too hard. He assumed it was the Thai way of doing things, sabai sabai. Used to the high pressure of professional life in Sydney, and the heavy demands Australian universities placed on their students, he could only assume things were different here.

Despite all those extra customers he had never known about, Aek had often pretended he had no money, opening his empty wallet in a pathetic gesture, explaining that the usually ample baht he had given him often only the day before had gone on school books or been sent to his ever demanding family; and so, for reasons that escaped him now, he was always generous.

“Did you really warn me?” he asked the Captain on one of his occasional visits with Aek to X-Size to see old friends or polish off or share around a bottle of whisky. The Captain always declared he wanted to be his friend, wanted to help him, offers he was learning to mistrust. “I don’t remember. I must have been drunk. I wish hadn’t been,” he replied. “I wish someone had told me. Everyone knew but me.”

The Captain just nodded.

And later he had said to Aek, during that strangely extended -sometimes hostile sometimes sad sometimes even intimate phone relationship that developed after their separation, “I didn’t realize I was just another customer.”

This was met with silent acknowledgement.

William wasn't quite sure how to explain it, but he loved Bangkok. It was just such an interesting city after the dead hand of socialism and over-regulation had extinguished almost all social life in Sydney. While there were a number of suggestions that he head back there, basically go back to Hicksville where you belong, or at least long enough to get your head together; but that hadn't been working all that well in Sydney either and he had in fact been doing better in Bangkok than at home. Most of the time; bar that one extended and ridiculous bender from which he was still recovering.

On that strange visit to Sydney where Aek had acted like a fish out of water, spending half his time hiding under a doona, making the single

trek to the local Thai restaurant or looking sadly at Bondi Beach and commenting on the number of foreigners, as if he hadn't expected to find many overseas.

William noticed, too, how empty streets seemed, how quaint the signage.

In Sydney these days you even got thrown out of bars for being drunk; a left wing government having introduced the law that it was illegal to serve someone who was intoxicated. Hardly a winner with their working class constituency, he would have thought.

I'd rather die than go home, he sometimes said out loud.

Yes, well, as so many warned, Bangkok is a dangerous place and no doubt that could be arranged.

And if he run out of money get diagnosed with a terminal disease I will head to Calcutta, also one of the world's strangest and most exotic cities, where smack is seven dollars a gram and he would die in some opiated daze at the Fairlorne in faded colonial splendor. Well that was one plan.

But now William wanted to see how this story, his life in Bangkok, amongst so many other stories he had either lived through or reported on, would end. Luckily he had been in journalism for so long that he was used to the fame, infamy and controversy which accompanied the profession

All that money he had forked out to supposedly support Aek through university, including supposedly paying university fees, when he should have been supporting his own children through university - even if, for the first time since they were young they were separated by distance and luckily enough their own scholarships meant they weren’t too badly off. All those lectures he and others had given Aek on how important it was to finish his tertiary studies if he wanted to get ahead proved to be just part of the farce perpetrated against him.

But nobody, nobody warned him. And nobody had ever so successfully stolen off him as Aek had done. And nobody, he was determined, would ever do it to him again. We learn more from our mistakes than our successes, it is said, to which he would respond with the quip he was too old to learn and just wanted to live. But learn he was forced to do, just in order to survive. There wasn’t any way forward but up; or dereliction, despair and a quick death. He wasn’t ready for Calcutta yet.

Most people in Thailand could not care less what a falang did, particularly not in their own homes. Many tourists came to Thailand for one simple reason: to party and to take advantage of the country's relaxed attitudes to prostitution and the handsome nature of its peoples.

The disproportionate attention focused on him ran out of control.

One of the few if only actions William could take, apart from leaving the country altogether, was write about what had happened, the system and indeed the history which had led to such an improbable series of events.

William's attempts to repair the damage he had done and the propaganda war directed against him all failed. There's an old saying in English, just because you are paranoid does not mean they are not out to get you. Firstly, in Aek's company and in what he hoped was a conspicuous display, he withdrew the complaint he had first made to the X-Size bar. It made no difference.

Most Thais could not care less what falang did, particularly not in their own homes. It was easy to find falungs in many of the tourist areas of Bangkok in Nanna, Soy Cowboy, the original red llight district of Patpon who were far more off their heads than he ever was; and acting far more badly. In Pattya little more than two hours from Bangkok there were in the high season an estimated 100,000 girls working any night of the week, and even at 7 am as some ragged relic of a man stumbled from the bar where alcohol had deluded him into thinking he was having a good time, or some late night customer was just staggering along Beach Road in a complete blackout, there would be girls waiting to offer their services.

As a restless spirit and hopeless insomniac who often did not sleep more than an hour or two a night, he had in Sydney long got into the habit of doing a daily blog he called simply Days often writing 600 or more words at about three in the morning, before taking the dog for a walk while the children slept peacefully upstairs. He had not kept up the habit as strictly in Thailand, but still did it on a semi-regular basis.

It was this habit which attracted the attention of some of Bangkok’s nastiest elements when he wrote about the under-age boys that could so easily be bought through Night Boys.

William's attempts to repair the damage he had done also included taking this material off the internet. He also talked to the owner, explaining what had happened and how he had no wish to take on the gay mafia of Bangkok, something beyond the capacity of any individual in any case, he just wanted to live a peaceful life. Since leaving News Limited he no longer had the resources of a multi-billion company to back his investigations.

It never occurred to him that they might have any impact. He knew a few friends followed his blog; which varied somewhere between inspirational word play and sludge depending on the day, but it never occurred to him it had much of a readership or would ever have any consequence in the real world. It was just a personal outlet. He felt better once he had untangled the thoughts swirling through his head; and maybe one day it might all fall into a place as a book, a record of a decade, something. If he didn't do it each day he felt like he hadn't achieved anything.

The story on his blog, volume two of the series he was simply calling Days, which originally brought him attention from some of the nastiest elements of Bangkok he titled “Night Boys on The Bewildered Soi” and accompanied it with a pathetic picture of a young Thai street boy he found on the internet.

He opened it with a quote from Dies Irae (Day of Wrath), a famous thirteenth century Latin hymn thought to be written by Thomas of Celano which he kept playing repeatedly at home, for some reason it suiting his present mood. The poem describes the day of judgment, the last trumpet summoning souls before the throne of God, where the saved will be delivered and the unsaved cast into eternal flames.

It reads in part:

“Day of wrath! O day of mourning!
See fulfilled the prophets' warning,
Heaven and earth in ashes burning!
The day of wrath, that day
Will dissolve the world in ashes

Lo! the book, exactly worded,
wherein all hath been recorded:
thence shall judgment be awarded. The written book will be brought forth,
in which all is contained,
from which the world shall be judged

When the Judge his seat attaineth,
and each hidden deed raigneth,
nothing unavenged remaineth. When therefore the judge will sit,
whatever hides will appear:
nothing will remain unpublished.

William had been doing the blog for so many years with little or no consequence in the real world apart from the odd compliment or query from the few friends who knew the anonymous blog was actually his, that it had never occurred to him that it would have any local consequences in Thailand.

His attempt to repair the damage he had done, having no desire to take on Bangkok’s gay mafia, by taking the offending material off the internet, including withdrawing the complaint he had first made to the X-Size bar where he had first picked up Aek, made no appreciable difference to the level of attacks against him.

So instead he opted to go in the other direction; and tell the whole story, including admission of his own mistakes. When we are wrong promptly admit it is an old but very practical therapeutic adage.

William knew the world of smoke and mirrors. Having been in the media virtually his entire adult life he knew the nature of news cycles as well as any one. Build them up one day, tear them down the next. Today’s hero becomes tomorrow’s villain. In the end the story was about power and money as much as it was about individual gullibility and individual treachery.

And all of those people who were cat calling him, labeling him a buffalo and a farmer, two of the Thai words for stupid, those who labeled him a fool had no university degrees, had never had their work published on the front pages of newspapers, had never travelled around the world, had never written a book and were on the whole working for miserable wages.

But the mob is a powerful thing.

If there was one motto the mottled sex industry of Thailand should take from his experience: “Do not steal from journalists. There is a high probability they will write about it!” And in the process implicate the entire system which allowed the theft in the first place and which made a lying, thieving cheating go-go boy whose best friend and mentor was a pedophile into a national hero.

Ultimately the mass hysteria and the overall Aek phenomenon would not prove good for Thailand and its moral centre or sense of decency. Sure he was guilty of some very poor, drunken, excessive behavior. But also the viciousness directed against him discouraged any sense of empathy or understanding for those who were different or suffered from various afflictions. The resources wasted over the lies of a go-go boy were just ridiculous. The Aek hysteria, with its strong racist and xenophobic overtones, would certainly not prove good for the multi-billion dollar tourist industry and ultimately because of the high level of theft and deceit involved brought the go-go boy bars themselves into disrepute; certainly anyone reading this cautionary tale should think twice before getting involved and be extremely wary of anybody they take back to their hotel or their home.

You can attempt to blacken and discredit a journalist as often as you like for their misfit natures and lack of conformity to normal social mores. In the old fashioned world of journalism he had first joined in what would come to seem like the profession’s final days of principle way back in the 1970s, attention to detail and high ideals, it was a world full of unusual characters. Journalists were never known for their sainthood and in the end the public, fascinated by the inner workings of the media, were disappointed if the journalists they met were not eccentric in one way or another. In truth he could not have survived, much less thrived, in any other profession.

In the end it was their words and the truth that counted, not the journalist’s personalities or even their personal habits. Traditionally, although of course there were many idiosyncrasies and deceptions along the way, the reporters of that increasingly long ago era were known for and proud to write the truth in a fearless and determined way. That was what used to make journalism such an admired profession, with so many thousands of aspirants in Australia lining up hopefully for the miserable four or so cadetships the major papers would offer each year.

Now the world had entered a period of 60 second sound bites and news as entertainment. The truth they once so conscientiously sought was now more likely to be seen in a series of rapid-fire photographs. Now the world had entered a period of 60 second sound bites and news as entertainment. In a crowded world besieged with information, the complex nuances of a story were certainly of less consequence than they once were.

Coming to Bangkok, he had left the world he had spent the last 25 years enveloped in, and was at sea for more reasons than one.

Thailand has some of the most extreme controls over the internet of any modern country in the world. An entire division of government dedicated to its surveillance and many thousands of websites are banned, most of them of a political nature. In his view, the free flow of information, views and opinions was essential to the proper functioning of a healthy modern democracy.

There were numerous attempts to block the proper functioning of his computer, whether from the authorities or those he had offended he was never quite sure. there were times when he would find four or five different people or entities riding on the back of his wireless connection. He was also constantly finding new programs on his computer he tried to systematically delete. At times there were almost constant virus attacks.

One of the ironies of William and Aek’s separation was that he had paid out 13,00 baht for a computer course he used to go to on the weekends which Aek then used to great affect to make his life more difficult, including loading up the computer they had so cheerfully bought together at MBK, the major department store complex in the centre of Bangkok, back in the days when it had appeared they were building a life together.

He was eventually to discover that the computer had been heavily loaded up with cameras, videos and other forms of spyware.

For a while, lonely in Bangkok he would get drunk in the early hours of the morning with a woman who made no secret of the fact she smoked every day and rarely slept, her joke being that she was waiting to see bin Laden. She knew both sides, the police and the dealers and successfully stayed out of trouble.

He never saw the videos or photographs, apparently incriminating videos spread by Aek showing him at his very worst, drunk, stoned, incoherent, a desperately sad person on the fast road to nowhere but an early death. Because so many people seemed to recognize him he got the impression that many people had passed them between each other on their cell phones. Whenever he questioned anyone about their existence they pretended not to know what he was talking about, or made some excuse not to show him. He must have looked bad. At one point some police acquaintances were to tell him they looked very bad indeed. At first he was rather blaze about these exposes, Australians were party animals and that was no great secret. But when he became more sensitive to the Thai way of thinking, the secrecy involved and the disrepute attached to anyone who indulged and witnessed, if that was the word, his own plummeting reputation, he just shuddered at his own stupidity and indiscretion.

As the old English phrase went, just because you are paranoid does not mean they are not out to get you. There were repeated attempts to meddle with his computer, to block his internet access or to block access to what he was writing and to destroy any credibility he may have had, although it was impossible to prove that a single sentence he wrote was incorrect.

It would be weeks after his bender sputtered to an end before he noticed Thai people starting to smile at him, rather than treating him with something between disdain, contempt, disgust or horror. He was now under hospital and psychological treatment. If only you could snap your fingers and be a different person; if your reputation could be repaired overnight. Of course such is not the case.

The higher a person’s profile the harder it is to kill them. The more obvious his enemies became, the more likely they were to come under surveillance themselves.

After many years at News Limited, with the massive resources such a multi-billion dollar company could offer if required, he missed the blizzard of security, protection and legal advice that would once have been afforded him automatically.

What he had seen or at least begun to see "made his hair curl", to use an English expression suggesting shock or disbelief. At first, still more or less in tourist status, it had seemed rather marvelous to him that one could wander down to the local massage parlour and get taken care of by some handsome young men; they were always frisky, they wanted the tip. Or to head off to the boy go-go bars and admire the parade of semi-naked men. The cluster of such bars in the heart of Bangkok had no parallel anywhere else on earth that he knew of. Their uniqueness in the international gay lexicon made them fascinating.

But almost overnight, as he got to know and understand some of what was going on better, got to know some of the operators, talked to some of the trade, he began to understand how little the boys liked what they were doing, and how ruthless and money hungry were so many of the operators. What had been parading through his brain as fun only such a short time before suddenly seemed lit with a stark sadness. In one bar, Night Boys in fact, he watched some young man masturbate for a small audience of falang and could see how much he was struggling to get it all working, could easily read how much he disliked what he was doing. He couldn’t bear to watch any more and stood up and walked out - probably, because of the small size of the audience making things even worse for the poor lad.

He joined Aek on the verandah outside, where in those far off days they would sometimes sit with Mr Tong and watch the passing parade, the random circus of tourists, the aging English or European men who would come in and take a quick look before fleeing to somewhere less confronting.

The Bewildered Soi, as it was known, was a humble enough street running off Silom Soi 6, filled with run down gay bars of one kind or another. there was no mistaking its nature, with the names like Nature Boy, the Golden Cock, Hot Male, and now Night Boys. With half lit office blocks backing on to it, for some reason it had one of the most distinctive atmospheres of any of Bangkok’s myriad of back streets. In some ways it was more atmospheric than the crowded Soi Twilight, partly because the few foreigners searching for some sort of nirvana of the flesh were so obvious, and as they sat there drinking whisky or beer it was easy to laugh at their awkwardness and uncertainty. Sometimes he would count the seconds between when they walked through the doors to be confronted with many a hungry boy parading in their white jocks and walk out again, sometimes little more than 10 seconds. Not one of the boys appealed to him; and as he felt committed to Aek at the time would brush off their flirtatious encounters and rejoin him on the verandah. What an idiot he had been.

William had been introduced to Mr Tong early in the piece, and it was always said he wasn't gay, he liked young boys. As he was later to learn, he was Aek’s guide, mentor, teacher and he later came to believe was instrumental in helping design the plan to rip him off for several hundred thousand baht. At first, when he openly declared he liked young boys, he didn't think he meant it literally.

On one occasion, after one of many of his brothers was leaving the local wat after a three month stint, a group of them, Peter, the tall artistic Australian, himself, Aek, Tong and another rent boy he instinctively didn’t like; drove out through the endless urban scenarios that surrounded Bangkok until they entered an urban area criss-crossed with canals and orchards.

Aek’s family home was small, unassuming, and on his first visit there had been the usual gathering of wide eyed children staring at him as if he was from space, scenes he had got used to in earlier decades of travel before mass tourism had familiarized much of the world with the sight of western travelers.

The family home was tiny and set opposite a picturesque river. The family was obviously poor but there was a certain cheerfulness about the whole community feel of the place.

These cheerful rural Thai scenes contrasted utterly with his own memories of childhood and the struggle into adolescence. The greatest moments in his childhood had involved setting fire to fields and in his greatest triumph setting light to the palm trees and therefore the entire valley where their house was set on the outskirts of Sydney. He figured the beating he inevitably got was worth that wonderful sight of the burning valley; and it was only a fluke no houses burnt down. Later in life he was often to write about pyromaniac kids who set alight forests, endangered houses and outraged the community. Their flames, their disgrace, the public's hatred, he could feel these things. But he always related to the kids. All the greatest moments of his childhood involved conflagration, burning fields, burning trees, endangered houses.

He grew up with the series called The Great Books, alongside the Encyclopaedia Britannica, lining the bookshelf which loomed over his narrow bed. Outside the demonic rustling of the trees disturbed him fundamentally. He decided early on he wanted to be a writer. Head buried constantly in books, anything to escape the torture of the present, it came to him it as the only thing he could ever be, a noble pioneer, struggling to understand everything.

All of William’s early attempts to put pen to paper involved strings of apocalyptic images, chanting queues waiting to be judged by a merciless God. So far, so far away. He was caught in the swirling, gloom laden imagery of the end times as his religiously obsessed mother waited for the world to end, for that terrible time, most terrible time, about to descend on sinning man.

That was the way he grew up, cowering in this remote place both in terms of space and time, unsafe, waiting for the tides of licentiousness that were sweeping the world to get to them, to threaten their goodness. They were allowed half an hour of television a day, Gilligan's Island, Lassy, Rin Tin Tin. It was a much looked forward to half hour.

The main sources of fear in that far off house William grew up in were the voices of American evangelist Garner Ted Armstrong and his father Herbert W Armstrong, their ringing declamatory tones and frequent Biblical quotations enough to frighten the Bejesus out of anyone. His mother stored bottles of water in the cupboard, for the coming chaos and societal collapse. The gum trees rustled ever louder throughout his tormented adolescence, filtering through his dreams in patterns of dark shadows, waiting in terror as God singled them out for ever greater trials.

They studied the volumes of Bible Stories diligently, copying out the stories designed for children. Apart from their mother's praise, they expected little reward. The only reward for independent thought was the beatings, and his heart grew colder and more isolated with each passing day. When he was at home and not away on trips his father pounded away angrily at things in the two story work shed he had built out of concrete blocks. It was bigger than the house.

Shaken not stirred, it was the ridicule of his parents and his school mates that got to him the most, even though he felt he had somehow brought it all upon himself. Something had gone wrong long ago, deep in his soul. Born deficient. Half a century later, the events in Bangkok were to make him feel very much the same.

Shortly after he had topped every subject at Primary School but the title of dux had gone to a girl whose parents were active in the school’s activities while his own were invisible, his parents having never once shown up for a parent teacher night, his father was posted Mexico City to establish the now defunct Qantas route to Bermuda.

On their way to Mexico there was one moment so clear it remained with him forever, when he watched transfixed from 30,000 feet as the sun set over the mountains between San Franciso and Los Angeles. It was so breathtakingly beautiful he thought: I am never going to forget this. He was 12. On the cusp of everything.

After all the beatings he was a silent, weird little child. He looked down at that amazing scene, a kid from the out lying suburbs of Sydney, and thought this special gift of experience, these great adventures in this astonishing world, he was going to absorb them, remember them, write about them, as if he could drown in beauty and be absolved, as if the secret to escape could be found in the fabric of things, in the painted deserts, in the twisting tropics, in the shafts of sunlight that briefly lit up the cabin of the plane. It was all for a purpose. His destiny was marked. Writing was the only thing he could think of to relieve him of a terrible, inexplicable suffering.

The last year of Primary School, thanks to his mother’s religious obsessions, he and his brother had been forced to stand out in the playground while the rest of the kids did scripture, the only kids in that position. It was appallingly embarrassing. It marked him as different at the very age when the last thing he wanted was to be different.

His dreams were obsessed with flying, floating high above the city, looking down at the sleeping houses.

Or the strange dripping catacombs that he believed most fervently lay just below the school grounds, just behind the swings where the kids would bully him after school, and he would escape through these hidden doors into this very odd world where men stood pissing into urinals and other naked men moved in the mist and the shadows, waiting for something he did not understand. It was a mental trick to find the door, and during the daylight hours, when they ran out of the school yard with their satchels and he sought comfort with his mate Chris Gosling, he always thought he would find the door to that place.

But it was not somewhere that could be found during daylight hours. Or waking hours. They were very strange dreams for a school boy to be having, and sometimes he expected some figure of authority to step in and prevent him from having them, as if they were somehow wrong, instead of just downright strange. He met Chris years later, about town, a biggish, gawkish gay man, intensely uncomfortable in his own skin. That was the most terrible time, they agreed of their childhood years, just terrible. Newport. It was just a horrible place, just horrible.

And yet from the outside, Newport was an idyllic beach side suburb, drenched in color and sun, trees coating the climbs around the inlets, the yachts dotting the depth blue of Pittwater, those picturesque bays. But to those two kids, those two friends, that wasn't what it was at all. The horror of their changing bodies, the horror of a place where there was no one like them amidst the stifling conformity of Australian suburbs in the 1950s, it was a living nightmare. These days, it’s hard to find a house there for under a million dollars.

The two misfits clubbed together. They shared everything. Most of all their desire to escape. And they ran in circles and they whooped as they passed the neat white houses on the long walk home from school, home to places which made their skins crawl with misery and the tears start through their young eyes. It was an agony of the spirit more than an agony of the flesh, and no one could have realized, or even understood, the depth of psychic pain that dwelled in their young hearts.

Rescue me, rescue me, he thought, crying out to the twisting gums and feeling the first flushes of desire in the prickling heat of summer. This is not my life. This is not where I'm meant to be. And the beat of another place closed around him, and sometimes when they passed through the city’s red light district on the way to taking his father to the airport, he stared out the window entranced.

Difficult! Those days had been a tragic nightmare as the belts snaked out and everything he ever did or thought was ridiculed. It was appalling. This hurts me more than it hurts you, his father would say. Oh please, he thought, as the tears sprang once more and his body stung with the pain of the straps. Children were to be seen and not heard. Beaten for their own good. Beaten for their own good!

As he got older, he tried to fight back. You can't do this, it's so unfair, he said, and they did, again and again. These cruelties, this brutalised child, had in the end only one place to go, and that was inwards, behind the veils which even then were settling firmly into place. He wanted to be a writer but he didn't know why, and he read everything he could get his hands on. Then the Britannica Encyclopedia arrived, and then The Great Books. He would start at A and start reading; and had read about the Aardvark so often it was a wonder he didn't know it by heart.

Then there was Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and the Greeks, Aristophanes, all the greats. He read everything, struggled with everything, he thought it was important to know all there was to know. And then the day came, when he was 14, when he dared to say he didn't believe in God any more, and the beatings escalated still further. You can't force me to go to church, he would say, and they would beat him into submission, his father doing so with such relish, even though he never went to church himself, only his mother.

Why was he beating him for not wanting to go to a church he didn't go to himself? It didn't make sense. Do as your mother tells you. Of course it was a few hours when she was away, we were all away, and perhaps that's why. Whatever the case, he would be forced into a suit, his eyes rimmed with red, and they would climb into their FJ Holden, his family was one of the first in the street to get one, and they would drive into town or across town to those halls where the faithful and the chosen gathered.

The end times were coming, that was all that was clear. Intensely uncomfortable, he would gaze out the window as the suburbs rolled by; their concrete colours jarring with his immense sadness. He would still be teary from the ritual beating of the day, and as he gazed out the window, and prepared for the terrible meetings with the priests, who would counsel him on his doubts: but how can there be a God, it doesn't make sense? And as he gazed out the window at this heartless place the plans began to form: he had to escape. Everything he wrote was intensely sad. He loved the story of the dog which trekked across America to return to its owner. Finally he found Gone With The Wind, the only adult novel in the house besides The Great Books; and read it three times. Ashley. Ashley. Tomorrow is another day.

At the age of 14 he got a job at the local milk bar. As he made those custard flavored milkshakes you could still get back in those days, filling them to the top to impress the kids from school, he already knew he was never going to fit in, not here, not anywhere.

The surfies, the cool kids at school, came in from the beach, fit, muscled, girlfriends in tow, while he was the funny little thing behind the counter on his first job. The only girl he had ever built up the courage to ask out had said no. He tried so hard to remember everything the kids ordered, making milkshakes and at least in his imagination accomplishing great things as his head swirled with images, just as it always had.

Who were these people, these creatures, here in this remote outpost of civilization, everyone else seeing the sun breaking on the surf while all he saw were the lonely pines lining along the front of the beach.

The beach was the scene of his recent suicide attempt. While the handsome young men shook the salt water from their hair and the girls fawned over them, William could barely keep from crying.

Even as he worked in that milk bar after school, all he could think of was that lonely beach, that terrible time, his name echoing out of the waves as he walked and walked along the edge of the crashing surf, waiting for the dozens of pills he had swallowed to take affect, waiting to die. He didn't die and he didn't know why, as he lingered at the edge of the sea. He didn't want to go home, he didn't want to face another belting, not this time, not now. The tears flowed down his face in a flood and no one asked: are you alright mate? You don't have to die.

He didn't know why he was like this, a complete mess. His legs and his back still stung from the last brutal belting; and he wondered if the money from the after-school job could help him to escape. There had to be a way out from the tree lined streets and the psychotic rustling of the gums, there had to be a way out from the doom laden project that was his family. He made the milkshakes the way he liked them himself, full to the top. And back then custard was a real flavor, perhaps not as popular as vanilla or chocolate, but up there for the cognoscenti.

All his "mates" from school came in to check out his latest humiliation, tried to scam free milkshakes while the owner kept a close eye. Money changed hands. This was a beach side suburb and this was the sixties; but even here in this remote, wind filled place they could feel the beat of a different world, the planet shifting on its axis.

How cruel it was, what they had done to him. He withdrew further and further, behind the screens, his face buried constantly in a book. William was growing older and his reading was changing. As a child he had swallowed every single Famous Five and Secret Seven book, every last one of them on the local library shelf. He had read and reread Swallows and Amazons as if it was the Bible, happy kids playing on the edge of a lake faraway, happy kids with happy decent families. They weren't being beaten black and blue, they weren't sitting here on the beach’s edge, waiting to die.

He couldn't face it any more, the belts, the ridicule. Nothing he did was right. While his mother expressed appreciation of his piano playing his father stomped around the house as if there could be nothing worse - there was a pansy in the house. The only peace was when his father, an airline pilot, went away for work. Then the beltings stopped and his bruises healed, and the rustling of the gum trees no longer seemed demonic.

But even then, as his mother prepared the family for the end time, for the coming apocalypse, William struggled with the doom laden beliefs that filled the house. There they were, the ceaseless lines of souls, snaking down mythical steps through mystical buildings, waiting to be judged, waiting to die. He wrote about them all the time. God was there, cruel, determining who would be given eternal life and who would die. Elsewhere, Beatlemania was sweeping the world. Up there, in those remote tree filled bends of Wallamutta Road in the hills rising up behind what was then a remote outlying beach on the city fringe, they were preparing for the second coming, for Christ to rescue them all from the deviance and wickedness the Beatles and the Rolling Stones represented. Mick Jagger was living proof the end time was nigh.

He bowed his head and he tried to pray, tried to accept the Christian God of their understanding. And the wind swept ever louder through the gum trees, and he shivered, waiting for the coming storm.

That was his childhood.

His most vivid memory of adolescence was the belt laid out on the table at three or four am when he would be dropped home by some queen or other on Monday morning, after having changed out of his school uniform on and Friday and disappeared into town for the weekend. I’m about to be beaten very badly he would say to whoever was dropping him off, but they said something encouraging, it can’t be that bad. Easy enough to say. It wasn’t happening to them. He would walk through the kitchen the door and there was the belt neatly laid out; and the beating would begin. That was just part of what you got for being gay in Australia in those days.

His most vivid memory of adolescence, before he reached the legal age of 16 when he could officially leave home, was the belt laid out on the table at three or four am when he would be dropped home by some queen or other on Monday morning, after having changed out of his school uniform on and Friday and disappeared into town for the weekend. I’m about to be beaten very badly he would say to whoever was dropping him off, but they said something encouraging, it can’t be that bad. Easy enough to say. It wasn’t happening to them. He would walk through the kitchen the door and there was the belt neatly laid out; and the beating would begin. That was just part of what you got for being gay in Australia in those days.

Even on the day he made his first suicide attempt, walking along the beach of the suburb where they lived waiting to die – he was to discover that two bottles of aspirin was not enough to kill you, he got another beating for being late home.

While he had failed in his suicide attempt the youngest of his father’s second family was to succeed at almost the exactly the same age, cresting 15. His father had seven children. He only treated two of them badly, himself, who he suspected of being gay, and the youngest boy, who he also suspected of being gay. Following a beating which had shocked the entire family, because as I remembered all too well those beatings were vicious and went on and on, as if there was no end to the cruelty he could administer, the youngest, Bryan, was sent off to boarding school for his own safety. He had only shortly before returned to the large house on the avocado orchard he now occupied after retiring as a Qantas Captain, and was settling into the local high school. He was popular amongst the girls, in particular, as many gay boys are, because they were fun and not a threat.

On the night of his suicide Bryan told all his friends on Facebook that he was going to kill himself. This life is for you, but not for me, he told them. Not one of that network of teenagers bothered to tell their parents. Despite the repeated pleas of his second wife, Wendy, to keep the gun in the shed because they had young children, William’s father had always insisted on keeping the gun mounted in the lounge room, something that in itself was illegal. The ammunition, too, was within easy reach.

So rather than swallow a couple of bottles of aspirin as William had done, Bryan, subjected to the same kinds of beatings he had been, got the gun and the bullets and walked out into the orchard. One bullet straight through the brain was enough to do the job. His father found the body amongst the avocado trees the next morning.

Despite those beatings he remembered so vividly even decades later, he was the only one of his father’s three first sons who bothered to ring after Bryan’s suicide and say: “I’m sorry to hear the news.”

He attended the funeral with his own children, a somewhat unexpected addition after his early life and all the beatings he had received for it.

After the service at the Cathedral, attended by the entire High School senior year and many of the city’s senior burghers, a smaller group travelled to the cemetery. After all the to-ing and fro-ing with the various cars William found himself walking down a grassy knoll towards the grave site beside his fathers, while his children ran ahead.

“Can you believe it,” his father said. “Macquarie Bank shares just topped $50.”

“Wow, that’s amazing dad,” he replied.

At the grave site the mother Wendy, who had been especially close to Bryan all his precious fragile life, from sleeping in his room as a child to now, when they had been planning to travel to Sydney to see a Gilbert and Sullivan show at the Sydney Opera House. If that wasn’t a gay thing to do with your mother nothing was.

Distressed but at the same time strangely composed, as if every possible tear had already been shed, she clutched a picture of Bryan to herself as the coffin was lowered into the ground.

Then she flashed it at him.

“See,” she said. “It was exactly the same story as you. He even looked like you.”

That was true. That he was beaten as if being beaten would get the gayness out of him was also in little doubt. That was the price of being gay in that family.

But his suicide had failed. And so he found himself in parts of life he never expected, never wanted to be.

That was what William remembered of his childhood, a nightmare against green, the trees in the new suburb a rustling and demonic force. He had grown up in a silent war, he never heard his parents laugh, never heard them cry, never even heard them argue.

Indeed partly because of all this it had never occurred to him that happiness or even to be calm or relaxed were things that were in his grasp. To the Thais he appeared hyper and strange; just as he had been seen as somewhat eccentric back in Australia.

Forced into books to escape and internally to survive, the desire to write had formed early. If anybody had taken the time to know, they would have realized that: “All will be published.”

These experiences bore no relationship whatsoever to the picturesque and apparently happy scenes of village domesticity that surrounded Aek’s family home, which he was to visit on several occasions, all part of the illusion of happiness.

On that particular day, after hanging around the house for a while, they were taken up by boat through a web of canals, the water thick with floating weeds, the orchards barely above water level, the heat and the atmosphere could be nowhere else; yet they were only 125 kilometres from the heart of Bangkok. The three day party was only in its early stages; the crowds few, the guest star, having just finished three months at the wat, was yet to arrive. There was plenty of food and the families were gathering. The men were yet to settle into their heavy drinking.

It couldn't be that serene; but he watched the women putting on their traditional costumes for the rehearsals, he saw the giant family groups; nobody ever did anything alone here; and he saw the enormous affection with which Aek was treated, particularly by his mother; who so clearly must have loved him when he was a cute tiny tot running around the place. When, later he made a comment to such effect, she made a gesture of hugging him to her; he might have seven brothers but as the youngest he must have been extremely cute and at least at the time it appeared to him must have been dearly loved.

But even coming from such a background didn't stop those who chose to be rent boys from being tricky.

He doesn’t understand Aek, does he? William heard the mother ask Tong once; as they departed in the new car following a visit where much of the talk had been about whether or not he wanted to buy the family a new house. No, Tong said, shaking his head. They didn’t think he understood enough Thai to know what they were talking about. But his doubts were already growing.

Later he came to regard the family, as they cackled with laughter when he complained about how much their son had stolen and cheated him out of, with contempt, as being just part of the scam against him. Back then they had seemed pleasant, but vast in numbers. Children swarmed everywhere.

At the Buddhist ceremonial centre they had travelled through the canals to get to that particular day with his Aussie mate Malcolm, the village shaman was beginning to hold court. Whatever your beliefs, he clearly had a connection to some other spititual plain. To somewhere else.

Tong was bouncing one of the boys, maybe eight or ten years old, the boy a little odd looking with his head shaved except for a pony tail type knot at the back of his head, up and down on his knees. "I like young boys," Tong declared jovially. "So you keep telling me," he said. "It's alarming." This was an aside to Malcolm, his tall artistic friend from Sydney who was passing through and staying with them. "Is it true?" Malcolm asked, taking in the scene. "I don't know," he replied. "It's so easy to misinterpret things here. I've made some appalling mistakes. Completely misread situations. I just don't know. His parents don't seem concerned." Later they sat on the edge of the canals, watching the lights from the temple buildings play across the magic night and the watery web, the narrow boats transporting party goers to and fro.

But a few months later any room for misinterpretation had disappeared. The scales falling from his eyes over this particular issue followed some scandal involving a foreigner and an under age boy and the police which had enveloped Night Boys one evening; whether the boy stole from the falang who then complained, or whether it was a set up and he promptly went to the police with what he had learnt, or however it played his Thai wasn't good enough to follow. But what was soon evident was there was no consequence. The falang was quietened down. No one was arrested. The boy, it could only be guessed, continued to do whatever it was he did. Some nights he would go and sit on the outside table at Night Boys where various people lounged around, bored massage boys from the set up next door, the spruiker come security guard with little to do between the occasional passing foreigner, most of whom ignored his entreaties over go go boys and a sex show which in reality rarely materialised.

It wasn't for nothing this atmospheric backstreet was known as The Bewildered Soi. Adjacent was the entrance to the bar upstairs, where wealthy Thai women went to buy boys, a status symbol apparently. Judging by some of the late model sports cars the boys were pulling up in, the women were paying well. "They're gay!" someone at their table commented one evening as a group slim, effeminite working lads piled into the club. "Don't the women notice?" "Apparently not."

Tong, early one evening, began proudly showing off the pictures on his mobile phone of his latest school boy conquests, some with their pants down, some, it seemed to him, although Thais could be deceptive, barely pubescent. And when he became the manager of Night Boys, promoted from Mama san, he noticed the age of the boys dropping dramatically. Lucky to be 15, much less the legal age of 18. It might have been in front of his face, but he hadn't noticed; beyond thinking how young some of the Issan boys hanging outside the massage parlours looked. Now it was impossible to ignore.

Then, partly spurned on by fury over malicious rumors Tong was spreading amidst all the talk of him being such a buffalo he had bought an old boy, all of 24, a car and a motor bike when there was a queue of younger boys he could have had; he banned Tong from the house, the car, his life. And he stopped going to that particular vantage point at the front of Night Boys, although there had been occasions when he had liked nothing more than to watch the goings on of The Bewialdered Soi from exactly that spot, the stark reminders in the form of tourists of foreign worlds outside these crumbling buildings and crowded back streets. He acknowledged the peanut hawker, an Indian in a land which didn't like Indians, so he always bought his 20 bahts worth. The craned necks when a fight broke out between two lady boys further down the soi, outside Hot Male Station.

One of the more bizarre plans to extricate money out of him in the final weeks and months of their relationship was to open a discotheque in the same building as Night Boys, besides which was adjacent to another rather famous bar which catered only to women clientele. As a woman it was a status symbol in Bangkok to be able to buy yourself a boy. Some of them obviously did quite well out of it all, pulling up in abandoned since someone died there in a fight.

The manager, the partner of one of the district’s most senior police, claimed that we would only have to pay a reduced 100,000 baht a month to stay open until 6am. At the time there was a fair bit of dissatisfaction with Hot Male down the road and the talked about opening price was 1,000,000 baht. There were a few days when enterprising plans flowed through their dreams and conversations, but when he went to inspect the floors they were in such a state of dereliction he was not convinced of the project’s worthiness.

So he laid down the law that Tong was no longer to come to the house, nor was he to be a passenger in the car he had just paid for... His edicts made no difference whatsoever to Tong’s use of his car.

As the story had been, as the story went, although what was to be believed was anybody's guess, the one who had got his friend into the trade only months before. What a kind act.

Why, he would often ask himself, had he been so vulnerable to this situation? Why had he wasted so much money on a stupid dream woven by a go go boy half his age who he should never have trusted in the first place? Part of the answer was that he had never re-partnered after separating from the children’s mother; the studies showing that the men who do best after separation being those who do re-partner and those who stay alone or bring up children on their own doing worse. There were occasional attempts, occasional women he was interested in, but nothing ever worked out the way it should have. He always hesitated for too long. As for being gay, once you turn 50 you might as well be 500. It was hard to go from being the hunted to the hunter, from the one whose entrance to any venue attracted immediate positive attention, to being just another old crow on a bar stool, some pathetic old queen with a broken heart and a sagging body.

After previous bad experiences with Thai boys, who while they could be great fun out and about in the bars were also expert at spending his cash and leading him down drunken and misguided paths, he had watched Aek closely for weeks. He was clean, tidy, seemed impeccably honest, polite, charming.

Part of the answer, perhaps most of the answer, came from ridiculous assurances when he asked why a young man like Aek would want to sleep with an older man, that Asians regarded older people with respect; and thought about these things differently to the West. Nothing he was told could have been more ridiculous. This part of the story began when Aek was late home one night, he found a condom packet he didn’t remember opening, had a stab of what was probably jealousy, ridiculous in retrospect, and decided oh bugger it, after 70 days without a drink he would go and buy a beer.

When Aek got home he appeared shocked and worried to see him drinking for the first time in more than two months. “You worry Aek?” he asked. “No,” he replied firmly, “you are free”.

But after Aek’s repeated claims that this was his first time experience with a falang boyfriend and that he had only been working as a go go boy for four months to help him pay for his university studies and had previously been working in a restaurant, all lies he was later to discover, he was naïve enough to believe what he had been told.

Aek had been at Screwboys and various other venues for years and as for university, who was to know where the truth of that lay.

One day, as they were driving across the bridge at the Chao Phraya River, he pointed at the five-star Shangria Hotel, where he had last been almost two decades before, returning to Australia with his young family, including his new born daughter, then only one month old.

Aek nodded.

He smiled ruthfully. Of course you have, he thought. Whoever the client may have been, a fat German, an American businessman, an English advertising executive.

But as a result of this night when he had a few beers, Aek went to elaborate lengths to arrange a trip to Khon Kaen, the capital of Isaan, where a friend of his Mr Ju, who had a falang boyfriend, had been providing him with constant advice on how to deal with me.

Working hard on the movie script at the time and sometimes frustrated by the slowness of the computer or its programs or his own clumsiness on the keyboard he would swear in frustration. It was very funny one day watching him ask: “What does ‘fuck it’ mean” while mimicking his actions of slamming his fist on the table. Writing was not easy and journalism was a high frustration profession; and he had never thought anything of working his way through a number of phones and keyboards.

Aek’s brother drove all the way up from the family home outside Bangkok the previous night and then they drove all the way to Khon Kaen. As it turned out it was only a one night stay; and a very long drive for such a short visit. But the falang, a teacher from Holland who appeared highly educated and intelligent, did their best to convince him that Aek was a nice boy, honest, likeable, sincere, who had only been working a short time. Here is a sample of some of the correspondence that passed between William and the Dutch man Ben:

“Enjoy each other, don't think too much. You make a nice couple.”

To which William replied: “I was embarrassed about the way my getting pissed was reported but didn't know how to change the story so just tried to pretend it didn't happen.

I'm not the jealous type who demands monogamy, or I hope I'm not. I don't think humans, and certainly not Thais, are naturally monogamous.

These things can get confused and I suppose, perhaps as we get older, we try to own parts of the world that simply aren't ours. It's a ridiculous thing.

I was alone bringing up two children for quite a long time after I separated from the mother of the kids and I've made a few inappropriate and expensive mistakes since I've been here.

“I paid 8,000 baht bar bills for Aek's predecessor on more than one occasion and put up with all sorts of behaviour - with all sorts of people, especially Thais, telling me to just get rid of him because he was very bad for me, which was most certainly true. He cost me a good 300,000 baht and almost every story including of course I Love You turned out to be a lie, but for some reason even when I knew perfectly well he was ripping me off I put up with it.”

To which Ben responded:

“Welcome to the club. Get over it!

Sorry, a bit harsh, but we have all been there. By the way, this is a Thai way to react; self-pity is not well understood here, I agree.

When I was young I used to have a poster from a contact lens company, at the time the soft painless lenses did not exist. It read: “Cry it out and start over”. I made it kind of my life’s motto.”

William answered back:

“I guess because I had been alone for a long time and because as a boy I did more or less the same things; and except for maybe one exception, a Canadian fishermen who used to come to Sydney for his holidays once a year, I didn't like having sex with clients one little bit and would only do it when I was too drunk to know what was happening. I guess I get paranoid or assume that in this situation I'm obliging someone to do something they don't much want to do either. That is, to have sex with an older person. I remember sitting in a dinner party I had been invited to with some beautiful bright young things before I left Sydney and they were having a serious debate at one point about whether they would sleep with someone over 50 for a million dollars. I reminded them I was there. No wonder blokes our age love Asia.

“I'm very fond of Aek and he has no reason to be insecure. None at all.

He makes me feel complete, which sounds like a stupid thing to say, and I like having him around. He makes the flat seem like a home. Other things I think I'd rather talk about in private. It's very easy to misunderstand things and situations here or in turn to be misinterpreted and I have no desire to cause him any harm.”

On the question of “obliging someone to do something they don't much want to do either. That is, to have sex with an older person” Ben wrote:

“Yes, the same thought crossed my mind. Why on earth would a gorgeous young man want to have sex with an old guy? Apparently it’s a very Western way of thinking. They seem to think very differently about it. The only way I can explain it is by the lack of warmth they received from their father when young. Maybe you noticed it too; Thai only talk about their mother. Many times I was wrongly under the impression that the parents were divorced or the mother be-widowed.

“According to Dtiew (his partner), Aek is very committed to you. On the other hand, I’m so not sure you are as committed to Aek as Aek is to you. Just an impression, no idea about its accuracy though. If my feelings are correct, please keep in mind that Aek might feel that and it might make him a bit insecure.”

And Ben informed him that his hesitation to commitment was stupid. Aek genuinely loved him, wanted a long term relationship and was happy to be completing his studies and not working in the bar. They told him he would be stupid to pass up this opportunity for happiness.

It was their advice, the stupidest advice he had ever received, that finally convinced William to abandon his reservations.

His last commucation to the Khoen Kehn couple read: “I have just had to have the phone and internet reconnected after discovering that Aek had been stealing the money I was giving him to pay the bills. I understand you two have denied any knowledge or participation in this fraud.
One of the only reasons I ended up trusting Aek was because of your advice.
I hope one day you see fit to apologize to me for your role in this.”

There has been no further communication.

Later, after Aek’s departure, one morning, fed up with going to discos where the DJ would greet him as a “drug driver”, announcing to one and all as he walked through the door, “welcome to John the Drug Driver”, and sick to death of Aek’s hero status for having so successfully cheated a falung, he sat down one morning and in the matter of a couple of hours penned a response. He didn’t edit it, or even reread it. He just pushed the send button to as many places as he could think of or find on the web; and that was that.

He had the nagging thought that it might be the wrong thing to do; but was angry enough at the amount of money he had lost and the derision he was attracting thanks to Aek’s hateful propaganda that he did not to care. Perhaps it was this response that added fuel to a story which was already making his life in Bangkok difficult if not impossible. It may well have helped ignite the crowd hysteria and antipathy. It certainly on the face of it brought him little one could say zero sympathy. While some stations read out word for word what he had to say, on others it was no doubt selectively interpreted.

Again and again in this nasty propaganda war, it would be emphasized how he was maw, gow, ting tong. Drunk, old, crazy, smelly, had no power. If there was a high level of racism in the hatred directed against him, it was true enough that he was old, 58, that he was drunk all too often; and for a while that he was a little crazy. And no, at his age and in the state he was in he didn’t have much power; and had never liked sex very much anyway, one of his peculiarities derived probably from his early experiences.

Finally, after a night of being ridiculed in the bars and fed up with Aek’s acquired hero status, staring at an empty driveway where his car should have been, he wrote the following story inside a couple of hours, not bothering to re-read it or edit it, just putting it out to as many outlets as he could find. The thought crossed his mind that it was probably the wrong thing to do; might just make matters worse. But he wanted the truth out there, or at least more truth than was currently being peddled, so send it he did. Perhaps predictably enough, all it did was provide more fuel for the fire.

THE BUFFALO WHO BOUGHT A GO GO BOY AN $8000 CAR

One fateful evening in April last year I returned from a visa run to Cambodia to the up market condo I had rented - in an effort to cheer myself up - at Silom Lofts in Soi Pipat off Silom Road. I dumped my bags amidst the polished grey and black of the modern apartment and thought: bugger sleeping alone.

Things did not work out that way.

That one thought, of not wanting to sleep alone, was later to lead to

me being ridiculed throughout Bangkok as a buffalo and despite zero

evidence Thailand’s number one drug driver. My 25 years as a well

respected journalist on Australia’s two leading newspapers and my

latest book, Chaos at the Crossroads, easily found on the internet,

were ignored by commentators far and wide. But I can admit to being

one of Thailand’s number one buffalos.

Like many foreign males, I saw no reason to sleep alone in a country

where it was the currency conversion rates made it relatively cheap to

buy yourself a bed buddy, so I made my way down to Bangkok’s infamous gay soi, otherwise known as Soi Twilight.

After sitting for a while having a beer and watching the colourful

parade between Beach Boys and Bangkok Boys and all the other go go

bars, I noticed most of the Asians were heading for X-Size, so I

decided to follow their lead.

It was one of the first time I had been in a gay go go bar and I

watched with interest as the parade of men in their skimpy underwear paraded their wares on the catwalk.

And one of them caught my eye, a good looking boy who attracted me

perhaps primarily because he smiled at me. It was to turn out to be a

fateful and ludicrously expensive smile, a terrible mistake. The boy I

was soon to learn was called Aek, more formally known as Tanasak

Yimpray, was soon sitting beside me; and soon enough he had changed

into his street clothes and we were on our way out of the soi.

We were to spend seven months together.

He is one person on earth I can truly say I wish I had never met.

For his cheating, thieving, lying and betrayal throughout those seven

months Aek, more formally known as Tanasak Yimpray, was to become a

hero on the gay sois and amongst the gay venues and even amongst much

of the general population for so successfully cheating a foreigner –

falang - and a cult figure in the discos where many DJs mixed songs to

make Aek the super star and the falang the object of ridicule.

And although the bar is perfectly well aware of how much I was

deceived and robbed, a year after we first met Aek is back working at

X-Size. But I must the late nights and the God knows how many

customers have made him look sick; and hhe appears no happier for the

hundreds of thousands of baht he tricked out of or deliberately stole

from me.

There is nothing Thais like more than to see a foreigner make a fool

of himself. That I did.

Lonely, I guess, and emotionally vulnerable after a difficult previous

year before leaving my long term job as a news reporter on Australia’s

national newspaper The Australian, I liked having someone around the

condo; and in a way it was a random pick, like picking a rickshaw

driver out of the Calcutta throngs to keep the others away.

The Twilight boys are not called black eyed angels for nothing. They

are practiced to deceive, masters of the art, Hollywood star actors in

their pretence that they like you. Aek was a master amongst masters.

A few days into the relationship he wrote what for a non-English

speaker was an elaborate letter declaring his love and desire to stay

with me. Every word, of course, a lie. Probably copied from some

standard format.

At first Aek could not have been more charming. I had paid him 3,000

baht for that first night, well above the going rate, and throughout

the time we spent together was in retrospect ridiculously generous. I

was particularly proud that he was going to university, and each

evening would wash his white shirt and each morning iron it before

heading off. I was the last to find out he was also taking customers

down at Soi Twilight in the afternoon.

Each morning breakfast was always on the table. Any medication I was

meant to take neatly sitting on the kitchen table.

And after about the third morning, when I found him cleaning and

tidying the condo, I thought, well I didn’t hire you as a cleaner, but

it all seemed to be part of his role and any attempt to interfere

seemed to throw him off, so, lacking many domestic instincts myself, I

soon let him takeover running the house.

How, in the end, what had once seemed so idyllic turned into a

complete and total nightmare is even now hard to fathom.

But as I was to discover, ironing his white shirt each morning was

only part of the act, and many an afternoon he was down Soi Twilight

or elsewhere taking customers. Having been alone more or less since

turning fifty, it took a while to work out that this was one of the

main reasons for the lack of excitement or interest in our own sex

life, despite his healthy renumeration.

Sometimes, later, despite his determination to put the whole sorry affair behind him, the hurt would continue. “You can see in the videos he’s deceiving him,” he heard a woman say behind him in a Korean restaurant. “He barely does anything. You remember his comment, ‘I’m not going to suck HIS cock!”

He tried to act as if he hadn’t heard the comment, but in fact he had already heard it before.

One of the single most embarrassing things about my relationship with

Aek was that I took him to Australia with me, introducing him to my

family and friends. It made his later deceit and thievery even more

evil; because he knew and had met my two children, both in university.

He knew all too well the money he conned out of me, including the

240,000 baht for the car, would have been better spent on them. It was

also a terrible abuse of the hospitality that everybody tried to show

him.

The practiced tricks of the Twilight Boys are many; and the techniques

passed between them as part of the job.

The chant to buy a car began early and went on for months, despite my

protests that a car in Bangkok, particularly when you are already

living near the centre of all the action, was a waste of money.

When we moved from the condominium to what at first seemed an idyllic

house and later turned into a terrible trap surrounded by gossiping

neighbors, the chant for the car picked up apace. I wanted and could

have quite cheaply rented a car from the same family business that

owned the house, but he dismissed the idea, saying he could do much

better through his family. Another lie.

I finally surrendered to the car idea when I got a healthy tax return

and it seemed to fit with the house.

The con job of buying a car which the foreigner assumes is being

bought in their name but in fact ends up in the Thai person’s name is

an old one; although at the time I had no idea.

Nor, as I was working 20 hours a day finishing a particularly

difficult book to a tight deadline, was I concentrating on or even

thinking about being robbed.

But the first trick to come up, also an old one, was gold and within

ten days or so of our relationship I found myself in a gold shop at

MBK being expected to fork out something like 25,000 baht for a chain

and ring. The way I had understood it before finding myself in the

shop was that he wanted to buy us matching rings.

For reasons now well beyond his understanding, William also bought him a new phone, 4,000 baht, paid for his birthday party, 12,000 baht, finally

did buy him some gold, about 14,000 baht, and at a time I was later to

discover he was already planning to leave, despite his daily

protestations of how much he loved me, a new computer, 12,000 baht.

Along with the car he also walked out with a brand new 46,000 baht motor cycle which he had no idea was being put in Aek’s name,

The 25,000 baht, almost one thousand dollars, Aek withdrew from the bank when he had sent him off with his ATM card to get 10,000 baht, enough he thought to last him while he was away and to supposedly pay for a XMAS party, seemed expensive but he was assured the change would be returned. No change ever came back, but he heard it was quite a party. Sure it was. Pappa’s away, let’s party. He might have done exactly the same at the same age.

William had already sensed everything wasn’t right, and on his visa trip, this time to Laos, he thought seriously about not returning. But he did return. And his doubts were dispelled when Aek greeted him with what appeared to be a very warm and affectionate “I have missed you”. They really are master actors.

This is how he expressed that moment in time incommunications with a friend: “Just settling back into Bangkok after a bit of a mad trip to Pnom Penh in Cambodia and Luang Prabang in Laos; which I hadn't been to since
1975, 35 years, when I'm sure I cut a more comely figure.
Seriously thought about not coming back.

Had a few things out with the boy this morning which has cleared the
air and I think we're working things out reasonably well. Mind you I've thought that before and then become resentful at being
such an integral part of his ambitions.

I can never find enough to keep him occupied and for some
stupid reason I admire the way he's used me as a stepping stone to a
bigger better future; something he makes no bones about. While he declares of course he loves me, which is simply ridiculous and impossible. For a while there I decided I was sick of being slept with as part of his work
responsibilities, but somehow that's the way the Thais think.

When I told him I had been thinking of staying in Laos because I thought he
didn't really like me he was just working Aek pointed out he could have
walked off with the car, the bike, the computer, the gold chain and
money he never had when he met me at any time, as would most of the
boys on the Twilight soi and restated his affections all over again. Oh the
travails of trying to have a love life of any sort after 55!!

Aek’s an ambitious little sod; but at least he hasn't drunk everything
away and used abused me at every opportunity like the last one.”

How very very wrong that last sentence would prove to be.

Baw’s idea of tricking a falang was to run up an 8,000 baht bar bill and maybe put a girl on the tab as well. Aek’s scams were much more sophisticated, ruthless and well planned.

The 15,000 baht Aek had borrowed for his family just before he had left for Laos and promised to return within a few days never came back; and was just shrugged off. One of the last times he was in the house he stole 10,000 baht out of his jeans. The very last time he stole about 14,000 baht.

It was obvious Aek was planning to leave shortly after the arrival of

the car because the money William gave him to pay the bills, internet,

electricity, telephone, water and so on, went straight into his pocket. He was later, much to his surprise, find

himself without services and a string of unpaid bills. It was straight

forward theft. The stealing and the betrayal came to seem endless.

That stupid stupid car he hated so much, bought over his own protests and which he so regretted buying marked the beginning of the end of everything they had built up together.

William woke up feeling like a shot of vodka and a cigarette, worried by the mere mortality of everything, and thought: you're just so crazy. The vodka was not a good idea on top of liver disease. Nor was the cigarette. Why would he want to destroy what they had worked so hard to create? This perfect house, this perfect life. The handsome boy who took care of everything. The garden in the middle of Bangkok, so that he never wanted to go out.

Suddenly, after being stupid enough to let Aek trick him into buying that stupid car William did not need and Aek then promptly stole,, he was worried about money. His ideas of wafting away at the Happy Hippy when the money ran out seemed all the more immediate. Calcutta. The dead zone.

His efforts to make friends amongst the Thais did not work out well. And the few falang he did befriend were often troubled. “Honestly, some days I think a lot about taking myself out,” Gary, one of the few Americans he became friendly with, said after flying in from some disastrous situation in the Phillipines.

“Put it off till tomorrow,” he advised airily, as in, I feel like a drink, put it off till tomorrow. Put off disaster for another 24 hours. It's just a daily program. Today is all we have. Blah blah blah.

Gary wrote in an email: "The black dog awaits my every move. It stands as a sentry of the devil in front of me. If I dare go left it goes to its right, to my right it goes to its left. It is uncompromising. It is there to wear me down, to see that my destruction comes to a completion at my own hands. It has fun in its abuse of my mental faculties.”

So he sat in Sathorn watching the native squirrels do their little morning escapade along the electric wires. The birds twittering in the trees. The luxury, seemingly empty houses coming into view. He could never understand why he had gone so far down. Why the light was not more enticing. Why he found himself yet again the only foreigner in a cheap hotel in a decaying part of Bangkok tourists never saw; with cheap porn playing on the television. Short stay hotels. A buffalo woman trying to charge them extra because he was a foreigner. The boy wasn't having a bar of the buffalo, and went straight to the front desk. He alighted from the bike he had paid for and stood there impervious. Nothing was anybody's business. Everything was going crazy. So he came home soiled from unhappy sex in cheap hotels; back into the garden and the fully equipped house and the person he still thought of as a handsome, considerate boy and thought: why risk everything? Why bother with the dark adventures of the dark lords? Surely you're too old now?

His defences were down. William had let Aek talk him into buying a car he did not need for twice what he had been prepared to spend; and thought, why, why? Perhaps it was guilt. But only he would suffer when his money ran out. Everyone else in this seething city moved on to another warm body. Time was never going to stand this still. But it had. And now he wanted safety. Reform. Another heart.

As he was later to discover, while Aek drove around like a princess in his new car, down Soi Twilight he was calling William an old, stupid buffalo. Now that’s loyalty! That’s gratitude. His protestations, when he heard such rumours, was that he never spoke of him turned out to be the usual batch of lies. The dream Aek had woven of their future together, touring Thailand, buying a house together, living the quiet life in the country after they tired of Bangkok, “I take care of you always,” was a cruel psychological hoax on someone who had just worked non-stop for more than three decades and who had just bought up two children largely on his own.

It all came crashing down, or I finally woke up, when one night he

declared he had to go off and see his old boss at X-Size to catch up

and would be back in a couple of hours. I watched as he and his friend

and mentor Mr Tong, now manager at Night Boys on Soi Six off Silom,

who’s liking for under-age boys is well known, drove merrily off in

the car I had paid for, flush with the money I had given him.

I am an insomniac at the best of times, rarely sleeping more than an

hour or two a night, and that was one of the longest and ultimately

most humiliating nights of my life. At seven in the morning, after

having not slept, I was sitting on the steps at seven a.m. in the

morning when he drove the car in, did not look me at me and headed

straight up to bed.

Sadder than sad, I went down to one of the few bars open at that hour of the morning, The Madrid on Patpong, and downed several drinks inrapid succession. Even later that day he pretended to have no moneyand I handed over yet more baht. But I soon discovered the truth ofthat night: there had been a big sex party at X-Size and like an auction, the customers bid for the performers.

I was not keeping him as some sort of sexual prisoner. I did not expect complete faithfulness. Few gay couples do not have the odd adventure or two on the side. I was in no position to lay down the high moral ground about Fsex, although I had been in retrospect ridiculously loyal and apart from an occasional massage boy faithful for most of the time we had been together.

I threw him out of the house. To this day I regret the way I behaved this morning, refusing to say a word or offer and explanation, although as he was later to realize the plans to leave were already well under way from the instant the car had arrived. In the end it would have made no difference. The theft was in motion; it was only a matter of exactly how it would play out. Doing a sex show as part of an auction, deliberately designed to humiliate him amongst all those who knew him, was a pretty good way to bring on the end game. While they were not particularly erotic in the first place, I could never look at a sex show in the go go bars again without feeling immensely sad; wondering what exactly had happened, what he did, who did what to whom, how much was the offer.

I had said to him often, we can be a free modern couple if you like,
or you can even take the spare room if you don’t want to sleep with me
anymore, since I already had the feeling things weren’t right. These
suggestions were always met with declarations of “me no boyfriend” and
“I love you mak mak, very much”. I had said to him often, we can be a free modern couple if you like, or you can even take the spare room if you don’t want to sleep with me any more, since I already had the feeling things weren’t right. These suggestions were always met with declarations of “me no boyfriend” and “I love you mak mak, very much”. There was no need for the deceit.

But the way it was done; the lies that were told, the humiliation that was heaped upon me as everyone called me a buffalo and he rode around in his new car, were simply too much. It felt, and was, the ultimate betrayal. The denials were implausible.

As part of the charade over Aek and the sex show Mr Lee, the lady boy from Hot Male with the silicone tits and the plastic hair spread the story that I had spent the night with Pye, the boy I particularly liked from there but had never been home with out of an in retrospect ridiculous loyalty to Aek.

Where this story was meant to get anyone God only knows, it simply wasn’t true.

William promptly complained to the manager that you cannot go around making up stories about one of your best customers. He insisted that in his country she would have been sacked, true enough. Apart from that he knew the owner; currently in England, and insisted on communicating the problem directly to him.

Mr Lee was later promoted to manager of Hot Male and has turned what was once a fun bar far more harm than good. Up to them if they want to promote this sort of treacherous and dishonest person. But not good for business.

William confronted her later, saying he did not want to be enemies, and she apologized. Her excuse: “Aek tell me you buffalo.”

Their brief period on talking terms did not last.

On his occasional cruises through the bar a contemptuous frisson passes between them – so much for customer relationships.

In retrospect I wish I had handled things better. In the final throws of finishing the book I had fallen off the wagon, having struggled with alcohol and addiction problems since my early teenage years. But the way it was done; the lies that were told, the humiliation that was heaped upon me as everyone called me a buffalo and he rode around in his new car, were simply too much. It felt, and was, the ultimate betrayal. The denials were implausible.

Good customer? He later asked about that night, in one of those odd moments of intimacy between them, when Aek finally gave up on the denials and accepted that he knew the truth.

Aek shook his head, no. He hadn’t been a good customer. Whoever he was. However much he had paid.

There have been several attempts at reconciliation, after all he had a

very comfortable life with me, but they have all ended in disaster, or

me being robbed or deceived in one way or another.

Calling me a drug driver, which appears now to have been widely

broadcast so that it is impossible to walk anywhere in Bangkok without

being abused, was, after all that generosity, Aek’s final and most

vicious of all the tricks played on me.

To any foreigner picking up a boy on Soi Twilight I issue one simple

warning: do not believe a word they say. And watch your wallet. Or

you too will soon find yourself being called a buffalo. As I was to

discover, foreigners are regarded as nothing more than fruit for the

picking. Beware."

The story, as he had feared, did nothing but ignite further hostility against him.

No he didn't claim to be perfect in all of this. He was vulnerable because he had been lonely; at least in terms of sleeping partners, he was in his 50s and no longer the cute young thing he had once been, he had been given particularly stupid advice by a professorial type that Asians respected older people and had a completely different attitude to sleeping with them, the stupidest advice he had ever received in his life. And yes, while he had been sober and straight for most of their relationship, he had begun to slip as he struggled with the last chapter of the book, in retrospect probably failing to recognize how rapidly his decline had set in or how embarrassing Asians regarded these matters.

Australians are much more relaxed about these issues. They are regarded the world over as party animals. Maybe not classy, but certainly up for a night out on the town. And when they say night they mean all night, welcome to the dawn.

But if he had come across as some sort of moralizing foreigner who thought he could buy a person lock, stock and barrel it was the last thing he intended. He knew perfectly well money did not buy love. Whenever William was asked, as some of his friends did, if he loved Aek he would always reply no, but it's a very convenient relationship. At first it was just nice to have him around, William would say. He has a calming affect on me, which is pretty good for someone who has never been calm in their lives.

While Aek was around the house is spick and span. He could get on with his writing work without having to worry about anything else.

William was never very good on domestic details anyway, despite having brought up two children largely on his own. Their general independence was in the end a good thing . For example, their contempt for his cooking meant that his son Sammy took cooking classes at school and soon turned into a whiz in the kitchen. Henrietta, on the other hand, being a modern girl, could barely boil water.

Before William left Australia, due to their family circumstances, he and the children had been extremely close.

Nor, he would add, does "love" mean the same things to the Thais as it does in the West. But here it is a much more practical notion of taking care of someone, while in the West it is all tied up with passionate abandonment, the giving over of oneself to another, the complete sub-summation of one into the other, individuals becoming couples, in love for life. In Thailand it didn't mean anything of the kind; and you would sometimes hear them warning about falling in love as if it was nothing but a nuisance.

In the end Aek took care of no one but himself and never apologized for all the money he so blatantly stole, never attempted to apologize for the cheap tricks he pulled with the car and the bike before driving off with them. Never thanked him for the one thousand dollar party he threw at Christmas, no change forthcoming. Rather than having any regrets, he proceeded to do his best to make as many problems as possible for the falung who had been so ridiculously generous to him.

Nor was William some high horse person or moralist about the notorious sexual freedom or liberty of the Thais. As the saying went, when God was handing out sexual feelings, the Thais were standing at the front of the queue. While he had been largely, perhaps ludicrously faithful, he could hardly deny the odd massage boy had kept him happy on occasion. But the way it was done, the dismissive contempt that was shown him, the outright fraud and deceit that was perpetrated against him as they smugly drove off to the sex show while leaving him bored and alone, was simply too much.

William had repeatedly declared he understood he was old and no longer handsome. That Aek was young handsome gay man who might understandably want to go out on occasion, or have sex with other people. These attempts to introduce some reality or modernity to their situation were always countered with declarations of love and "me no boyfriend" and that William was the only one he wanted. Oh sure. He could see what the mirror threw back as well as anyone.

It would have been so easy to tell the truth: I want to go out partying for the night. Why don't you go and take out that boy Pye you like at Hot Male. Instead of declaring that he would be back in an hour or two. As William later said: "You forgot one basic rule. Make sure pappa's happy." Because pappa was the one who is paying for every body else's misconduct.

Not that with his excessive drinking he was entirely innocent in the parade of events or that he could avoid all responsibility for the predicament he found himself in – but with buffalo die buffalo die buffalo die buffalo go home being chanted outside his house during the Thai New Year festivities, which spread over several days, the abuse was getting increasingly on his nerves.

Pure intentions of greed and deceit were to become even clearer during the following months.

their souls as well.

Lean times, originally brought on by the Red Shirts political demonstrations which had scared many of the foreigners away, made competition even stiffer. There was always someone younger and better looking just around the corner.

He should have realized that he was dealing with working boys who could not and should not be believed; and virtually everything he was told, from Aek's age, 22, more like 25, to how long he had been working, allegedly only for four months to support his university studies, were all lies and he had been around Screw Boys and such places for years. Almost every boy he ever went with tried to cheat him in one way or another. The stories, often heterosexual, of being cheated out of every cent they had by voracious Thai families or tricky spouses and partners were legion. As a number of Thai people warned him themselves, you need to meet normal Thai people. These people, these boys, only on want money. Perhaps it was a bit harsh; he actually liked a lot of the working girls and boys he met. But many others warned that If you were fortunate enough to find a good Thai person to have a relationship with, it was highly unlikely you would meet them amongst the bars and clubs crowded with sex workers.

But changing worlds aside, if you can sleep with someone for seven months straight, as he did with Aek, and pretend to be both faithful and in love for the entire period while being neither, puts you in a Hollywood Star class of actor. But it also turns you in the end into an amoral manipulator whose concern for the welfare of others, or certainly for their so-called clients or lovers, is somewhere below zero. But then, that is how many foreigners are regarded, morons with too much money.

There were crowds dancing their butts off to an endless new string of songs about buffalos and drug drivers.

In the distant, deeply deluded past he had felt proud about introducing the young man he had so proudly or perhaps courageously taken back to Australia to introduce to his friends and family. He had been determined his children would approach the situation in a broad minded way; but nonetheless his son and daughter had been somewhat shocked to discover their dad was gay, well at least for the time being anyway. But at the end of it all, melodramatic as it may sound, sometimes he felt he was staring at pure evil; perhaps primarily due to the lack of remorse or embarrassment at the damage so obviously done to him and the blatant thefts he had perpetrated on him and no doubt many others.

He should also have realized he was dealing not just with one thieving little deceitful rent boy, but with a question of national pride; and with organizations including the police who had large amounts of money invested in or who were making large amounts of money from the go-go boy industry and the sex industry as a whole.

The physical beauty of the Thais and their relaxed and open attitude to prostitution was after all one of the country's major draw cards for tourists. And these days not just males, as he noticed the women, particularly Japanese women, lining up in some of the go-go bars.

The house, now empty except for his over looming self, made him nervous. The Chant of Metta - The Chant of Loving Kindness became the most played piece of music in the house; along with Lose Your Soul by Dead Man's Bones. On many a day he felt it didn't matter any more what else was in the world. It didn't matter who said what. He was beyond caring, could not think of taking another lover. Voices crackled in the wind. Drug Driver. Baw. Banha, problem. Falang, foreigner. Yabba.

He could hear the crackling twists in the ether; their twisted thoughts, the land of layered deception, the derisive voices of the neighbours who never seemed to tire of commenting on the ting tong falang.

The Thai New Year was supposed to be a happy, carefree time. Throwing water and daubing clay on the soaked faces of the mostly young people filling the streets at night was all part of the famous festival. He turned the volume up on the stereo to drown out their voices. One woman in particular could keep up her shrieking about the ting tong falang, nam kang, ice, the maw falang, for hours and hours at a time. On one New Year’s day she kept it up for ten hours straight, roaring uproariously at any movement she spotted in the house or mention she heard on the news.

But the hysteria and hatred generated at him for being an alleged “drug driver”, based on absolutely no evidence at all but the word of a Twilight go go boy and without any journalist querying him on the subject; was difficult to comprehend.

The situation spun out of control, leading during the Thai New Year festivities of Song Khrong to some of the most remarkable crowd scenes he had ever witnessed as thousands of water soaked youngsters pressed their way through the famous Bangkok street of Silom. They danced and cheered to the themes of Drug Driver and Buffalo Go Home, Buffalo Die, Buffalo Ting Tong. Some people in the crowd recognized him and were kind; almost embraced him, daubed him affectionately with clay. “I think you were very hurt, I am sorry,” one said. A few others were angry, muttering “geur”, “buffalo” or “go home”. Sometimes he was just greeted with excited cries of “drug driver”, although he was no such thing, it was simply a fantasy that had gripped the nation.

But as another cheer went up from the frolicking crowd for the buffalo to go home, he felt like the loneliest person in Thailand. Perhaps he deserved to be. Broken hearted at the collapse of the dream Aek had built up, his sins of drunken excess were more crazed than at any other time in his life, but they were still indulgent or driven by old fashioned alcoholism than they were venal. The hysteria was made worse by his lack of conformity to the crowd and his difficulties understanding the complex culture in which he found himself. In Australia nobody much cared what anybody else did. They just went about their lives.

That first night he ventured down to Silom, having taken shelter behind a food stand, he watched, in the company of one of Baw’s old girlfriends, the most astonishing scenes erupting in front of him beneath the concrete stalwarts of Sala Dang Station, the water drenched band shouting Buffalo Die Buffalo Die, Australian Go Home, Go Home. The packed crowd of dancing teenagers pumping their fists at every insult directed at the foreigner, the so-called drug driver. Some people recognized him, pointed him out, many had no idea who he was.

For a while he and his companion, a tiny Asian girl dwarfed, already overwhelmed, sought refuge at the craziness being pointed in their direction. They sought refuge at one of the main tables in the front of Coffee Society, one of Bangkok’s many gay haunts. Good looking coyotes, as they were called, danced wildly in front of them, shirtless to show off their slim, taught bodies. He crossed his legs in a an attempt to try and maintain dignity, tried in some sociological, distanced sense to find the wild crowd scenes in front of him amusing or interesting or even beautiful, the cries of Aek! Aek! Aek! nothing to confront. He tried to ignore the sadness, embarrassment, astonishment at suddenly becoming the focus of a attention for thousands upon thousands of people.

He drank two mugs of white coffee in rapid succession while his companion seemed to shrink more and more into a state of discomfort, perhaps for fear of being recognized as being with the so-called drug driver.

Before they left Café Society the crowd, including the go go boys, coyotes as they were known, danced enthusiastically to the new song: All The Boys Think You Are Crazy.

That all this was brought on by the words of a go-go boy anybody could rent for the night, with zero evidence, could only happen in Thailand. That this and the death threats against him stemmed in part from his having dared to complain to the bar X-Size where he had picked Aek up him up about all the money tricked and stolen from him defied belief. The bar had in fact given Aek a glowing recommendation. After a few days at Silom Lofts Aek expressing his concern that he wanted to stay with him forever but he owed the bar money. So another 3,000 baht disappeared as he obligingly went down to X-Size to cover the debt which arose when many of the bars leant their employees cash during the Red Shirt protests. The political demonstrations had jammed up much of the centre of Bangkok and brought the go go bars to a virtual standstill.

The normal tourist trade had stopped altogether and most countries were warning travelers to stay out of the city.

But after a time at Café Society watching the frenzied dancing of the boys and the surreal scenes and jeering cries of Aek! Aek! Aek! and Buffalo Die, he really was starting to feel if not sad, then something way beyond. They worked their way slowly through the packed crowds.

On their second night out on Silom they ate on the steps behind a food stall. The same street scenes were being repeated all around him. “Buffalo die” the crowd cheered, and “Aek Aek Aek” they chanted. His friend told the stall holder to make the simple egg, rice and pork dish “mai pet”, not spicy, as most foreigners preferred. Not to worry, “I’m already spicy,” he joked, something he was to hear later repeated on radio.

As he sat and ate the simple dish washed down with a Leo beer he watched as a middle aged man, obviously angry, declaring, he is here now, you could arrest him now, he is in the street. Not long after the man strode off in annoyance at the apparent lack of action.

After Song Khran the Captain would come and question him, he heard on the radio. But what voices were true and what were not were difficult to tell, his brain putting together the pieces of Thai that he knew with syllables similar to English, often in the worst possible way. He would be very glad to start his Thai language course the following week, so that the voices he heard around him would begin to fall into place.

But he heard their voices on radio, angry, immediately on their telephones reporting in to various radio stations, telling their friends they had spotted the Buffalo farang. Every taxi in the area had been ordered to keep an out for a strange looking Australian, and reported him. Soi Cow, that is Soi Nine, off Sathon, became infamous. Although there was hardly any one there; the attention being focused on him was way out of proportion; a lot of foreigners came to Bangkok and went a bit crazy, at least for a while. You could walk down Nana, the tourist district, any night of the week and find foreigners far more messed up than him.

Absurdity piled upon absurdity, and the insults included comments on his lack of power, the ultimate insult for a Thai male and which was certainly true enough after Aek left, he was so hopelessly drunk by time he got home. Besides, the fact that after the departure of the boy he had been deceived into thinking was his boyfriend, he only ever liked two or three of the many handsome men in Bangkok and never felt comfortable having serial affairs with strangers, as did some if not many gay or bi-sexual men, or many men for that matter.

Sometimes drunkenness and some kind of madness, or perhaps it was hope, would grip him and he would drag two boys home at once. But most of them were straight and apart from occasionally watching them wank off to straight porn movies, this ridiculously expensive diversion, compounded by expensive drinks in go go bars and people who always seemed to be lining up for a tip, a kindness they simply dismissed as further proof of your stupidity, proved as pointless as so much else during those first insane months of 2011.

As his former “partner”, or what he had been deceived into thinking of as his partner with constant declarations of “me no boyfriend” and equally constant declarations of “I love you mak mak”, the now famous go-go boy Aek spread the lie that he was a drug driver across as many media outlets as he could, his personal situation went from bad to worse. WhiIe he was ultimately to confess that he had made the whole story up, the cruelty had already done its damage. His public standing was not helped by the bender he had embarked upon, his deteriorating mental state, increasing paranoia and certainly as far as the Thais peculiar behavior. As a child of the seventies and the inheritor of a legacy from a group of that era's crazies, most of whom were long dead now, he perhaps didn't realize how bizarre his behavior and state of mind was becoming.

A cascade of schizophrenic responses began teaming through his brain. He ended in some of the worst mental states he had ever been in.on To drown out the voices, just to feel normal, his drinking became extreme. One Singha and two shots of Jack Daniels, followed rapidly by another round, was enough to get anyone moving.

But in Thailand, where sabai sabai, relax, was the order of the day, the demonic bender he embarked on after the breakup of a relationship with a go-go boy he was stupid enough, old and naïve enough to fall for, combined with his natural separation from the crowd, must have made him appear even more strange.

Despite his rocky start and a predilection for alcohol and addiction problems which plagued him from the age of 15, when he would pass out in the street with bottles of alcohol or swallow anything he could find, anything that would make him feel different, he managed to finish High School by correspondence, topping the state with level one passes in modern and ancient history and English, something he was proud of after the many chaotic days of his adolescence.

He was the first of his family to ever attend a tertiary institution, major and anthropology. Later he did his sociology thesis on gay bars, which were, perhaps primarily for their theatrically, to remain an enduring interest throughout much of his life, not for the sexual interest they rarely held. He could admire the circus, the thronging crowds, the many games that were played, but he wasn’t in search of sex, which in any case he rarely enjoyed.

How much of it was real and how much of it was hallucinatory he seriously began to wonder. But unfortunately, not all the voices were just in his head. Radio and later television commentary ranged from comments on his over tipping, even down to how much he had once tipped a taxi driver 50 baht, less than half the price of a cup of coffee in Sydney, or his need for a shower and whether or not he had ever heard of cologne.

Advice to change countries increasingly looked a better option, although his instinctual reaction was to stay and confront the issues. To see how this story, amongst so many others, would end. Luckily he had been in journalism all his adult life, and was used to the fame, infamy and controversy which accompanied it.

Why should he be driven out of a city he loved, despite the lack of a warm embrace. A wise man walks around trouble. He seemed to have landed slap bang in the middle of it. To now be walking through the middle of a sea of chaos and fear. He was becoming frightened to go out because the derogatory comments just kept flying wherever he went. They thought he did not know enough Thai to understand what they were saying, but after a year he most certainly did. It was difficult to stay caged in one place for a naturally restless soul such as himself, blessed with a chronic case of claustrophobia. But why should he flee one of what he regarded as the world’s most beautiful and affordable cities, all on the vicious propaganda spread by a go go boy and a street boy?

Now you wake up, the evil little prick who sold ice to the boys and acted like some Prima Donna attached to Night Boys, Mr Joo Joo they called him, asked? They were sitting in the corner bar Hot Male on the corner of Soi Twilight, and Aek was being particularly cuddly while acting, and no doubt it was acting, as if he was drunk. Despite all the protestations that they were off to a new beginning and he wanted to spend the night back at the house; this, too, ended in disaster and duplicity.

After he had fallen off the wagon at the end of the book Chaos At The Crossroads; he discovered a certain liking for a bar down the road that opened at 4am each morning after the disco below it closed. Often he hadn’t had a drink all day until then. But his habit of ordering a Singha beer and shots of Jack Daniels soon ensured he was pissed. He loved the bar because it was tacky and unpretentious, and reminded him of Sydney bars in the 1970s and 1980s when heavy drinking was the norm and being off your head in one way or another perfectly socially respectable, if not expected. Nobody who was anybody, in those far off Sydney days before health, fitness and professional careers took over as the normal aims for all but the alcoholically doomed, his reputation in Thailand, reflecting on the situation at hand, was not helped by his own behavior.

While he might already have begun to slip, the alcohol and drug bender he embarked on after Aek’s departure was entirely life threatening and without precedent in his life, turning him into a jerking caricature of a human being. Sleep was not on the agenda. Intoxication in almost any form was. That first night he did what any ordinary Australian would do, that is go and get drunk at the local pub with other men. Except there wasn’t a local pub anywhere near him, so instead he went to the local shop where a small group of men would often gather after work for a drink or a chat.

He bought a bottle of whisky and the small group, still friendly at this point before the rumors of his being a drug driver began to spread, assisted greatly by Aek, who appeared to have been very busy blackening his name amongst the neighbors.

That first night after Aek’s departure with the 240,000 baht car he had thought he was buying for himself but had ended up in Aek’s name, William shared with the other men his frustration perhaps most at his own stupidity. They laughed in what seemed like a kind of sympathy but probably wasn’t.

“He even stole the dog, that’s what gets me the most,” William said, trying to make some brief light of the disaster. “I loved that dog and it cost 2400 Baht.”

To these men spending that amount of money on a dog was beyond insanity or imagination; and they just poured another round of whisky.

At one point he stood up and walked around the block in an attempt to release his tension, kicking a brick by accident along the way and lifting off his big toenail. The whisky made sure it didn’t hurt much at the time, but when he returned to the shop the men kindly helped to clean up the blood. It was later to become infected; making it almost impossible to even walk.

But later that night, with the whisky bottle empty and the family men calling it a night, he bought another bottle of whisky and went back to the now empty house. He sat on the steps and continued to drink, unable to even think about entering the house.

He decided to go and stay in a hotel; and remembered the Shangrila on the edge of the river as being a particularly nice hotel. He had stayed there almost 20 years before on the way back from England, when his daughter had been barely a month old. He showed up at the hotel, now one of the most expensive in Bangkok, extremely drunk sometime after one in the morning. He was disheveled and the security guard looked him over with more than the usual attention. But once they worked out he could afford to stay there, the staff were professional and courteous. He ordered a suite and Baw and his girlfriend came to stay. For some disordered reason he had thought he was calling on the fellowship of a friend to help him through a difficult period. Instead, one way and another, Baw made money out of the opportunity. They ordered a bottle of Jack Daniels and he got smashed as a skunk for the two days they stayed there; most of the time he just spent staring out the window. And, ridiculously in retrospect, he could not stop crying – for a go-go boy for Christ’s sake. He was a mess.

He was paying 10,000 baht a night or more fomer one of the cities most beautifully located and expensive hotels; and most of the time he just spent tearfully staring out the window at the passing barges on the Chao Phrava River, gazing across to the Peninsula Hotel on the other side, and as the sun set watching the pleasure barges begin their nightly cruises. It was several days since he had slept, he was hopelessly helplessly drunk, and just felt sad beyond measure.

It wasn’t as if he had never broken up with anybody before. Of course it is al ways easier to leave than to be left.

And he kept thinking: it could have been such a happy house. It could have been full of people and parties ande fun. He had kept suggesting they could have one of those free and open relationships so many gay people have; or Aek could just take the spare room if he liked. These ideas were always rejected with the “I love you mak mak” and “me no boyfriend” and “I only take care you, forever”.

With his foot starting to infect and barely able to walk despite the antibiotics he was now on, he went from the Shangrila Hotel to Chiang Mai in an attempt to create a different atmosphere. As he walked through the airport, in the worst state of mind he could ever remember being in, he thought everyone, even the kids, were talking about the idiot falung who had bought the boy a car. He had forgotten it was high season in Chiang Mai and the streets were jammed with tourists. Chiang Mai was a much more charming place without them. He stayed in his room, trying to recover. There weren’t enough sleeping pills in the world to keep him unconscious.

CHAPTER TWO

GASSAP GASSAI - RESTLESS

As the year 2009 drew to a close the entire life he had built for himself and the children collapsed. The national newspaper where he worked was in turmoil. The paper was being redesigned and the website re-launched in what was intended to be another adroit maneuver to continue making money in the age of the world wide web.

News Limited did not get to be a massive multi-billion dollar company owning hundreds of newspapers and television stations by being slow on its feet; and the best minds in the business were being exercised on how to make money out of the internet. The changing nature of the medium, of which he was ultimately to become a victim just like so many others of his contemporaries, could be clearly seen just by the changing nature of the office.

Once the Chief of Staff was located directly outside the Editor in Chief’s office; and in an hierarchical organization power then emanated out from there, across a news room full of reporters. By the time he left the paper 15 years after he first joined it, the area outside the Editor in Chief’s Office was occupied by a web master and other technocrats employed to run the website, which was finally generating income and attracting significant numbers of readers.

As the web maestros spread the traditional reporters disappeared. The staff, ably assisted by editors who stayed holed up in their offices, radiating silent threats, felt under siege. Older journalists, many great characters with long associations with the paper, basically anyone 60 or over, were being dismissed as dinosaurs. They were being deemed unsuited to the new world of the web, of instant online blogging and twittering, a world of where news was infotainment, a faster, shallower more immediate world where they were expected, for instance, to file constant updates throughout the day on any developing story.

Soon enough, it was rumored, journalists would also be expected to take their own photographs and file short video updates as well, to be both talented and presentable.

The dinosaurs, they joked amongst themselves, were those who cared about the story and getting the facts right.

There was an old but very true saying: journalism is a young man’s sand pit and an old man’s quicksand.

The saying was to prove as true for him as it had for so many others.

Journalism is a wonderful profession when you’re young, flying all over the state, meeting all sorts of people, spending the nights drinking with compatriots, on the road again in the morning, every story an adventure.

For an old man it was a profession filled with treachery, failing eyesight, missing talents, declining enthusiasm.

Historically journalism by its very nature of long hours and strange associations across the social spectrum and often enough in the city’s hotels, attracted misfits; and certainly 30 years ago the stereotype of the hard bitten journalist wedded to a bar stool wasn’t that far from the truth. Now communication degrees were offered at universities and journalism had come to be regarded as much like any other technical profession.

But back then no one expected journalists to be or to act like normal office workers. Even where he came from he was regarded as somewhat eccentric. But in Australian journalism there was a long and often unwritten tradition of noble eccentrics; many of whom, as he own career began to soar, he watched and befriended as their careers sputtered to a close.

Coming to Bangkok, with all the shackles of his old life having disappeared, one thing he missed more than anything was the close relationships he had formed to many of the creative people he worked with. There was something about the profession that often made people sympathetic to the fate of others. Few persevered in an essentially unrewarding career without developing some kind of empathy for those less fortunate themselves. The rich were protected by money and high walls from the scrutiny of journalists. Even at tens of thousands of dollars an hour, Australia’s richest could get the state’s Supreme Court opened in the evening to block a story if they so desired. The poor on the other hand were always easy fodder for the press.

Many reporters, including himself, were not in journalism simply for the money, which while above the average wage was not that well remunerated in contrast to many other professions. They were there for other reasons: the creativity of telling other people’s stories, a compulsion for social justice issues, an urge to tell the truth about the society they found themselves in, or sometimes simply for the excitement of in the centre of everything, which was also one of his motivations. If something was happening, often as not he was slap bang in the middle of it. There was no better place to be, If you were interested in journalism, than at the heart of the national newspaper, even if not high up the slippery pole.

Some of the dinosaurs, most only two or three years older than himself, especially those who had long but often not all that interesting careers at the paper left with handsome payouts which simply added to their assets built up over the duration of their stable lives. Others, often those who could have done with the money the most, were being dismissed in the cruelest and most offhand of ways; working journalists one minute, being escorted from the building by security guards the next. That was News Limited, clannish at one moment, ruthless the next. Everyone was expendable, of that no one was in any doubt.

With the redesign, many people’s workloads virtually doubled; the news room became a deeply unhappy place. While previously freelancing, an occupation which enabled him to pursue his own interests including interviewing some of the world’s most famous authors, including Dirk Bogarde, Anthony Burgess and Norman Mailer while he was living in London, freelance journalism was financially insecure in the extreme. Newspapers and magazines are always happy to publish but slow to pay. Finally, already over 30, he crawled into the mainstream. The day the Bureau Chief reached across the news desk and said, congratulations, you’ve got the job, the same day as his first front page, was one of the proudest days of his life.

For the 25 years before he came to Bangkok William had been a staff journalist on Australia’s two leading newspapers, The Sydney Morning Herald and then for the past 15 years for the national newspaper The Australian. Through a series of incredibly stressful circumstances, it all came to an end.

Having been writing since childhood, and professionally for three decades, it came naturally enough to him that he would write about the events in Bangkok, no matter how bad he might sometimes look, how much the Thais laughed at him, or even in some senses what the consequences were. The whole Aek thing made him feel sad and foolish; a feeling for which he had paid a very pretty penny.

Strangely he kept meeting people turning 30 whose dreams remained unfulfilled, their lives if not directionless than less than successful.

But it had been at exactly that age, despite some minor successes over the years, that he finally decided he would live or die by the typewriter; no matter what. Perhaps having sat and read all three volumes of van Gogh’s letters to his brother Vincent; perhaps it was just the remnants of the haphazard time when everyone wanted to be a writer or artist or musician, whatever it was, that was the age when that one decision transformed his life. Live or die by your dream.

He was living in London on the remnants of his good looks and in the remnants of a long relationship; interviewing authors and musicians and always working on one project or another; but barely patching together a living; making it up with weekend shifts at the local pub for a pound an hour; or cleaning jobs with an insane queen we all called Diedrie, who flashed around London in his red BMW convertible and his dog, an Airdale, reputedly the dumbest of almost all the breeds, taking pride of place while he sat stuck with the buckets and mops in the back seat.

He remembered the day he crawled into the mainstream vividly and wrote about it thus:

“Everything comes out of the torrents of the past; always disturbed, always flung to the four winds, good times non-existent. The world was a flat, monochromatic place, leaden grey. A terrifying place. There was no coherent, single personality. The grey was all that he knew, all that he had known for years. Comfort came from the familiarity of despairing routines. If he sought wealth, it was purely to fritter away. He had no belief in a brighter future, such an idea would have been laughable, if it had ever occurred to him. The cringing, sad person that he had become evolved over years, decades. The chaos arose from a doomed lifestyle and his own addictions. He wore his depression like a cloak, a protective armour; leaves blown on soggy ground, swirls of dark colours, orange sludge, the despair of the landscape, reaching up to melancholy. That was about the range. He wandered into the job at The Sydney Morning Herald, then regarded as one of the world's great newspapers, out of these doom laden winds with no ambition, no hope of a career, just a sad determination to see out promises made to himself a long time ago.

“He had no formal training, had never studied journalism, he simply had the compulsion to write. He didn't, in his heart of hearts, actually believe his determination to live by the typewriter would succeed. He knew, deep in his own soul, he was doomed to failure. But somehow, out of sheer persistence and more particularly the kindness of strangers, he began getting the occasional reporting shifts. He used the old line, it almost always worked, that he had just got back from overseas and was looking for work, although in fact he had been back in Australia for several months. One of the editors of the Saturday feature section of The Sydney Morning Herald, the city's broadsheet, a reformed alcoholic, took kindness on him and started giving him assignments. Something connected them, perhaps their own dysfunction, secret comrades in arms, sharing inner defects and fatal flaws.

“Whatever the reason, this man took it on himself to recommend him to the editors, and be began doing casual reporting shifts. It was working Sundays that did it. Sooner or later they noticed that he kept getting a run on Mondays, the paper wasn't getting sued and the stories weren't, hopefully, too badly written. He was perfectly happy to work Sundays, it wasn't as if anything else was going on in his life, no happy family, no picnics with friends, clothes dank with addiction sweat. He had already won and lost so many times, he felt old.

His first front page would never normally have made it to Page Zed, much less the front. For months, poverty stricken and attempting to stabilise his life, he had kept up the casual shifts in the wan hope of fulfilling a dream of becoming a journalist.

In those days, before the news pages shrank and the sections became the money spinners, there was always a scrabbling desperation to get enough stories for the next day. There were a lot of pages to fill and in a city the size of Sydney, on a lot of days not all that much to put in them.

There's a register for women in unorthodox jobs, the chief of staff said. Their funding has run out and they're whinging for more. These people always want more of everybody else’s money, they can't possibly stand on their own two feet. Anyway, we're desperate for picture stories tomorrow, see what you can get. Try and find some cute young woman carpenter, covered in saw dust, or a mechanic, grease streaking her face, dribbling down her breasts. Just make sure they're cute, we don't want some bull dyke. So I headed off to the meeting in inner-city Surry Hills with Steve, the most foul mouthed and crude of all the photographers. Like an early Chef Ramsey, he found it impossible to utter a sentence without swearing.

Soon enough we found ourselves sitting in the middle of a room jam packed full of often rather butch looking women; we were virtually the only men. We certainly didn't slot right in. I tried to feel comfortable, nothing to it, I'm a progressive kind of guy, go girls, all of that. I had done women's studies at university in the seventies. I thought of myself as a SNAG, the cutting edge of gender transformation, a sensitive, new age guy who might even have batted for the other side at times, if it was anyone's business.

There, in that crowded room in the mid-1980s, there was nowhere to sit, the air full of self-righteous anger with 300 or more women crammed into the small space. Eventually a woman dedicated to taking care of the media cleared a spot for them; and they sat cross- legged; completely surrounded. No other media outlet had bothered to show.

They were late, as always, and a woman was up the front pounding on about the injustice of the government's failure to continue to fund their directory of women carpenters, plumbers, electricians and the like, yet another blow by a patriarchy determined to keep women in the kitchen.

As the only two men there, William and Steve couldn't help but feel distinctly uncomfortable.

"There's no picture here," Steve whispered, intentionally loud enough for a dozen of the sisterhood around them to hear. "Just look around. None of them make a photograph, mate. I'm out of here, I'm going to find something else. There's just not a shot here."

"I've got to stay and listen to this," William said.

"Well I don't, I'm gone," Steve said, standing up and elbowing his way through the crowd of women.

William, very uncomfortable, knew the women around him had heard exactly what Steve had said.

On and on the speakers went. Back in the office, he wrote up the story on the antiquated computer system, made it as interesting as possible, assuming as his fingers rattled across the keyboard that the story would never get a run. It might have been important to the people involved, but it wasn't earth shattering. Journalists are always being targeted by groups whose funding has run out; noble cause after noble cause.

Next day the story was on the front page, his very first front page story. It was the picture that did it, of course, and he learnt forever the value of a good photograph in dragging a story onto the front; or higher in the "book" as the sections are known. A large photograph, run wide and deep, of a drop dead gorgeous young woman, maybe 23, adorned the page. She was carrying a ladder, with the Opera House in the background. Her white overalls were stained delicately with paint; the upper flaps just loose enough to provoke the imagination of males around the city. Can I help you carry that? a hundred thousand voices asked, the delicate tracings of signs of labour, the glorious smell of sweat.

He never got a thank you from the organisers of the Women In Unorthodox Jobs Directory. But later that day the chief of staff leant across the desk and shook his hand; congratulations, you've got the job. He was a full time journalist. It was the proudest day of his life.

It had been a very long journey to get there. In the literally thousands of stories that would follow, an equally long journey lay ahead.

A quarter of a century later, having previously watched several vicious cycles of managerial decimation of news rooms, supposedly for some higher economic goal, many of the senior journalists around him were being shown the door, years of loyalty dismissed in an instant.

Instead William was given a supposed promotion, labeled an editor, told there was no way a general reporter could get any higher than his present salary level. He soon noticed that while the most senior of the editorial staff continued to hide in their offices or treat everyone with disdain, others were suddenly treating him with more respect than a “mere” general news reporter, although they were the people who filled the news pages every day and whose reliability, professionalism and accuracy the paper’s reputation rode upon.

The day he was given the so-called promotion would remain seared in his memory as the beginning of the end of his life in Sydney, the career he was so accustomed to, the life he had built with his children, the friendships he had formed, all of it began to fall apart.

William was in the centre of the news room, talking intently with one of the photographers about an upcoming story, and while he knew someone was calling his name he ignored the call. Someone was always clamoring for attention.

Then one of the subs came over to him and declared: “The editor wants to speak to you,” gesturing in the direction of the little Hitler they all called Boris after a cartoon character of short stature.

William had already attended the rather sad farewells of a number of the paper’s largest personalities, those who leant it at least some personality, and his first thought was: now it’s my turn.

Instead Boris briefed him on the paper’s upcoming redesign. The world’s top newspaper designer had just been flown in from Spain to oversee the paper’s new look. Then he was informed that he was being appointed as editor of a column to run on the arts pages, later to be named “Out and About”, essentially a daily culture vulture guide of what the paper recommended its readers see or attend. The column was Murdoch’s own idea, he was informed, and his performance would be closely observed by the big man himself; the owner of more than 350 newspapers and the world’s most feared, admired, despised and powerful man in journalism.

“I joined the Australian because I like to write,” he responded. “Not because I want to make lists of things. What if I say no?”

Boris, unaccustomed to being questioned or talked back to, looked momentarily surprised and then proceeded to make it clear William had no choice in the matter.

As a national newspaper the column required providing the details for all the major theatre, musical and intellectual events of every capital city in the country on a daily basis, along with extracts from the paper’s critics. It might have sounded simple enough, but in reality was an enormously complex operation. The column took up half a full broad sheet page six days a week, an enormous amount of space to fill.

The gossip of management’s latest insanity, taking their best and most experienced general reporter off the news pages, spread rapidly through the news room. The lack of consultation was classic News Limited. Not even his own Chief of Staff had known about the move.

The promised pay rise which was supposed to accompany the “promotion” never arrived, as was also fairly typical of News Limited; and the job itself was entirely unsuited to his “skill set”. For a start, he rarely bothered to read the arts pages, and was only ever called upon to write for them when they wanted a reporter who could tell a straight story, rather than a critic who would only clutter the page with their own personal opinions and attempts at clever word play.

Apart from anything else, William was a hardened general reporter who had been “on the road” for the past quarter of a century and didn’t much like sitting in the office; as his new job required.

Presented with no alternatives, and still with two children to support, he promised to give the job his best shot. It all went south.

One might assume that the term “editor” meant exactly that, one would be assembling material and directing where it should go on the page and in what form. While there was a lead-up period to the re-launch, including heavy promotion of the new column, the training and preparation all proved inappropriate. With the assistance of one of the paper’s technical experts he dedicated many days to drawing up a beautiful multi-coloured calendar map able to track forthcoming events in all the country’s major cities. It proved a complete waste of time.

Only on the day of publication did it dawn on anyone that he was also supposed to sub-edit all the copy as well as finding and assembling it.

Traditionally on newspapers reporters dismiss subs chained to their desks each night putting out the paper as “the living dead”, while subs regard themselves as technical experts and dismiss reporters as incompetent overpaid egotistical idiots who could not write their way out of a paper bag.

William had never subbed anything in his life; a complex process for the uninitiated. In reality every piece of bold type, colored headline, indentation or italic had to have the computer codes keyed in by him; and at the time didn’t know a “quad left” from a “quad right”. For days the entire arts section was turned upside down with various arts writers being diverted to assist with the column’s production.

The column took up a full broadsheet half page, an enormous amount of space to fill. Out and About proved an impossible job, which in the end left him working up to 14 hours a day and almost led to a heart attack. He felt harassed beyond measure. Not a single person in authority moved to assist. The day he was given the job was the last day Boris spoke to him.

At the same time his life was turned upside down with the collapse of half the ceilings in the Redfern house William had rented for years and after a period of chaotic homelessness he moved down to Bondi Beach. The local Redfern pub where he knew everybody, the local café A Little On The Side where he chatted happily each morning to a little crowd of self-appointed intelligentsia, all of it disappeared.

Euro-trash girls with fresh suntans and attitude – you’re old, you don’t belong here – accepted his orders for coffee begrudgingly, with an attitude somewhere beyond utter indifference. He tried to make new friends in the beachside suburb, but apart from his old mate Michael, who he had known for 30 years and was probably his most reliable friend, Sydney just wasn’t that warm a place.

The one pseudo-romance William struck up with a woman his own age could hardly have been more disastrous. Over the atrophying years of not sleeping with anyone, he had become uncomfortable touching anybody.

One day he had been happily chatting to the barmaid Joe at the Bondi Hotel, a good looking, fine boned, thoughtful woman who used to work as a journo at the Sydney Morning Herald in the eighties. William hadn’t seen her since she disappeared off to South America with some crazy handsome cocaine fueled boyfriend two decades before.

“I'm going to have to work, the management keep a very close eye, they get upset,” she finally said. “I've got a friend outside, I'll introduce you; you two would have a lot to talk about; she used to be in the media.”

So that was how he met Marsha. She was sitting on a high stool at one of the tables outside; the Bondi Hotel was in the middle of renovations and much was at odds with its normal self; just as in his own life everything had been thrown out of kilter. The simple truth, William was no longer coping; stressed beyond all reason. He climbed mountains everyday and got paid nothing in contrast to professionals on other career paths. He got pissed for no known reason; and every reason; and was happy to settle with a full schooner glass next to someone with an equally full glass; to chat with someone his own age about life, the universe and everything.

William and Marsha talked all afternoon. Sit up straight, she remonstrated several times; and he tried to ignore her until she physically bolstered him. I'm psychic, she informed him, I sense things, know things. As the afternoon dragged on, he heard the whole story, the lesbian daughter she had brought up on her own, how Marsha had bought her magnificently located terrace overlooking Australia’s most famous beach and directly opposite the massive house of Australia’s richest man Jamie Packer in the 1980s for just over $100,000. Now it was worth millions.

William had fallen off the coveted Sydney real estate ladder with separation and could do little but look on with envy at all those people who had been more stable or more sensible than him, who had at least invested something. How easy it would have been in retrospect, if he had ever expected to live; which of course he never had. The beer flowed all afternoon and the day turned into evening; he heard about living with Martin Sharp, about Sally Anne Huckstepp, a famous Sydney identity, a prostitute and heroin addict revered for her wild ways; her boyfriend killed in a Chippendale back lane in the 1980s by Sydney's most infamous cop, Roger Rogerson.

We all touched, our lives all touched; the great and the famous; the terrible shifting sands, this illusory place. He grandly insisted on shouting schooner after schooner, Boags, the best beer you can get, which of course made it alright. They drank and they smoked, unfashionably, the old party animals who never gave up, could see no reason to give up. Sobriety was for morons and the characterless. Day turned into night and the tourists drifted up and down the concourse. Groups came and went at the surrounding tables. He was in the flow and nothing mattered; a fascinating man, life battered. A story for every occasion. They were firm friends by the end of their drunken communion; having established that they lived in the same street and that both were in desperate need of human comfort. Embarrassing moments followed. They shared Bloody Marys at the Italian cafe on the corner one morning, despite his remonstrations about trying not to drink; taking in the shuttered windows of the beach house of Australia's richest man. One afternoon she tried to make him dance to Van Morrison on her polished wooden boards; clearly showing their age.

Did anyone dance to van Morrison anymore? You're the first man in years I've fantasised about - waking up in your arms. I'm psychic. You know I can help you.

Work had only gotten worse. He was even more battered by circumstance than before. That job's killing you, Marsha said; and that, if nothing else, was true.

They shared their conversation with one of Marsha’s friends. The friend, had already settled into a heavy intake of alcohol and nicotine and imparted that blokely Australian wisdom to a fellow in crisis, the same wisdom that had been passed down from the Eureka Stockade; hang in there, the bosses are bastards, be your own man, hold yourself together, don't let the bastards beat you; have another beer, enjoy yourself, life wasn't meant to be an agony. You'll get through this. Change is nothing to be frightened of.

William knew inside it was all wrong, the world was a cave of liquid deceit; that this intoxicated communion with a female contemporary was just another lie or false path. He would never be able to make such convenient love.

The brief Marsha flirtation, novel for the fact she was in his own age bracket, ended when he invited her to a party at Michael’s, later thought better of it and didn’t show up to collect her from her house. Marsha showed up at the party regardless, wielding a bottle of vodka. You're pissed, she declared, populating the end of the table, a shock out of the mist. Where have you been? What are you doing with these people? They're beneath you.

A silence developed around her as people, people he had known for 30 years, began to listen. I told you I could rescue you from all this. I told you I could take you into the light. Everyone's disappointed in you, everyone. I'm disappointed in you. Everyone here is disappointed in you. Your children are disappointed in you. He grew more silent; if that was possible, having uttered not a word; as the tirade continued.

One of your girlfriends, mate, John Price whispered in his ear.

They had already been laughing for the last couple of hours, with Price in fine form with his wryest wit; and at this they both collapsed into laughter on the table, dislodging a beer bottle. This sent Marsha off into new paroxysms. These people aren't worthy of you, how dare you! I told you I could bring you into the light. I was serious. You know I'm psychic. You know I can help you. Why have you turned away from me like this? Why are you choosing to corrupt yourself in this sad, pathetic way? Everyone's disappointed...

At which point he stood up abruptly, walked out of the party and went home.

His son, coming home after midnight, found him sitting in the flat in the dark.

What are you doing? he asked.

“Hiding from a woman.”

“Fair enough,” his son replied, and headed off to bed as if there was nothing unusual about that.

Later he heard that Marsha had completely written herself off at the party, describing one of his friends as “lower than concrete, lower than the limestone beneath the concrete”. An ambulance had to be called when she passed out in the street on the short walk between Michael and her house. While he passed her occasionally on his walks, he pointedly refused to speak to her again. That was one of the few and only attempts in his life at having a relationship with a woman of his own age.

Finally the job simply became too much. He would find himself buying coffee at 3am in the red light district before heading off to work, the only advantage of that hour being that you could actually find an all day parking spot within walking distance of work. When William had presented at the doctors on more than one occasion literally on the verge of a heart attack, it became obvious he could go on no longer.

At the same time his home life had collapsed, with half the ceilings in the house falling in, the landlord being a complete bastard like only landlords can; half his belongings were randomly tossed into the street and yet he was still expected to continue to pay rent; his children were forced to stay with relatives; and under all this stress, despite his diligent attendance at therapeutic programs, seeing a psychologist and being on a blockade medication for another addiction, he descended into some unfathomable darkness. It was one of the toughest periods of his life.

Those Bukowski lines: “I was born for this, I was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead” echoed in his brain.

Life as a single father with a difficult job and an uneasy personality had meant he felt like he had already passed through several life times; and the final denouement of his employment as a journalist was hard to take. He would have died in the saddle if it hadn’t been for Out and About.

So coming to Bangkok was many things, but most of all it was a time to be happy, a thought, odd as it may seem to most people, he was having for the first time in his life.

Previously William's melancholic state, deepening as the years passed into the feeling of an insect crushed under an atmosphere of liquid lead, meant he thought the only people who were happy were simpletons who could not see the bruising angst that was life itself. This attitude, far from normal even in his own country, contrasted totally with the Thai's astonishing capacity to enjoy their own lives.

Sabai sabai, they kept advising him, relax. And dee jai, dee jai, be happy. Sometimes, being tone deaf and having difficulty picking up a tonal language, Thai in any case being a notoriously difficult language for all but its native speakers, he would ask what a particularly long and involved conversation was all about. Often enough it was nothing but an elaborate joke over something very small. But it was their capacity for enjoyment of the every day, to laugh easily at each other or some odd circumstance, to enjoy a party or just the fact that they were alive, that he most envied.

Sydney, unlike most other Australian cities, was not a place where people socialized very much in their own homes. The children were shocked when they first saw him start to go back to the corner pub when they were about 16, having no memory of having ever seen him drink before.

But as an often difficult and not very friendly city, despite its outward reputation, the local pub and his easy availability for a conversation as a “journo” made it one of his greatest source of easy companionship. The studies show that men who do best after separation are those who re-partner; well he just hadn’t. The Thais, with their more relaxed attitudes to relationships and sexuality, seem to suffer few such difficulties.

Even when William was in recovery and dutifully attending meetings the very business of his life meant it was crowded with people and with work. Coming to Bangkok meant everything had changed. The strictures of his old life which allowed him to function as something resembling a normal human being all vanished at the same time. He might not have cared much about himself, related little if at all to what the Thais kept telling him, you have to love yourself before you can love someone else, but he had cared enough about his children to stay on the straight and narrow for many years. The treatment programs he had been on, including a blockade dose of a particular medication which allowed him to function normally, both as a parent and as an employee, were no longer part of his life.

Since the 1980s William had also attended as time allowed meetings of two different types of recovery programs with contrasting theories on addiction and alcoholism. He found the mix worked far better than just trying to struggle along with all the dogma and religiosity of 12-step programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, still popular in their birth-place in America but increasingly unpopular with health departments around Australia because of their insistence on “God” or a “Higher Power” as central to recovery and their debatable analysis of addiction as a “disease”.

Unfortunately 12-step programs were the only ones available in Bangkok and were top heavy with Americans. Australians admire stoic silence and humility far more than the verbosity and grand standing which characterizes many of the Americans at these meetings. Independent thought is not encouraged. Any deviation from the dogma of the program, which while successful for millions around the world nonetheless has a very low retention rate, is little tolerated. While he attended hundreds of these meetings during his time in Thailand, he rarely spoke a word. The other program, increasingly being utilized in Australia, was known as Smart Recovery. The meetings were entirely different, with a counselor directing a small group, enabling the group and individuals to focus on the issues they were facing at that point in their life and encouraging them to change bad habits and bad life patterns, to reach for their dreams instead of the gutter.

The government funded psychologist had also proved fundamental in his later years in providing some sort of stability and normality in his life. William told her things he had never told any other person in his life. One of the most obvious things he told her was that he felt like a failure. “But that’s ridiculous,” she told him. “You just have to look at the facts. It is called cognitive dissonance. What you think and feel inside doesn’t match the outside. You are clearly not a failure. You are one of the most famous journalists in the country. Many people admire your writing. I’ve been reading you for years. And you are a good father. A lot of men would have walked away. You didn’t. You stayed. You brought them up. They are doing well because you stuck by them.”

Other things William told her he might just take to his grave.

After the job and the house they had lived in for almost a decade collapsed, he spent a final six weeks, during the summer holidays, with his children at an apartment building just near Australia’s best known beach, Bondi. That summer passed all too quickly. The children were teenagers now; and far from clinging to him as they had once done, were happily off with a bevy of friends; his daughter always with a clutch of inseparable ceaselessly giggling girls; his son, now he finally had his driver’s license, obsessively pursuing every poker game he could reasonably get to with that close knit group of friends, many of them Asian, that he had made at school and some of whom had even followed him to university.

While some people disapproved of him allowing his son to gamble in this way; he thought the idea of medical students playing poker kind of cute. Certainly a lot more harmless than what he had been doing at the same age. Besides, his little super-brain son was making several hundred dollars a week off his hobby, beating some of the biggest nerds in the city.

William spent much of that last summer in Australia, after the job had ended, walking up and down the beach, trying to regain some sense of normalcy after the nightmare ending to his 25-year career in mainstream journalism. Bondi Beach never stays the same, its colors constantly shifting with the weather and the tides. After the 14-hour days under fluorescent lights slaving away under the pressures of a job entirely unsuited to him, he began to regain some color and physical fitness. When he first arrived back at Bondi he would pace up and down the beach staring blankly at the sand. God is in the places in between; where the ocean meets the land. The waves crashed and slowly his eyes lifted. And after a few months the thought came crashing in: Life Is Magnificent, Every Day Is Glorious. He sat in his alcove, smoked an inappropriate cigarette, watched the shifting colors of the sea and the dolphins splashing beyond the surf.

There was always some scenario to watch: one morning a group of businessmen who had obviously been up all night drinking and had decided it would be a good idea to freshen up by jumping naked into the surf. Their unattractive bodies, by local standards, shivered with the shock of the cold sea. They were all laughing hysterically as one of them stood reluctantly on the sand with his underpants still on.

“Not going to join them?” William asked, grinning because everything was so fabulous and the day so wonderful and the beach absolutely beautiful; every where he looked another tableau. “It's public!” The man said, stating the obvious. “People are looking!”

“Have fun,” he grinned back again; barely breaking his stride, because there was more that was beautiful to be embraced, the view from the point, the water splashing on his feet. It was a long time since he had felt so happy.

The tourist season he had been warned about arrived soon enough; and at times it seemed as if every good looking young person from Europe had decided to visit Bondi. Dodged the bikini clad girls, the handsome boys. Made as if to wander. There were thoughts of old love; as he passed so much youthful joy. The sun warmed the morning air for another day of revelry. Everything was closing. He didn't want to do anything anymore. The sea had finally taken over. He grew at once calmer and more frightened.

Everything had been thrown up in the air. Cruel passage, but truly everything, his home, his children, his job. And so he walked. Now in his 50s, lovers no longer queued as they once had done, but he was easily entranced by the sight of young families splashing in the surf. The shapes of board riders were imprinted against the sea and sky. Even geographically and from within the same city they had come from a very different place, Redfern, next to the infamous Block. Established in the 1970s as part of the land rights movement, the government of the day ignored warnings it would turn into a ghetto rather than fulfill its intention of being a source of aboriginal pride.

When he had first moved to that large inner-city terrace with the children a decade before he had not realized the social chaos he was about to surround himself with. Once inside the well secured house you could have been anywhere, outside was a different matter. In one newspaper article he wrote about it thus:

`HOW much is four 50s -- 200?'' asks an Aboriginal child of her
friend. ``Two hundred? No it's not, four 50s, no it's not,'' comes the
reply.
Both of them are about 12 years old. They're dealing heroin but they
can't count. And while, according to the law of the land, they should
be in school, they're not. Hard little faces, sad eyes too old for
their years, they pass up and down this Redfern street doing quick
deals.
Children are harder to bust, everybody knows it.
Later in the day a woman with a pram and two young children nods off
in full public view at the top of Eveleigh Street, the children
crawling around among broken bottles. The police, bending over her,
try to sort something out but are greeted with hostility.
This is life in Sydney's inner-city Redfern. There are always scenes,
ambulances carting off another body, tableaus of dereliction which
have as much to do with alcoholism and addiction as the vexed subject
of race.
Sometimes the scenes are so improbable they're almost funny. ``I'm a
sensible man, I'm a sensible man,'' shouts an Aboriginal man, standing
in the middle of busy Lawson Street, drunk as a lord, weaving as
traffic dodges around him.
``No, you're f---ing not, you stupid c---,'' yells a woman from the
pavement. ``Get off the f---ing road.''
``I'm a sensible man ...'' he continues to shout, another car barely
missing him. Redfern.”

Over the years William and his kids were to spend in that house the suburb slowly gentrified. The screams from the young Asian women heading towards nearby Sydney University as they were being robbed and the once familiar sight of ambulances carting off another body slowly ebbed away, but it remained a gritty, inner-urban landscape, a far cry from the green suburban grids many of his kids contemporaries grew up in.

“It could be a different city,” his daughter said, pleased once she realized her friends thought Bondi a super-cool place to be. “I love Bondi. I don't ever want to leave. Can't you do something?”

The relationship with his children, so fundamental to his life, so much a part of the reason why he had to get up and go to work every day, was entering its final stage in terms of their living together. For years, having not re-partnered, William and his two children had been as one entity. How are you, how’s the kids, people would ask. Everyone knew they were central to everything he did.

Now his daughter, dolled up to the nines and excited to be showing off fashionable Bondi to her friends, went off to parties while William stayed at home, disinclined to even turn on the television. Just like his son, suddenly no longer a child but a young man with defined tastes in music, friends, entertainment, his daughter was suddenly grown and almost flown. She looked like a model, he told her, as she flounced out the door, seeking his approval but at the same time determined to announce that she was young, independent, smart, savvy, determined to succeed on her own terms.

Only the year before, when William had walked down the streets with the two of them on either side, they would snuggle so close to him so that it was impossible to be any closer. Now they were teenagers and there was no snuggling to be had. Now he was old and they were young. He was looking at the so-called “twilight years” and they were looking forward to their brilliant careers as a doctor and a merchant banker.

Thousands of stories after that proud day when he had first become a full time journalist, the bright new talent on the block, he had become one of those grey-haired old hacks clinging to the world of after passing their prime that he had first observed with such interest when he finally became part of the newsroom floor, and not just another amateur submitting articles in the often unfulfilled hope of being published. Now bright young things, charming, clever, well educated, publicly presentable, populated the news floors and their bylines decorated the general news pages. It was someone else's turn for the momentary fame and status that journalism brings.

But it was also his own children's turn to step into their own lives, their time to twirl in the spotlight, that was emotionally the hardest to bear. They had been so close, so inseparable, building their cosey world against the gritty, even hostile backdrop of the inner-city.

His children were happy to be down by the beach, but for him it was more just a matter of another brilliant landscape acting as a discordant contrast to his inner life. All very well to be parading the beach in a teenager’s body. William had never actually expected to experience growing old, gracefully or disgracefully, after so many of his friends had died young. So age, now that he suddenly had time to think, had caught him out in many unexpected ways. As a young man he had never expected not to be handsome and desirable; and then shyness and work and children, embarrassment at the thickening shapelessness of his own body, distracted him from any thought of sexual or emotional passion.

Stray fragments of stories squirreled through his head, but he didn’t have to write about them anymore. Housing Commission blocks had loomed over the suburb where he had worked and he always remembered the story of the lonely old man who had died at the kitchen table in one of the seventh floor apartments; and whose skeleton they only discovered six months later after some thief broke into the apartment and left the door open.

Now he saw the desperate on the street as if they were old friends; if he only had time he could join them, tell their stories, make art out of their daily miserable, make reality readable. It wasn't to be. Even that adventure passed him by. Slowly recovering from the near nervous breakdown the pressures of the job over the previous six months had induced, it was difficult to think of writing anything. A farewell was organized for him in mid-January, and he did his best for that. But otherwise, William couldn't bear to even make a single phone call. The often quite close friendships forged at work because of the intensity of the profession just washed away, simply because he wasn’t there anymore. Few places on earth are harder to get into than a newspaper office if you are not on staff.

Whatever was to happen next, the person he was could not be the person he would become. He could not see any way out of his own gathering sense of loss; except to survive day by day – and then go travelling. One door closes and another opens. All he required to make it work was optimism; but for that his brain would require an entire makeover.

The sparkling sands of Bondi and the fascination of the ever changing seas were only the backdrop to a life going through a fundamental transition, 19 years before from the entirely free man about town to becoming a father. Now the narrative was entirely different. He could no longer suffer the journalist's disease - you're only as good as your last byline - because he no longer worked for a newspaper; and that single fact had been fundamental to his identity and much of what he did, who he socialized with and how he thought for a quarter of a century.

During those final weeks in Australia William walked and walked; around the cliffs, up and down the beach, through the neighboring streets. In contrast to the vivid brightness of the landscape, he felt as if he had gusted out from a different world; dank ghosts, entities, fleeing from the sunlight. The tourists splashed happily in the vivid heat. Other lives were beginning, others were ending. The waves broke against the shore.

While, probably like most big cities, Sydney in particular was one of those places where it was possible to know and meet a large number of acquaintances, but true friends were rare. One of the only close friendships he maintained at this time was with Michael, who he had known for more than 30 years, through good times and bad, fame and infamy, poverty and money. He had adroitly bought an apartment with his girlfriend near the beach many years before; since which time Sydney real estate prices had headed skywards.

Aek and William had stayed with Michael while on their trip to Sydney.

As only an old friend could or would, Michael laughed uproariously when he heard of how much Aek had stolen and manipulated out of him and how pointless had been their earnest talks to him about the importance of finishing his tertiary studies.

And what a waste their earnest efforts to make him feel comfortable, to show him Australian hospitality, had been.

Aek had been a difficult guest from the beginning, pining for Thailand and showing no interest in Sydney or its surrounds. The only time he displayed any interest was when we pulled up at a spot where he could be photographed in a cool looking pair of sunglasses in front of the Opera House and the Harbor Bridge; pictures he could later show off to his Bangkok mates.

Sometimes William would pull up at some attractive view of the harbor; but couldn’t even convince Aek to get out of the car to take a look, cringing further down into the car seat. At one point he went to elaborate lengths to obtain the keys for an apartment with spectacular views across Sydney for the weekend while its owner, an old friend of Michael’s and a character by any measure, was away for a couple of days. Polly, who was in the UN building in Baghdad when it was bombed and has been living rather comfortably on a UN pension ever since, was not an easy person to make arrangements with, to put it mildly. Aek refused to get out of the car to even look at the apartment, his excuse being that the would not be able to find his way to a Thai restaurant. Of course sex, somewhat the point of hiring a go-go boy, was out of the question for the entire visit.

Michael and William introduced Aek to the local Thai restaurants, did their best to make him feel comfortable. But nothing seemed to work; and at the time neither William or Michael, both well travelled from an early age, could quite understand why.

They had only intended to be in Australia for three weeks: wouldn’t any young man on his first trip overseas want to embrace the sights and sounds of a new country? Well apparently not. As they stood overlooking Bondi, one of the world’s most famous beaches, Aek would look at a plane passing overhead and say plaintively: “Thailand”.

William finally gave up trying to make Aek feel comfortable when he made his usual half-joking comment about being careful not to spend too much money or they’d end up having to go and live in India. “At least it’s closer to Thailand,” Aek replied.

For reasons extending back through the centuries, there is nowhere on earth a Thai person abhors more than India.

In the end Aek appeared to become so ridiculously homesick and impossible to deal with they abandoned long held plans of going down to one of the world’s most picturesque isles Tasmania, to see one of William’s oldest friends from university days.

Stephen was now a doctor after having spent many years as a male nurse and William had always been proud of him for pulling himself out of the morass of their earlier years, including a gloriously chaotic period in London in the mid-1980s. William had been greatly looking forward to seeing him and his partner; swapping notes on the passing years; showing off his new bed buddy, as pathetic as that now sounded.

“That poisonous little fucker,” Michael laughed, as only an old friend could, when he learnt how thoroughly fleeced William had been, suckered by a pretty face, fake charm and loneliness. “Aek didn’t even try the whole time he was in Australia. He was just a quivering, cowering piece of human baggage.”

As if to get rid of bad magic and bad luck, Michael threw the small statue of Buddha Aek had bought down on Silom Road and left in the Bondi apartment into the sea.

William left an identical statue abandoned at the house in the soi for similar reasons; to rid the house of bad luck.

The gestures were not meant as an offence to the Buddha for which they held the usual high regard of many westerners, but simply as the rejection of a person who had betrayed and used their hospitality and friendship.

At first he had never understood why Aek had behaved so badly on what one would have thought would be an exciting adventure for a young man in his twenties, his first trip overseas. Later William was to realize that far from being a question of cultural adjustment, it was just that being a tourist in Australia and meeting his friends and relatives didn’t fit into the scam being perpetrated against him.

Instead Aek and William had flown back early to that large house in Sathorn in central Bangkok which they had somewhat extravagantly established as their dream home before they left for Australia. He had dreamt about that house so repeatedly before actually moving into there he became convinced it was his destiny; never thinking for a moment it would turn into a gloomy nightmare trap of baying neighbors and empty rooms after Aek had left.

It just wasn’t a house meant for one person but for a while the chaotic stream of haphazard people who followed in Aek’s wake did nothing to improve William’s reputation or state of mind.

But all that was to happen months later.

At the beginning of 2010, in those last weeks with his children, it was exactly 19 years ago he had last lived at Bondi Beach, when Suzy had been pregnant with his first and only son.

Suzy, always persuasive, had pushed him into moving from the beautiful two storey apartment with spectacular views across Woolloomooloo Bay to the city and the Sydney Harbour Bridge where he had been so happy; where everything had seemed perfect. Right down to the fact the author of that wonderful book on war correspondents The First Casualty, the infinitely admirable Phillip Knightley, had the apartment next door.

William met his children’s mother straight out of a detoxification centre, in those Sydney days of the 1980s when everyone who was anyone seemed to be in some sort of recovery program. There was no more fashionable place to be. He had logged off his terminal one Friday and did not return for a week, offering no explanation, booking out of the centre on Sunday and heading straight for work. He barely escaped being sacked and was put on early shifts and public holidays for months afterwards.

He remembered one of his primary motivations being that he didn’t want to be an old queen growing older on a bar stool, a graying, ever more emotionally desperate gay man like so many of those who had paid him when he was a teenager. Seeking, always seeking, an impossible love. Through the bottom of a glass, darkly.

William was clean and sober, going to the gym and working on the Sydney Morning Herald, the Bible of the cities chattering classes, regularly appearing on the front page. To the largely unemployed inner-city crowd he was something of a catch; and at that time seemed to have it all, the beautiful apartment, the gorgeous car, the great job; and then along came Suzy.

In those days it was far more fashionable to be in Narcotics Anonymous than Alcoholics Anonymous and there was always a peculiar snobbery between the two programs; as if neither would ever stoop so low or be so boring as the other. Brett Whitely, Australia’s best known painter, was in NA as some of the only members with any personal fame or even so much as a job. You can leave these meetings and need never work again, they would parrot one of the slogans. Suzy was friends with Brett’s girlfriend and for a brief while it felt like he had fallen into some wonderfully colorful social set.

William and Brett became friends because they stood out against the crowd; Brett flashing around in a smart white sports car and a gorgeous looking girlfriend, and he had a classic renovated 1960s Holden which always drew a lot of attention. They both agreed the program was boring and William would always remember their last conversation; when Brett told him how he would sometimes head off down to a hotel south of Sydney and get trashed for a few days; anything to escape the boredom of everything. The news a few days later that Australia’s most internationally renowned painter had overdosed in a fairly ordinary hotel room travelled fast and saddened everybody who knew him.

These days Brett’s paintings fetch a million dollars plus. Some of them he would dash off in an afternoon.

After their first date William would always remember sitting on his balcony with its spectacular views across to the Harbour Bridge and saying almost idly to Suzy, then a cute 24-year-old clean and sober in a program: “I’ve always wanted to have children.”

Like all good Australians they slept together that first night, a concert with legendary Australian performer Ed Kueppper, and within a very few days indeed Suzy was pregnant.

Soon enough they were parents and their lives had changed forever. They had two children under two before they barely knew each other.

The months before his son’s birth had spent them here on the edge of Australia’s most famous beach. Nineteen years ago, when the world was young and laptops did not exist, when there weren’t mobiles and Google meant nothing, he had been a grown man with a pregnant woman in tow; and the world had seemed a fresh, very different place. Astonishing things were happening. His life had been transformed. Like it or not, parents, particularly in the work place, are taken more seriously than gay boys – who more often tend to be regarded as eternal adolescents in search of a party. Sincere drops came sweating from his brow, and they were together, the young, handsome couple. His articles were appearing regularly on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald and he was known not just as a character, but something of a success. Everything swirled and the world seemed full of both portent and potential.

He had moved from that magnificent apartment in Potts Point and had surrendered all the neurotic past, bouncing in and out of meetings; falling desperately into the arms of others; maintaining a quiet dignity. He was so afraid; and yet there was nothing to be afraid of. A child was on the way and life was being transformed utterly. He was proud and confused and desperate; could feel his old life slipping rapidly away; and everything was born anew; everything was full of hope. He had moved into Suzy’s shared apartment overlooking Bondi Beach; and would come home from work to find his increasingly large girlfriend happily chatting to the neighbors, all of whom seemed equally excited about the pending birth.

The whole world, the future, lay in front of them. He had never felt so optimistic, so full of hope. Neither of them had had children before. His stories were getting on the front page and all was right with the world. Because young love knew no obstacles; of course everything would work out, this was noble destiny; this was their life.

Now it was 19 years later and his journalistic career was over. He was exhausted from the job, lonely from sleeping alone, uncertain of his next move. Why 19 years? It wasn't a magical number. It made no sense. But 19 it was. After 19 years they were back living in Bondi, if only briefly. Like previously; their lives in transit, moving from one to the other, from one stage to another.

Amongst the events that lay lodged in his memory was the day Suzy rang him up at work and declared: “I’m leaving meetings. I’m going to have a drink to celebrate.” And he would never forget the day she rang him up; just before he had moved down to Bondi Beach, to that apartment with spectacular views down the country's most famous beach, and proudly, a little nervously, unsure of the reaction, declared she was leaving meetings and was having a drink to celebrate. It seemed like a good idea at the time. We were frontiers people, always pushing the boundaries, and this was an easy boundary to push. Now the kids called her the weirdo; with nothing but disgust and contempt; and sadness.

One scene, Christmas Day, will do to paint the transformations that had taken place during those years.

Fast forward almost two decades and that once gorgeous young woman he had been so proud to be seen with stood outside the apartment he had rented for the summer, crying; there were always tears these days.

“Hey Dad, weirdo’s outside,” the kids said, more or less in unison.

In recent times William had been giving them the lecture, “I know she’s a difficult person, but she’s your mother, show some respect…”

“Yeh, dad, weirdo’s outside…” was the response.

Holding three cups of coffee for no particular reason, crying over God knows what; William brought her up to the apartment and was kind; while the kids rolled their eyes and shrugged sadly at the state of their mother. For by this time they had seen everything; but this Christmas was worse than usual.

It had been over a year since William had last seen her in person; and William was shocked by the deterioration; particularly now, back in Bondi, I'm on two different kinds of antibiotics she declared; scratching at the ulcers on her legs; alternately bursting into tears and laughing, her moods changing within seconds. So much had changed. “My blood's going septic,” she declared, and he believed it. Her legs were puffy and the sores looked appalling.

“What's wrong with me? What's wrong with me?” she asked. It was the same anguish he had heard before from so many who found themselves in the gutter, incurably alcoholic or afflicted, unable to move back into a normal life.

So much water had passed under the bridge; so much of their lives had disappeared. That child she had been swollen with; the smell of white nighties, of pregnancy and expectation; was now a 19-year-old university student; with a low opinion of the chaos from which he had been borne. The daughter who followed so rapidly was now a 17-year-old girl who could hardly be a more typical 17-year-old girl. “Dad, dad,” she had said excitedly on one recent day, “you know Bondi Rescue? Yes. You know the hot one? No. The hot one! Dad you don't know anything. The hot one! The blond one! I met him.”

Now on that Christmas Day he stood looking at a person who bore almost no physical resemblance whatsoever to the spunky dynamic charismatic young woman he had first met. He wasn’t exactly the most heterosexual of persons; but with her, as with only a very few other women, everything had been fine.

Now he stood in the wreckage of both their pasts, and was horrified by what he saw. The shock of her presence, the shock of the physical decay, the distress, the insanity, was so vivid because they were back here in Bondi when they had both been considerably younger and better looking; and considerably happier. Nothing could bring all that had been lost; the houses, the money, the years.

With their teenage children as witnesses, the universal cycle of life had brought them back here; but to show them what?

After Christmas lunch with one of his old Redfern neighbors, not having any family left in Sydney himself, the children went off for another round of Christmas lunch with their mothers family.

His son and his daughter were both subdued when they returned to the Bondi apartment later that day, almost as if in shock. They both went to bed early.

The best times of my life have been while travelling, he used to declare during his thirties - before work and children forced him into static routines and adult responsibilities. While on the outside each day was frenetic, filled with work and children and friends; as the years passed his heart became ever more still, until it finally gave up any hope of romance, became frozen into place.

William could feel the world tugging at his sleeve, at some much younger self who had so much loved to travel, long before the present era of mass tourism. Before the world converged into one place through cheap airfares and the internet there had so many wild and unusual adventures as a result; experiences few Australians, living out their lives at the edge of the known universe, would ever have. He was looking at a person in the past he had almost forgotten after 25 years as a chained employee who, no matter what state of mind he might have been in, got up and went to work.

William’s son mentioned the word “retired”. That's how he felt. It was time to do different things. He had been slave to Sydney rents and mortgages for decades; and now was the time to break free. He was going to make it through the night. Laughter was going to populate the sadly exterminated view of life’s possibilities he had somehow acquired. The sweep was there for all to see; as if anyone was looking.

On his many walks during those final days in his homeland William could see the houses of the wealthy perched along the cliffs. He envied their stolidity, the sound of people talking, parties winding up, winding down.

“Are you going to write another book?” he had asked his literary hero Paul Bowles in Tangiers many years before. The movie of that most beautiful of books The Sheltering Sky was about to come out and the name of Paul Bowles thus to become known to a broader audience. Once an acquaintance with everyone from Tennessee Williams to William Burroughs, William had deliberately sought out Bowles out as part of his own personal quest.

Every time he was in Tangiers William would seek him out; attending those daily soirees in the afternoon where Bowles held open house; or accompanying him down to the Tangiers Post Office, fascinated by the range of his interests and the extensive correspondence Paul Bowles kept up with so many people. On one of his last visits, when Suzy was pregnant with their daughter, he took his son to see him; proud now that he was both a father and a journalist on a major newspaper, rather than just a roving random act of longing. Having been famous for decades, his improved status made no difference whatsoever to Bowles.

Now William was asking himself exactly the same question he had once asked his spirit guide: Are you going to write another book? “Only if I've got something to say,” Bowles had responded all those years before.

Just as he had no desire to return to Australia, Bowles, who passed away in 1999, had no desire to return to his American homeland. He would remain for the rest of his life lost in the magic of other places, entranced by elegant love in a foreign clime, the exotic rush, the beat of drums in the night, the boys hanging on the street corners; he was going to see it all again. A bigger world was tugging at his sleeves.

Australia, although blessed with some of the world’s most beautiful landscapes, had in many ways had been remarkably boring and provincial prior to the 1970s. Once considered one of the most modern, progressive and advanced countries on Earth, in recent years state, federal and local government neglect and over-regulation had turned Australia into a backwater.

Certainly in contrast to Bangkok, which glistens with money from all over the world; and as a result had been transformed from the teeming, colorful, but poverty stricken he first visited in the 1970s into one of the world’s most cosmopolitan and fascinating cities.

While William had thought for some reason he would end up on the Algerian coast, he chose Thailand as his first port of call because of fond memories from the 1970s, when it was a cheap have for the young. In those days he hadn’t been all that interested in the language or the culture, just seeing it as a place to party against a backdrop of exotic beaches and friendly people.

In January 2010 in Afghanistan more than a million people were under virtual house arrest, allowed out of their homes only for three hours each afternoon as part of the war on the Taliban. People died in distant fields while preening power brokers turned the other way. Fragments of present history came from many different sources, the personal, the political, the distant, the near. In Bondi he found his whole life changing and that was all there was to it.

“Sydney really is at the end of the known universe,” William said to his friend Michael.

Gesturing at the distance between where they sat in his front garden and Australia's most famous beach Michael agreed: “The only bit I'm interested in is from here to there.”

They looked back at their own disheveled pasts as some kind of Bryonesque quest, noble within itself, discovering the truth about the days flickering past, about their own existence. Grown in the suburbs, destined for the suburbs, these mantles of mediocrity had settled across the entire place. There was no solution. All was not lost but times were most certainly difficult.

It was time to leave, there wasn't any doubt of that, intimate flashes touching down inside. Time was of the essence yet time was slipping away. We were prepared to be distorted. We came running, running, in a flurry of sweat and excitement out of the night. Distant battlefields were just another undiscovered tragedy; impossible for the brain to take in. They were miniscule worms wriggling in a petrie dish; they made way for the future and a way for the past. They didn't know who they were anymore. He was disconsolate with rage.

Because while nothing seemed fair, there were many other solutions to be had. He wanted to reach out and embrace everyone, record everything. Five am and on queue the kookaburras begin their raucous chorus. They were destined to be strangers. It was such an intimate thing, this lost longing. Could hardly be more intimate, he heard a voice say, and he wanted to make everything his own, be accepted, march every which way, approach the same penthouse bar in what was then one of Penang’s only tall buildings, watch the sqwawling, skanky city beneath, embrace landscapes and places almost no one he knew had ever seen. “Hey Johnnie, you want something?” had been the constant street cry of the day. These tales, there had been so many, did not a story make, and yet images collected over a lifetime needed to be portrayed, to fill the holes in the meta-narrative, whatever it was.

And so he knew, though he still found it hard to believe, that he was leaving Sydney, if not for good at least for now. There were other shadows flickering by, withdrawal sweats and drifting clouds of depression, free floating anxiety, but what had seemed like such a noble, Byronesque quest in their youth had turned them into nothing but thrill seeking derelicts, always looking back for the great party that had been. He sought the answer and could not find. He made all those unique connections necessary for a shadowy lifestyle; and their secret flitting from one place to another registered on nobody's radar. The authorities couldn't care. The politicians couldn't care.

Their life was meant to be a bold adventure; the personal the political, brave, pioneering, a stroke for a better world. Instead they were just another group of young, prematurely old hasbeens, marking time, trying too hard, phony as. What's this, his friend asked, replaying the old joke as he rubbed his fingers together: the smallest joint in the world, rolled just for you. Another round. Of drinks and gossip. The 1980s was the peak of hard drinking journalism, when legends such as Robert Haupt dropped dead in Moscow’s Red Square after finishing off a book and a bottle of vodka on the same day. Back then, William always threw back two double bourbon and cokes before he wrote up that day's story; then he would have a couple of quick schooners with all those other living bylines he had once only known from the outside; and then he was on his way to a darker night. Surely all this meant something? Surely this marathon of self destruction had its own nobility of purpose?

But of course that wasn't the case. He didn't know until he had been shell shocked into an altered consciousness what was actually happening. He didn't realize that he was on the decline. He didn't realise there was another way of being. He didn't realize that not everyone drank like him; or to be more accurate, he didn't realize the consequences of what he was doing. Much like a climb up Mt Everest, they had all thought of it as a noble enterprise, having swallowed whole the lyrical possession of the dispossessed, the noble struggle, the adventure. That this was a journey he was taking on the behalf of others. That to experience this journey, to record it, to document the fellow travelers he met along the way, was in itself the truest, most sincere, most creative thing he could do.

These delusions, acquired through the ether, through the breathing air, through the zeitgeist of the times, may have first formed in lightning moments of youthful camaraderie and shared joys, but solidified into dangerous falsehoods over years. Years he had always assumed would lead into greatness, never enjoying the moment, always looking to the future. William Burroughs. Silver fish boys ejaculating on silver streams. All these enthusiasms, these hallucinations, so hard fought, so heavily manipulated, were meant to be part of a noble history, but instead became a savage falsehood, hiding in the shadows, a wounded dog.

In the end, it all came to nothing except the multiple deaths of the many friends who had escaped old age. Only a few survived. The destiny of some was to become street alcoholics, defying their multiple talents, all the gifts and benefits they had been born with.

He was marching past the statues he himself had built. They had once meant something but now were shimmering into disbelief; flickering and fading into eternal night. Beauty lasts forever. Love lasts forever. So went the old sayings. From that lonely beach so long ago where he had waited to die to the present, massive beach where tourists from around the world stretched their perfect bodies and flirted with each other, not noticing the old man who walked between them, he had learnt one truth: all was ephemeral, nothing lasted. Now he packed his bags and prepared to leave an entire life. It was a strange point to have reached. One narrative ended and another began. He was letting go of everything. Projects loomed large but all he wanted to do was disappear. He was about to be reabsorbed; in a world drenched with information, stories, broken narratives.

William was not just leaving a life but leaving a city, Sydney, which he had once embraced as if it was entirely his own, part of himself. He looked with envy at the well formed lives of those around him. They could sneer, he knew that, he had lost any sense of belonging. He had been betrayed on every level, by the place, by himself, by his own worse angels, by the malignant fabric of things. There was a narrative structure but in the shape of a city, vast, little stories, like fireflies, darting here and there. So much of the public culture had become an unadulterated lie; worse now than ever before. He had lost faith in his country just as he had lost faith in all he had once believed in as a youth.

On one of his last days in Australia, at about 5am, a group of more than 20 people spilled out from a party in an apartment block opposite and gathered under the giant fig tree outside his bedroom window.

They sang in perfect unison the Augie March song One Crowded Hour, the chorus of which went:

And for one crowded hour, you were the only one in the room
And I sailed around all those bumps in the night to your beacon in the gloom
I thought I had found my golden September in the middle of that purple June
But one crowded hour would lead to my wreck and ruin

It was the height of a Sydney summer, there were tourists everywhere and in the heat no one could care less about anything. He took his kids out for a final farewell dinner at Hurricane near the beach, where there was a wait of more than half an hour. “But the ribs, the ribs, they're delicious,” his son kept repeating. Both of his children were moving into boarding situations, after all those years together. It had been William and the kids against the world for so long. Behind those locked doors and grated windows.

His son, who had once been so utterly reliant on him, was fine about him heading off overseas. “Have a good time, dad,” he declared cheerfully. “You deserve it.” All his daughter wanted to know was when he would be back. But both were optimistic about their own futures and despite some of the difficulties of their childhood, had turned out remarkably well, were genuinely nice people. As for his own future, he had no belief that things would work out well. No trust in anyone. He wanted to be free and yet didn't know how.

William’s original plan had been to spend a month on a little four acre property at a place called Tambar Springs. He had bought the place as an investment some years before; and had slowly been painting and fixing it up ever since. He loved the place for its isolation; it held a certain charm that perhaps only he could see. He was perfectly happy to spend hours staring at the blazing fire in the makeshift fireplace he had built outside the front door, the stars in the clear night sky the perfect antidote to life in the city. After losing everything in divorce, buying the property had felt like putting a floor back under his life.

He had written a feature for the paper about the property which began: “ALL my life I've wanted somewhere to escape: somewhere I could be secure. Finally I've found it: Tambar Springs, a village in the middle of nowhere between Gunnedah and Coonabarabran in northern NSW.

How corny to have become a tree-changer; to fit into a recognisable demographic, baby boomers searching for sanctuary a half century after they were young. Its claimed population of 103 is probably an exaggeration. ‘This could be the beginning of a very happy life,’ said the real estate blurb. Clever.

My teenage children shriek in horror at the mere thought I might take them there, into a primitive place without computers, parties, movies or mobile phones. I usually go alone.”

For a long time the local population had regarded him with suspicion, as that wanker from the city who had paid more than the property was worth. For a long time he drank nothing but lemon squashes at the pub, going through a sober spell. Then one morning, after a stressful period at work, he thought bugger it, went to the pub at 10am and didn’t leave till 10pm. From that minute on he was accepted as a local, many of whom appeared to do little with their lives but drink and smoke bongs.

But this was a time in between, in one of those places in between, and nothing was working. Absolutely nothing. One minute the beach, the next the inland. One minute the waves crashing on the shore, the next the wind whispering in the trees. The path roads to a better life were everywhere, and yet he could barely see them, so caught up in old images and old lives had he been. This was a different era. It didn’t have him in it. The elder statesmen of the ghost whisperers, the empath tired of the broken lives with which he could so easily commune. He could turn anybody’s tragedy into poetry just like that; obscene, really, how easy it was to transform the ordinary, to make something profound that was barely a whisper in the larger cosmos. He could see the stars and the night clouds drifting across the sky; he could hear the mosquitoes persistently dive bombing him.

It was time to no longer care. It was time to put everything behind him. Those small groups of talented young people with which he had so closely identified were gone; disappeared into history with barely a trace. Friends he had thought would last a lifetime were never to be seen again. Accidental meetings in the street of the few survivors brought back floods of memories, how’s Russell, did you hear Colin died? Colin had been one of his closest friends since he first met him around the Cross at 16; and watching his slow, prolonged death over the preceding months from AIDS had been one of the saddest experiences of his life.

The bloke he was paying to sand and polish the floors hadn’t finished the job as arranged when he arrived; the litany of excuses unbearably long. He refused to pay him until the job was completed; and declared he’d be back in a couple of days. The argument escalated rapidly into a scene at the local pub: “I'm going to knock your block off and chainsaw your house,” he threatened; and when William declared he didn't like being threatened the builder replied: "I'm not threatening you, I'm just telling you the facts maaaannn. You've come to the wrong area."

His heart thumping, more fearful of having a heart attack than being hit, William walked out onto the verandah of the pub, that nostalgic place with sweeping views of the Liverpool Plains, and was promptly informed that the builder had just taken his laptop out of his car – supposedly as some sort of guarantee he would be paid. He never saw the laptop or the builder again.

He got into his car, drove out onto the highway and turned right. He did not bother going back to the house to collect his keys, belongings, his expensive new set of glasses or anything else. He drove out of the village, past the police station on its outskirts and into the sprawling dark of the Australian bush. He did not stop driving for many hours.

As far as he was concerned, that was it as far as Australia and his life there was concerned. He said a last goodbye to his kids and his mother and booked a ticket to Bangkok.

In one of those miracles of the modern age and cheap travel, he was suddenly in the ever fascinating city of Bangkok. He watched a crippled monk in the street with wheelchair and begging bowl. He watched Thai teenagers, only a year or two younger than his own, swapping homework in MacDonalds on their way to school. He was exhausted to the bone. Would the tumult and the shouting never die down? It was muggy, muggy all the time; and his head was doing "head miles" as they used to call it in the old days; and he was friendly to all. The city, with its choking traffic, spread out vast and chaotic in every direction.

The mugginess and the sweat made him feel even more exhausted. William wanted to be straight and he wanted to be in the bars with all the rest of the "falangs"; getting drunk and obnoxious and pulling gorgeous girls towards him. There wasn't any easy solution. He felt disturbed; and yet nothing was seriously wrong. He could feel himself sliding towards oblivion, yet hadn't touched a drop. He was sure there would be other solutions, other places to be. But now, there was darkness and death and everything in between; as if fate had deliberately infected him.

Originaly he stayed, through various connections, in a large five bedroom house off Sukhumvit Soi 85, far from the centre of the action. There was only one other person there, one of the most ill-spirited people he had ever met. Later he came to think of the house as “the gangster’s lair”. The pool burbled outside. Nothing was right. The man down the road brought them chicken and rice for lunch. He tipped the taxi drivers generously by local standards, although it was only a few dollars. William, as was his custom, made instant friends but lost them by the end of a short ride. He caught the dark swirl of another person, another life, another being trying to break into existence. The old constructs were collapsing and he didn't know what to put in their place.

He certainly wasn’t like a lot of foreigners, on a sex tour. The was withdrawing from the medication had kept him stable for years and while he realized that at his age it wasn’t exactly an erotic thought, the withdrawals meant he couldn’t have a normal orgasm for more than two months.

The idea, after the collapse of their former life, was to do something for himself after what had not been the happiest of lives. It was just that he didn’t know how. Alcohol had wrecked havoc in his life and contributed to his depression, drugs had also created havoc and sex, well he just that wasn’t interested, the mind and the body, lust and desire, just didn’t function properly. He wasn’t a normal man in that respect. William remembered one day going with a friend of his he had made in the program; a handsome English chap with a very wild history. He had been avoiding any sexual encounters whatsoever, but the Englishman Paul convinced him to at least have a go. They picked up two attractive girls off the street in one of Nana’s narrow sois; were taken up to the sixth floor of a nearby building, had the obligatory shower; and while his girl did her best, offered to do anything, he just wasn’t in the frame. Through the narrow walls he could hear his friend going hell for leather. “I’ll give you an extra thousand baht if I come in the next 90 seconds,” Paul shouted.

Meanwhile both he and the girl he had picked up had given up on the project altogether, and headed downstairs for a coffee; leaving them to it. While he had picked up the odd boy in decades gone by,that, as far as this time around was concerned, was his first “sexual” encounter in Bangkok. What you want mister, boom boom, mouth? It made no difference to him. He was beyond it all; had transcended into some kind of monkhood while every one else came undone on the butt of a pretty girl, where the bars were full of fools, where there were no real happy endings. He watched deranged westerners weave their way through the crowded streets, their arms in slings, their faces puffy from the previous night, putting out one cigarette and lighting another, the victims of themselves, their own livestyles, their own worse inclinations.

His mate Ian, who suffered no such depressive temperament or physical impairment, showed up in Bangkok a couple of days after William. Ian just wanted to get drunk in the bars and get laid, get a nice Thai girlfriend, have fun, be adored and adoring.

William and Ian sat in an open market on Sukhumvit Road and watched a gorgeous looking girl in a tiger dress. All the curves in all the right places. They were reduced to babbling morons, Westerners, as they oggled one dazzling looker after another. It was all that could be done. The babble of Bangkok was all around him; and yet here, in this upmarket house, he could hear the roosters crowing in the morning and watch the squirrels chirruping as they jumped from tree to tree. He could hear the high note poing poing of exactly the same birds he sometimes heard in Sydney.

You young, strong, very handsome man said the woman who made him iced coffees in the morning a couple of sois up. Oh sure! Tell them anything; but while it might not be true it was nice to hear. No one told him he was young, strong and handsome in Sydney. At least there was some room for hope.

In Sydney, exhausted by the job and the collapse of his old life, without the prestige of a national newspaper to back him, he had begun to feel as if he was only clinging to dignity and illusions of destiny, writing still although he had no idea why while the summer had felt like it belonged to someone else, to those hard young bodies jogging past him on the beach as if he was entirely invisible.

William had left his children behind, and although they were in their final teenage years now and could well live without him, it still marked the end of an era, William and the kids. He used to say: I miss them, and they haven't even left yet. But the time had finally arrived.

He walked and he walked through the sois and down the main avenues of Bangkok. Everyone wanted something, that was for certain. William looked down from the Bangkok Sky Train at a one legged man pulling himself along the filthy street through the crowded stalls of Nana, his clothes black from the street, his begging bowl in front of him. The shopkeepers paid him no heed. Another Western couple near him watched the same scene play out. And uncertain how to fill the days and his newfound freedom, he wandered in the upmarket cool of the Siam Centre and saw an awful lot of movies, the airconditioning a relief after the stifling streets.

The Siam Paragon is more up-market than anything on offer in Sydneys, peppered with Gucci and Hermes and all the other upmarket stores. Even here you could spend $30,000 on a handbag, it was not the Bangkok of old.

William hadn’t originally had any intention of settling in Bangkok, that city many foreigners disliked for its choking traffic and difficult layout. He had imagined he would end up sitting under a palm tree on one of Thailand’s many famous islands; or renting a house in the picturesque hills to the north of Chiang Mai, settling down with some woman, writing obscure novels which might or might not come to be regarded as masterpieces long after his death, finding some sort of happiness.

Instead he ended up in the heart of what he came to regard as one of the world’s most impossibly beautiful cities. He liked nothing more than to
watch the office workers begin their journeys into the day as the last
of the late night crowd spilled out of the karaoke bars. Or the beauty
of its skyscrapers; the unique clashes of the ancient and modern, the
streets that were exactly like they were when he was here 40 years ago
now over towered by soaring sky scrapers, the ribbons of expressways
which multiplied across the face of the city, interspersed here
and there by the ghost buildings which remained empty, sometimes for no apparent reason.

When he first used to pass through Bangkok, American soldiers on “rest and recreation” from Vietnam filled the bars but normal tourists were thin on the ground. Now the streets are jammed with street stalls, restaurants of all kinds abound, and on some nights its barely possible to push your way through the crowds of people from all over the world.

“I love you long time, cheap cheap,” came the cheerful cries from the bar girls back in the seventies. “You very handsome man. You number one. You like me?” But back then he wasn’t of an age when paying for sex had even occurred to him.

While Bangkok has been utterly transformed, there were still remnants of those earlier days when he had first visited the city, the so-called hippy era; although he was never much of a hippy, except for those images of butterflies and mushrooms sewn onto his jeans one year. Two of the main cheap hotels of the seventies, including The Miami off Sukhumvit in what has now become a tourist district called Nanna.

One day, purely out of nostalgia, he walked up Sukhumvit and down the soi to look in at the Miami. The cheap laminex tabletops looked exactly the same as they had almost four decades before.

The other famous cheap hotel of the era, The Malaysia Hotel on Sathorn Soi One, also looks exactly like it once did. In those days the boy who escorted you to your room invariably also proffered a range of drugs and sexual services, depending on desire and inclination. The corridors were filled with travelers swapping notes on Afghanistan or the hashish in northern India, while everyone seemed to be in and out of every one else’s room for one reason or another. Such things don’t happen any more. The hotels are classier, the young set, mostly European, more conservative or more sensible, depending on how you want to think about it. There is a far greater range of sexual services on offer; from simple massage parlors where frisky boys seeking tips try to provide a happy ending whether you ask for it or not, to state of the art saunas and up-market brothels of many different hues.

When he first passed it all those decades later he was surprised by how little the Malaysia had changed, at least its exterior. But the alternative life-stylers that once packed the place are now rarely seen in Thailand. When they do appear these middle aged or even elderly, grey old ghosts look lonely, lost and as if they would be much more comfortable back in India where they have probably just been. Bangkok is now a modern, complex, sophisticated city; it is also treacherous, dangerous and tribal.

In those far off days when he had been young and handsome and it was
no great surprise while standing outside the Malaysia one day to be picked up by a Saudi in an expensive car and taken to some up market hotel for money and sex. He didn’t like the Arabs. They were far too demanding.

Now Bangkok glistens with wealth, attracting money and business from
all over the world, partly because of the freedom of its financial
regulations, although many foreigners complain about the level of
bureaucracy they have to face. But much of what passes for life in the
street, the food stalls and makeshift shops on the sidewalks would all be illegal in Australia, where in contrast to Bangkok the streets seemed utterly deserted. In central Bangkok are more shopping malls per square mile than in any other part of the world.

William could feel himself ebbing away, whatever resolve, whatever person he may have been, about to be consumed by the chaos of the city outside. It was so close. He could see the alcohol in every one's glass. He could smell the maluka honey vodka Ian was drinking; and later in the bars watched with envy the double shots of bourbon and coke he consumed with glee and no apparent consequence. Nothing was right. He was tired of being in withdrawals, as he had been for the past month because of the length of time he had been on the blocking medication. And he was sick of having temptation thrust in front of him at every turn. There were days passing by and yet all he could think of was his traditional post: oblivion seeker.

The gate of that large house where he had initially stayed way up Sukhumvit swung open and he looked across the neat Thai garden. The gate swung open and he could see the devil's heads on posts: all neatly marked out, all leering at him, come to me darling, me, me, come to me, they chanted in a sickening chaos. He shut the gate and entered the house, walking past them, hoping they would disappear, hoping they were not real. Asian demons, they were different to the ones at home. Perhaps it is time to stop, a kindly voice said. Time to stop. Time to stop. He tried to laugh. Everything was falling away. His resolve, his self, whatever he had been.

There was grave chaos waiting at the gates. He didn't know if he could claw his way back. I need help, he thought clearly, perhaps one of the last clear thoughts he would ever have. And yet the following day dawned and he was still sane and still sober. The bars were everywhere but it didn't mean he had to be inside them. He might be old but it didn't have to mean he was dead.

He sat with Ian in the Zanzibar near the old Miami Hotel he had once stayed in during the 1970s, when everything was in front and the Byronesque adventure was just fermenting.

William was very pleased; had been very pleased; to be away from all wasted lives, wasted opportunities, walking into another future. But now he was not so sure. At the meetings he listened to other people's stories, struggles, sometimes with amusement, disingenuous charm. Firecrackers went off as the Chinese New Year approached. They met up after he had gone off to yet another meeting in Nana; and in the meantime Ian, after some initial disorientation, found himself a Thai girl, small, petite, gorgeous looking, a clever tattoo adorning the top of her breast.

Are they real tattoos, William asked in the bar. The girl he was later to come to know was Sexy Sar covered herself when Ian relayed the question to her, whispering in her ear. They are beautiful, he told her. She's shy, Ian said.

“She won't be so shy when it comes to asking for money,” Paul, back at the Sukhumvit house predicted. Next Ian will be in love. “Next he will be sending her money from Australia.”

Everything he predicted turned out to be true.

Aek and Sexy Sar’s paths were to cross. At the time he didn’t realize he was being done over in exactly the same manner, just more slowly.

“I know one Thai girl has four blokes sending her money,” Paul continued.
“She say, if you no send me money I must go to work. If you no want that, you send me money. She still works in the Go Go Bar every night of the week. She is a friend of mine.” Paul laughed.

William watched, if not with disenchantment at least with a sense of distance, as some very plain men sat in the cafes and bars with good looking Thai girls hanging off their arms. “It's what you need,” Ian said. Perhaps he was right. At least these men had a certain faith in happy endings; unlike his own faith, of which there was none.

As always, he couldn’t sleep. Sometimes he would go three months at a time with never more than an hour a night, no drugs involved. He had been like that for years. The meetings were full of ordinary looking men from ordinary looking towns, but at least they got him out of the house at a time when he didn’t dare go near a bar. Everybody else was getting on with their own lives. Everyone else was accompanied. “Sometimes, maybe you are one of them, I think it is like a meeting of old souls,” another aging empath said to him after one of the meetings. “Old souls from another time, old souls who had lived before; and now were trapped in these fragile frames, these fragile lives.”

He felt like he had woken up in the future of his own life and in the future of the human race. He held on tight to a strap amidst the bodies crowded jammed into the modern carriages of the Sky Train as it swept above the crowded traffic and the darkened buildings far below.

“I'm not sure whether I'm here as an anthropological study, or am really here,” one man to said to him. To that he could relate.

William found himself talking to old Asian hands while the neon lights flashed outside, while the bars called, while middle aged, sometimes even elderly white men walked the streets with Thai prostitutes on their arms. They were all so gorgeous and the world was irradiated with glee. The muggy heat closed in. The traffic snarled. He spoke to no one and he spoke to every one.

Something was calling, perhaps it really was the city at the end of time. Old souls, old souls.

The man sitting next to him had been sober for 60 years, since he was 21. He had never met anyone like that before.

The man with one leg still slid himself ostentatiously along the ground in the Nana district; and at Om Nut the stumpy handed stumpy legged Buddha figure beamed at him, although he gave him nothing. Ian released two finches outside the a bar in Nana for good Kharma, the act appealing to his many senses. The chant to self destruct was in William’s head, but at least he recognised it now. He gravitated to a particular type. Old souls. Once again he saw a sign: The Miami Hotel. How many years, 40, had it been since he and stayed there? In the seventies as a young man. When all was future. When all was grand. When he was embarked on the greatest adventure in human history. For the few hours he ever slept in that large house off Sukhumvit he dreamt feverishly of a city at the end of time. Each morning he would go out in search of coffee, watch the Thai workers heading off to the building sites, try to establish a routine. He spent his own life, for which he had shown such wretched disregard, watching the lives of others.

Hard eyed girls served drinks in the girly bars, their hands massaging him like black moths. William didn't like any of it. The boys were out for a drink. It was their world. Naked appetites. Things not seen. Rooms. Places above the stairs. Levels of desperation. Hard, black eyes which never smiled. All was a farce. All was different. Beyond this point there will be no memory. He was shadowed by something he could not see. William was walking hand in hand with someone who simply wasn't there. He courted psychosis and let it die away, like an ancient breed. The world had become a very complicated place.

He was skipping across fate lines because there was no choice. There were shadows everywhere, in the pot holed streets. Wealth cut swaves through the indigenous poor. Surely there were more important things than drunken westerners stumbling into bars, begging to be fleeced. There were other ways of being. Other paths. He was shot through with envy and happy to be alive; fragile, questing. There weren't any simple solutions. He shadowed everywhere, the paths of others, ignoble professions. Aqui estoy, he said in Spanish, here I am, such a talented man in such a degrading occupation. And yet it had once seemed such a noble destiny, the only one, the only one to which he had been attracted, the telling of other people's stories.

Now the stories had burnt to cinders and he had moved on. Spiders moved across pages and rewrote words. Things shifted fundamentally. If there was a beginning there had to be an end. But in the great silence at the end of time who was to know what was real and what was not. He could be anything he chose to be.

The crowded Sky Train sped across the darkened lots and the snarling traffic far beneath. He had entered another realm. The future was always going to be another country. William didn't want, much, to be calm about anything. His stomach was leaden chaos; and all things had come down to this. There was no way out. He would soon enter another realm. Become a different person. Things were closing in, the alternatives closing down. He danced, briefly, on the floor of the bar, All the Single Ladies, All the Single Ladies, Beyonce. My kids like this song, he said, how pathetic is that.

The heat was stifling. In the middle of Bangkok William stood on an overpass brdge and watched the endless parade of red shirts. As far as the eye could see the road was choked with vans, trucks and busses filled with demonstrators, cheering, waving singing, playing loud music. It all appeared cheerful as they waved and clacked their plastic clacker toys; smiling up at the watchng crowds, many taking pictures on their mobile phones; many waving support. Their call for elections did not seem unreasonable. There was heightened security in the streets.

There were days when the universe called out to drink, the flashing signs of bars, cold beers in the bottom of fridges, shattered days and shattered psyches, good time girls beckoning, oblivion, communion, relief. But beyond the oblivion, beyond the border of the real, lay the most appalling despair, the most appallng states of mind, and he couldn't bear it, not now, not again. He put himself in harms way and instead found himself back at meetings, watching the flashing lights whistfully out of windows, caring nought for what was said, letting everything wash over him, letting the past be the judge of the future.

The past is a troubled country, let’s not go there, he said to an internet shop owner who had asked him what he used to do and who no doubt had no idea what his answer meant. Sing song voices surrounded him. The crowded trains of the Bangkok rush hour spoke of a future, of a million ants, of a cowed and obedient people, of a future he could never have imagined, not in his life time, not in this place.

And yet there it was; the spectacular city scapes, the crying, crawling signs, the heat coming off in waves as skyscraper after skyscraper stepped off into the distance, here, high above the streets, the dirt, the chaos. There was an amazing level of social order considering the crowds. Good girls, far from the bar girls, clung to their boyfriends, if there was one. They looked neat, perfect, in their tidy, ironed uniforms. It was the heat of the hive, the makeup of the hive, here in the air conditioned carriages. There was no relief. No one smiled; no one laughed. A man made way for the giggling, bejewelled, laughing, obviously silly bar girls.

Asia was full of old men, old FBI agents, aging, charming English crims, people who had done the right thing all their life and people who had done the wrong thing all their life. They ended in the same places; they ended in the same bars; swapping yarns, the most colourful stories. Money allowed that.

There had to come a time when William could learn to live with himself, when the waves of distress would dissipate, when he didn't want to drape himself in the street with every protestor, with every misguided belief, with every ardent advocate of whatever cause. How terrible to be so frail, so misguided, so desperate for a drink, for oblivion, for the simple caress of an altered consciousness. In the malls synthetic voices declared: “Enjoy your shopping experience. If you notice any belongings not attended please contact our staff. While enjoying your shopping experience please keep your belongings with you at all time. Thank you for your cooperation.” If only he could simply rewrite his head. Instead he was indifferent to his own fate. He decided to discontinue the search for comfort; because it would never come. The past was a ghost town; while he looked down on marauding packs of young girls parading through the high-end malls of Asia, the glistening floors, this ultra modern world where sky scraper piled on sky scraper and the advertising bill boards rose like waves into the sky.

At last, after two moths In Asia, he was no longer in withdrawal from the stabilizing medication he had been on for so many years and unprovoked desires began to swirl in the muggy heat. William watched the walk of the man who made him coffee in the morning and thought: that man is happily married, happy with his life. How many children he asked in a mixture of hand gestures and English and broken Thai. Five, came the reply. Five! He expressed astonishment, his wife did not look like a woman with five children, and they laughed in a mixture of pride and amusement. While skinny, perhaps Aids ridden rent boys lay sprawled on his own hotel beds; and the tragedy that had stalked so many of his friends, so many waking hours, dissipated in a city enfolding in and over itself, new buildings, new lives, new streets, construction everyhwere.

The embassies had all issued travel warnings against travelling to Bangkok. More than 20 people had been killed so far. And yet this was the place he wanted to be, under the concrete buttresses of the sky train, the declamatory tones of a typically long winded speech from a red shirt leader being played on screens set up in the street. As he made his way through the crowds a populist point cheers would break out; and even down the terrace walk ways amongst the hundreds of sleeping bodies little groups would cheer and clack their clackers when a phrase particularly pleased them. How could they move against so many people? Protestors cheered outside the shuttered Louis Vutton shop. Avatar at IMAX, advertised the sign at Siam Paragon. But no one was going to see anything.

William walked late at night through what used to be the commercial heart of Bangkok, the glistening high end malls that ran for what seemed like miles, Centralworld, Siam Paragon, these places where you could walk in and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars. He knew as if by magic with a feeling of joy prickling through the substance of everything, that this was history in the making. He had never seen anything like it. Headaches, sometimes feeling exactly like hangovers, dissipated; but his body ached and he knew, in some strange way, these were the days to enjoy himself, Rip van Winkle at the end of time, for life is fragile and the sweeping city scapes, so astonishingly beautiful, so futuristic, the finely designed architecture of the high rise buildings; these euphoric moments, of appreciation, delight, congress, all of it could so easily disappear. A lonely death. A silent dream. A place in the heart where there was no one left.

Even in the red light districts catering to tourists, even in the massage parlours, the colour red was everywhere. Bangkok was beginning to take on a certain familiarity. On Soi 4 off Silom he watched a so so fat middle aged queen with his astonishingly handsome boyfriend sitting at the Balcony. They were still there at 1am, when he circled back through the web of sois that was Patpong, Bangkok's original red light district.

There wasn't much point, of course, having such a handsome handbag if you couldn't show it off; and he knew in a single glance exactly the dynamic; and could even guess the price, the relationship, the long time pleasures and the short term pain, and could guess the compromises that boy had made to be there, keeping this man company, his dreams fulfilled, the Westerner’s wallet slowly draining.

William caught the boy's eye in a micro-second of misjudgement, hedidn't mean to stare, and they both knew instantly what the other knew; crompromises indeed. Money talks. Yes, in those kind days and kind nights, comfortabe hotels and showers of gifts, there was some satisfaction, if not desire. But they were far away from anywhere, far away from family, far away from the village; and here in a place where every interaction was fast and spoilt, swishy boys trolled for rich clients, those astonishing looks had bought him a space that few would actually want, company that few could stand, sex that few could muster. We were a dying fall. We were grace executed. We were a swan song of a life badly lived. And then the sewerage overflowed in the crowded gay soi; and the rank sweet dank smell permeated through the crowds of the watchers and the watched; The Telephone, The Balcony; and later, later, the sweetest dreams would be exposed as nothing but illusions with their own rank smells destroying all pretence.

That William would later be caught in all the same traps and deceits so regularly perpetrated by the nation’s sex workers defied credulity, certainly defied his own history and contributed to his own anger at having been so thoroughly deceived and so expansively stolen from.

While he had done his sociology thesis on gay bars back in Austalia, in a period when “participant observation” was regarded as a valid form of sociological inquiry and Street Corner Society, where the author had lived in and participated in neighborhood life, was regarded as the classic of the genre.

But his original academic interest in gay bars was certainly peaked by the scenes in Bangkok. There were scenarios in this strange you could almost say post-modern city which were like nowhere else earth. There was no other city he knew of that boasted the easy massage parlors, the theatricality of the go go bars, the sex shows, saunas and male brothels, on top of the more normal string of go go bars and discotheques.

Some middle aged men buy red sports cars. He hung out with Bangkok street boys, ultimately to his great cost, emotionally, financially and physically.

The first such boy was called Baw, a character, as he was later to discover, around Surrawong and Soi Twilight for many years, acting as a guide or tout for tourists, directing them to the bars and sex shows. He was not a go-go boy, he would repeatedly declare. Baw had a very poor reputation, but in the beginning had struck him as enormously entertaining.

The day William met Baw had begun early; in the middle of the day with Ian parked at a bar in the centre of Pat Pong with homey bar girls and almost nothing open. Super Pussy shouted the Pat Pong sign. In the warm drifting rain William and his cheerful old mate idly watched the atmosphere of a red light district during the day. It had all the beauty of seaside resort out of season. Nothing like it. Ian was back in town, just as Paul had predidcted, pursuing Sexy Sar, lavishing gifts upon her. On this day she was off on yet another errand to do with her enormous family and illegitimate son. A young man and a young woman drifted by. No interest was expressed on either side. An old man emerged from The Madrid, perhaps the one said to have lived above the bar for more than 20 years. The terror was gone. In its place; he had no clue. The whispering dusk; rubbish drifting in a corner; a sad regret; the stomach for nothing; they come they go, he said wryly, wasting thousands of baht on sex workers for the sake of a bit of physical company.

A middle-aged worker determined to keep them company; and Ian flirted with the aging prostitute for no other reason than that they were bored. They bought her, and the barmaid, a drink, grossly inflating their own bill. It was all expected. Stupid farangs wasting money.

Patpong during the day proved as atmospheric and as pointless as everything else. Super Pussy indeed. Perhaps it was time he went back to work. Instead of lurking. Just another in a long line. Reach the end of life and the end of time and you will be here too, another old man in the streets, charmed by the embrace of a handsome boy, an astonishingly good looking girl. They were here, now, warm in the flesh; bought and paid for. These men had long ago had their day and yet weren't ready to say die. But God, had their looks gone.

Eventually they decided to move on; although to where neither quite knew. Hadsome young soldiers, looking barely old enough to be out of school, much less in the military, lounged or stood awkwardly on every corner of the once bustling Patpong. The music soared and his spirits slumped. Topless pool shouted another bar; and William dragged Ian past because he couldn't be bothered looking at tits at this hour of the day. My heart, my soul, I give to you. Or any hour, some days, with swishy boys and the deal closed: you want me, you know you want me, pumped the disco songs, the same songs all over Thailand, and the unsettling thought kept pumping in: they really don't like you. Us. Them.

Much to their fascination and sense of revolution the Red Shirts continued to paralyze much of the centre of Bangkok. They often spent hours wandering through the crowds of protestors. Every taxi he got into the driver deliberately turned up the radio to accentuate the harsh, declamatory sounds of the Red Shirts. They made no concessions. They were on the edge of revolt. You like red shirts? William asked the taxi driver on the way to the Bourbon Street bar. Very much in my heart, he said, in the only English he had spoken all trip, thumping his chest. They smiled at each other. And the declamations continued.

Dropping earnest recovery, he had walked out of an AA meeting at the Plaza Hotel on Soi Seven in Bangkok and straight into the arms of liquid desire.

It started this way: his mate Ian was a jolly chap now in his fifties who had dedicated his entire life to hedonism and seemed to think most mere mortals boring for just getting up and going to work.

William parked Ian in the Biergarten opposite the AA meeting, declaring he would be back in an hour. Ian could hardly have looked happier. From morning to night there were never less than a 100 girls in the Biergarten, all of them available. They varied between charming and drop-dead gorgeous; Thai men seeking 500 baht street girls went elsewhere. The girls working falang expected much greater rewards.

Ian had been fantasising about girls all that day, well all of his life really. But on this day it had reached fever pitch. His current, exotic but temperamental squeeze was away visiting her typically enormous Thai family somewhere in the provinces.

“I'll buy you a boy,” Ian had declared cheerfully earlier in the day, “anything you want. A girl or two for me, a boy for you. If you don't see a girl you like.”

“I'm not really up to it at the moment,” he protested.

“Oh don't be ridiculous,” Ian snorted. “This is Bangkok.”

“I keep picking up these swishy, horrible boys,” William confessed. “They make me feel worse – sleazy – they never stay very long; and the girls – I just can’t raise the mast right now, I don’t know why. They’re so gorgeous some of them; and they’ll do anything. And I just can’t.”

Ian snorted yet again. No Australian male should confess to such inadequacies.

The air in Bangkok was different now, washed clean by morning rains; the stifling heat and the acrid pollution gone. As too was his state of mind, feverish, indistinct, living in the inverse, a psychotic negative of the real world. With a head no longer filled with post-apocalyptic imagery, it was easier to be free. But where was the excitement.

He sat through the AA meeting and heard all the various stories; his mind drifting as each middle aged man in turn went through their how it was, what happened and how it was now routine, the obligatory declarations of just how pathetic a human being they had become and how the 12 steps had transformed their lives; all thanks to God and a Higher Power.

How God fitted into a program being run in a Buddhist country he wasn’t quite sure; and his mind drifted as he gazed out the window at the neon Biergarten signage. All was moving in a discordant accord; he was deeply concerned and mortally frightened. He wanted to be inside everybody's life, inside every moment of history, to be at one not just with this universe but all universes. Ancient voices sprang up strong inside of him, harking back across the centuries, to times when he was a warrior, a guardian, a court official, a lonely drunkard in an English village; a once-young man disgraced. Even after the meetings of what was supposed to be a spiritually based program Western men boasted stories of their exploits. They forget they’re payig us, he heard one of the workers say dismissively. I'm just going to get a blow job from one of my favourites on the way home, Bangkok's version of Jack Nicholson declared cheerfully, waving goodbye with a grin from ear to ear.

Rapidly disengaging after the meeting closed, William re-enterered the Biergarten to collect Ian. He realized the number of girls sponging drinks off Ian had risen to at least seven with no sign of the decreasing. Ian was laughing away at their affections and affectations while simultaneously ogling off a younger and older woman seated together. Never had a mother daughter combo, Ian whispered in his ear. That would be worth trying. William whispered: let's try somewhere else. The bar bill alone was already getting out of hand.

Thus it was that they ended up at Bangkok's notorious Soi Cowboy; again a red light district dedicated to foreigners. Thai brothels for Thai men were another story entirely. They stood amidst the flashing lights and the crowds of Soi Cowboy, uncertain which of the go go bars to enter, whose enticement to respond to. A middle aged man was standing slap bang in the middle of the soi. You look lost, he said. I am, the man replied. Realising they had a fellow Australian in hand they cheerfully embraced him. Don't worry, they told him, we'll show you the ropes. I'm married, he protested. Yes, well, is your wife with you in Bangkok? No, I'm meeting her in London. We've been married for 24 years. We have two children. What she doesn't know won't hurt her, they assured him. And so they settled on the go go bar in the centre, drinks 70 baht until 9pm. And he just thought, oh eff it, I'll just have a few beers and go back to meetings tomorrow. Never confess. What they don't know won't hurt them either. nd proceeded to have not one but several. He had always been the same, he didn't know why. Other people, well at least some people, stayed sober and straight for years on end. His off switch just didn't work. Hundreds of meetings later he would go crashing out the door; often just on little trysts, sometimes on blinding, suicidal, life threatening binges which would make the skin crawl under a cat, make him convulse with the poisons pulsing through his already damaged body. And make way: make way, for the times are strange and bewildering and nothing would ever matter, not now, not ever.

For some weird reason known only to him the accountant couldn't bring himself to betray his wife of 24 years; so in the end, after an impressive number of beers and several inconclusive flirtations, none of the admittedly very pretty girls seemed quite right, they decided to move on yet again and check out Patpong, Bangkok's oldest red light district targeting falang, foreigners.

But first of all they decided they would go and check out the Merman show, where naked boys swam underwater in a tank. Only in Bangkok could you find such a thing.

And so the drinking began; it would be a full two months before it spluttered to a stop.

They settled on a go-go bar, and he thought, oh eff it, I'll just have a few beers and go back to meetings tomorrow. Never confess. What they don't know won't hurt them. The girls twirled around poles and danced naked above mirrored floors. One of the workers kept encouraging him to look at the mirrored floors, so he could see that the girls were all dancing without underwear. Perhaps it was some man’s delight; he just wasn’t that heterosexual. The mama-san organized some of the more delectable to come and flirt with them but nothing quite worked. I’m getting myself a boy, the thought kept repeating as the alcohol began to pulse through his veins.

So they abandoned the hetero-commercial tumult of Soi Cowboy and headed to the Boy Zone. Touts for Bangkok Boys, Beach Boys and X-Size all vied for their attention.

Ian was one of the planet’s most heterosexual males and the Merman show was part of Gay Bangkok’s most glorious sleaze; his preparedness to accompany William on such a quest was a classic act of Australian mateship. As in, “I don’t care if you are a poof. I’ve never been to a gay bar before, but if you want to watch naked boys with erections swimming in a tank, no worries, I’ll have a beer with you.”

The show was seedy, the boys tacky. They swam naked with condoms over their erections, then strutted about flapping their large appendages against the clients in the hope of a tip or a trick, much to Ian’s absolute horror. They exited the bar shortly afterwards. Ian, nearly always the coolest of cool dudes, was shaking, flummoxed; they sat down in a makeshift bar next to a gaggle of cheap massage boys.

Patpong, Patpong, Ian kept saying, I need an antidote. I need to perve at some girls, get those dicks out of my head. A man of the world finally ruffled; shocked to the core of what he had thought to be a broad minded being.

But he was a hunter now; gone were the days when he could sit in any gay bar in the world and the drinks and drunks would queue up. He wanted action. But the previous mistakes – swishy little boys, thieving AIDS infested pricks who went through his wallet but who, much to his despair, he liked anyway – made him cautious.

I'm not leaving till I pick up a boy, William announced, watching the flouncing little queens at Bangkok Boys gesturing with their eyes. Too camp too camp; not what he had wanted. He sat there, still drinking; suddenly Ian stood up and headed back down the gay soi. That's the end of him, he thought, he’s drunk as a skunk in the wrong part of town. There was a certain irony in watching Australia’s most heterosexual man disappearing off down a gay soi in Bangkok. God knows where he's going to end up, William thought.

Music continued to pump out of the bars opposite, boys continued to flounce and gesture from the bars and massage parlours opposite.

Some minutes later, much to his surprise, Ian returned with a handsome, straight looking straight acting young man, just the type he liked. What about this one? Ian demanded, having decided to cure William’s indecision. Another round of beers in an already disintegrating evening and it soon became obvious this was not a boy who was going to say no to a drink. They talked briefly and negotiated a price - three thousand baht stay till morning. Pay above the local market price; that got their full and undivided attention. Pay them well treat them well they’re happy you’re happy, went the local mantra.

It seemed like a good motto at the time. Later he was to discover that the more you paid the more they thought you were an idiot.

And suddenly they had a new Thai friend, Baw, who spoke enough English to laugh with them in a nearby restaurant, soaking up the alcohol with a bit of food, but of course with another round. They headed back to The Romance, Ian having given up on the idea of picking up a go-go girl and deciding to wait for Sexy Sar to put in appearance, whenever that might be. While she was due about one a.m. nothing was predictable with that girl.

The next morning William and Baw had four generous shots of Vodka each, polishing off the Absolut Ian had left in the room at the atmospheric Romance Hotel, ever after known as “the cheap hotel”, where their happiest early days were spent. It was a marriage made in heaven or hell. Hell as it was to become; out beyond the last Skytrain Station, where criminal gangs roamed a barely lucid earth; where his own fear of movement left him living stationary in a working class Thai neighborhood, the only foreigner lining up for morning coffee; where he sacrificed himself for the consideration of others.

Already drunk when they headed off for breakfast in the morning, he passed via an ATM the next morning and in a moment of generosity, unfamiliar with the value of the currency and the local prices, he handed over another 2,000 baht. This meant Baw had picked up 5,000 baht for having sex with him once, a handsome price in a city where you could buy yourself a short time boy for 1,000 baht and the touts were lucky if they made 500 baht a night. And so, unlike the others, Baw just never quite left.

He was suddenly not alone; after the years following his separation, years bringing up the children alone, having never re-partnered. The studies show that those men who do best after separation are those who re-partner, something he had never quite managed. William had never slept alone from the moment he discovered you didn’t have to, until turning 50 or so, after that always. And so he was vulnerable to the cyclone, the fatal obsessions, that overtook his life. Men just weren’t designed to sleep alone, young or old.

At this time Baw was sleeping on his brother’s floor and spent all of his spare money, which was never much, on whisky and girls. He could be enormously entertaining in his own delinquent ways. Later drugs were to wreck their havoc, turning him sad, sour, viperous. But way back then, William would stare at the boy who was in fact not really a boy but in his late twenties. He was, however, in his own delinquent way, still handsome and personable and certainly fond of a joke and a chat; so he would find himself in bars, cafes, nightclubs, with the first drinks of the evening and the final drunkenness of dawn, thinking, I can’t believe I’ve been there. In the end he wasn't thinking anything at all. Baw went straight from San Song to Black Label the minute they met, and any restaurant they entered would order up big. At the time William didn’t mind. He had no idea about Thai food; and no idea what to order. The best he could manage was to point at something someone else was having. He had a million baht or so to spare on having a good time; and having no idea of his own how to achieve this was happy to let a local take control. Strange as it might seem to others, at this time in his life he had no idea what a good time actually was. if he could only work out what that was. Later, having wasted far more money than he intended, he was forced to be more careful.

They were to spend a wild 60 or so days together, in between his visa runs to Cambodia; and Baw was to play a largely destructive but in some odd way instructive role throughout his year in Bangkok.

"Baw bad" he was repeatedly warned.

At some of the hotels they were to stay in the manager would take him aside and say: "I can find you nice boy, good boy. Not boy like this."

And as they left the manager would say: “You are welcome back, just don’t bring that boy.”

But who else to know the appeal of a bad boy?

While William knew perfectly well he was being ripped off at every turn, at that stage he didn’t care. The exchange rates were in his favor and it was a subject of some distant amusement to watch the antics Baw would go to just to relieve him of a few thousand baht.

And had by then learnt to recognize exactly what was going on. Sometimes when “out and about” he would introduce some Thai boy in his company simply as, “and this one’s looking for a tip”.

Perhaps what drew William to Baw was that he drank very much like he did when he was in his twenties, up all night, up for everything and anything. Before William was to become such a reviled figure, at a time indeed when he was entirely unknown in Thailand, he wrote a story about Baw and their earliest times together called Liquid Desire, Fatal Attraction and the Abandonment Of All Common Sense.

Within 24 hours of first meeting Baw; and with the city choked by the political demonstrations of the Red Shirts, they decided to head off Issan in the North. Where else in the world could you pick up a young man off the street, negotiate a price and then be dragged home to meet his family in the provinces the next day.

After a few days in that remote Issan village they decided to head back to Bangkok. He could not impress on the family that if a plane left at 3pm they should be at the airport by one pm; and as part of what was meant to be a kindly display of the local sights before he left, he was taken to a national park and what was known as “the painted cliffs”, a dramatic spot, inhabited for thousands of years, with paintings dating back equally as far. From the high cliffs they looked across the river to Laos. There were family everywhere.

A local businessman, curious, showing off his English, dropped by their picnic table and asked him where he was from. “Australia,” he said, and there was all the usual rigmarole about a country so far away. Kangaroos, Opera House, the Harbour Bridge. Then: which one is your boyfriend, girlfriend? he asked, gesturing at the enormous family, men, women, lots of children, with Baw in their midst. “None of your business,” he snapped back, jovial but definite. No offense was taken. The man moved on; through the trees he could see the winding valley and the river below, the cliffs on the other side.

William went to Issan with a boy so casually picked up off the streets because there was nothing else happening in his life. It was one of those random events, not so much as a change of clothes; from one end of Bangkok to another, from one province to another.

They climbed out of the bus and into the Thai countryside at about 4am. It really was the middle of nowhere. These appeared at the time to be glorious moments which could only happen here, with no other Westerners anywhere in the vicinity.

You can sleep with me too the host declared, embracing him affectionately. And then later, drunk: “You are safe. No danger. I am policeman.” Beating his chest. “I am soldier. Jungle. Thai boxing.” An endless parade of excellent food came out of the humble kitchen. A duck was killed in their honour. A long way away in a distant time, he never slept alone. Almost never. Except perhaps in Penang where the old men sat around smoking their dampened, heroin laced cigarettes and the streets were full of the constant cry: Hey Johnny, you want something. This part of Issan was exactly like Asia as he remembered it from decades before it turned into the giant modern powerhouse it is today; with a flourishing professional class. Hold my hand for a while.

“You stay with me?”

“Everyday.“

Now were days in a daze. But William wasn't in the empty warehouse of his skull he had spent so much time in during those last few years in Sydney. “Up to you, I like you,” he said to Baw, when the persistent boy, realising the foreigner was going to be loyal to his original choice, finally proposed a threesome. The whiskey flowed.

They all knew, but William didn’t, that his liking for Baw was entirely misplaced, that their cold showers together soaping each other and laughing was all just part of an act. He should have just gone with the persistent boy. Much more fun.

That first evening had worn on like the day itself, there in that messy, diisorganised compound. crowded during the day with an astonishing number of children. It seemed to William, coming from an entirely different, coming from a far more isolated and isolating culture, that they had lived like this for thousands of years; entirely communal. “My family happy, I happy, you happy” seemed to be the story. Later he would hear many a farang - foreigner - tell horror stories of enormous Thai families they were suddenly expected to pay for or support.

“Whatever you do, don’t meet the family, it’s all part of the con and you’ll end up paying for the lot,” was falang wisdom he heard or heeded far too late.

Their host might have been a policeman, but that didn’t seem to hold anyone back. When a group of young men sat around in the early hours wired on yabbah it became obvious somewhere around 3am that these guys were up for anything, including getting off with a foreigner and with each other. Out of the avalanche of Thai came one clear piece of English: “now you see our true nature.” The original gender benders. These pearls on the funeral path, coated, glistening, alive, powerful, that's all they were. As he had told his 1,000 baht extra if I come in the next 90 seconds English friend, you belong to Peak Experiences Anonymous, not to AA. These people decide to get their lives together after they lose their first library card.

Calling, calling out to accept your offer. Except for Baw sleeping upstairs. In such wild terrain. Calling, calling, because he couldn't keep his eyes off the village’s most handsome boy. The cattle moved in their pen. An early rooster crowed. They clearly had no desire to go anywhere. Another boy kept playing with the hairs on the back of his hands; making it clear he could go with him too if he wanted. There was so much desire in the saturated heat. The children everywhere testament to idle afternoons lounging around.

This was a pre-television world, the way everybody stopped by to say hello; the way they all knew each other; almost everything the subject of one great joke or other, including Baw bringing back a foreigner. He told them all how they had met and that he now had a new pair of Converse sand shoes which had cost the astonishing sum of 1500 baht.

Thais are the original gender benders. "First I like lady, then I like lady boy, now I like Pappa, you mature, you pay," declared the handsomest boy in that Issan village, impressed by Baw's new pair of sandshoes. And at the end of the night he said in his best school boy English: “I am very sorry not to sleep with you tonight.” At the time, still Western in his thinking, William felt an entirely inappropriate loyalty to Baw, and it just seemed wrong, to his western sensibility, to sleep with someone else after just arriving in the village. He would only discover later how misguided his loyalty was.

Back in Bangkok, for their first week together, in what they now referred to as the cheap hotel, way up at the end of the Sukhumvit Line in a clapped out hotel called The Romance, with the M missing, William still had no idea Baw wasn't gay. Amazing what a tip to a straight boy can do in of Thailand.

That time, strangely enough, in that cheap hotel up beyond Om Nut, spending most of their time inside, hanging out with Ian and Sar, going to cheap local hotels, playing Ian’s guitar or just watching television, was their happiest time together.

Restless cooped up inside, Then they headed to one of the islands, Koh Chang, less developed than Phuket or Koh Samui. In his naively deluded and lonely state he thought it was going to be some kind of honeymoon, but it soon became anything but, their drinking spiraling out of control. It turned out to be a public holiday and there was almost no accommodation available. On their first night there he shouted Baw a girl and that was the beginning of an avalanche of girls seemingly without measure, when he discovered suddenly enough that his “mate” was straight after all. You don’t mind? the local bar owner asked. Boys will be boys, he said, world weary, heart foolish.

It was no honeymoon, that was for sure.

Koh Chang was something entirely different.

Baw became an expert at convincing girls that if they wanted a tip they had to come back to their picturesque guesthouse at the end of the beach and keep papa happy as well. After sleeping alone for years, some mornings William would wake up sandwiched between sex workers of various genders, hands groping everywhere, the grunt of someone coming in the bathroom and think: nothing could be more beautiful. Swishy girls and high pitched boys; after cruel abstinence, time spent afresh and anew, woken, from a long sleep, if not at the end of his life then older, much older than he had ever expected. Die young stay pretty had been the motto of his youth; and indeed a lot of his friends were long gone. But for whatever reason, he remained on the planet surface.

Perhaps there was something to be said for tropical beaches and strange situations, for dancing in the last bar in town, there at 8am, for being lost, infinitely lost in the time zones between the places. He wasn't there. That was the point. There was no tomorrow. The declamatory voice held firm. He wanted to be high and he wanted not to think, he wanted to be in love and he wanted to negotiate a price, an understanding. Everything came back to haunt. They looked across desolated landscapes; but that was only the beginning. But every old queen he had ever met hung in the walls, laughing, and they said: we knew it would happen to you. We are tired. We are worn out. We are maw, maw, drunk, and their voices said: I told you so. We knew you were lost the minute we met you; even though you were young and handsome and desired at the time, every possibility, every permutation, everything he had ever hoped for and fantasised about was present, there in raised ass cheeks and there in the parameters so poorly defined. My friend my friend. Boys will be boys. Every cutting blow. You are old. I am young. I am beautiful. Every desire was gratified; and yet, yet, there wasn't any ending that could pass for an ending.

He was very strange, stranger than strange, and if these haunted symphonies ever had any meaning; if these wild times on the cusp of the edge, in a place where no man could survive and no woman was welcome, William came to them, crawling, pitiful, I love you, I pay for you, infinite, that's what it was, these cries of pain and loneliness and desire, infinite desire, for the islands have come to you; and nothing was safe.

They came together, all these warm bodies. They danced to his tune and another tune, and a welcome passing and all that ever was; angry now, but also, bless you, everything, orgasms so freely given, Thai sex workers so easily bought. Things that were never the same once another person entered; places where they loved and lusted and held their private entreaties, their infinite lust, their infinite gratitude; time out of mind indeed. It wasn't everything he had hoped for.

But in these crimes, in these places where he sought out the best and the worst, where he was reminded of a youth and flesh and sleeping with someone and the joyous spread of “I want you, you know you want me”, a disco anthem of the time: it was all the same. It would all end.

Bangkok not serious; Baw said; and it was the wisest thing he had ever heard him say. There was nothing serious about their escapades, the lightning flashing out to sea; the darkness and the warmth. Nobody had ever been so kind. Nobody has ever let him do that; not to the same degree. So they warmed; they were parted; things were different now. Times had changed. People had changed. The orgies of the past were long over. He paid and he paid. Things were lost but only begun. “You want me, you know you want me,” handsome boy, yes, yes, I want you only and for always; multiple hearts tugging like toggling microscopes, an understanding which came from a life only few could understand.

The bar girl looked so sad at 7am in the morning, the last bar open in Koh Chang, when the French boy said to her: I give you 1,000 baht if you match me drink for drink. The whiskey disappeared. We all disappeared. There were only old men who had lost their power; there were only things he could never imagine, never orchestrate, which never come to a conclusion.

Someone slipped something into his drink and he 48 hours later he woke up 40,000 baht lighter and sleeping on a bench in a restaurant near the guesthouse. People told him he had been walking along the beach, talking cheerfully to anyone. Why, why, was this desire so urgent? He saw them on corners. He saw them in restaurants. They looked. They smiled. I am yours for a price. They were always for a price. Never pretend your attractiveness extends anything beyond your wallet. Bars lined the beach, William hated every last one of them, the backdrops to an insane and dangerous bust. It was suicidal drinking. His was the broken heart that laid itself out across the so-called boulevarde of dreams, a broken place, a wretched place, and yet he understood desire took multiple avenues, he understood that he was old now. That boys would be boys. They come quickly they come slowly. Baw plundered the local girls with gusto. William regularly woke up sandwiched between a boy and a girl. And then came the blackouts, just like in his twenties. And then his heart went haywire: Western love, possessive love, crashed up against the flanks of a straight Thai boy and a communal sense of love, sex.

Oh you are so handsome, or so beautiful, William would say; and always they kept saying, I come your room, no problem. He hadn't had so much sex since time began; it was simply impossible to come more often. The offers often came with amazing good will; of course a tip was expected…

I don't understand your thinking, the boy said, when he refused to pay for yet another girl. This is Thailand. This is public humiliation. This is neglect. Easy to find a nice boy to take care of me, he thought, pay some money. Easy. They were everywhere, these slim, amazing looking men; dark, handsome, fun loving. The original gender benders. You can have me, the boyish girl said, but he didn't want anything, or at least not her. You do for you, not for me. I don't care anymore. The dream fell apart like an ocean crashing on a shoreline, and William should have known better. He should have realised.

You used me, William thought, as if this should be a surprise to anyone. The times come and go. Yes he had made a fool of himself. Yes he wasted some money, more money than he could afford. But it was always going to happen somewhere in Asia, on some obsessional self dissolving odyssey. And he knew, knew deep in his heart, how pathetic he had become. An old man trolling the beach, looking, looking, for love, for fun, for the sole object of his desire; and knew, too, it was crazy to be like this. As if anything good could come of it. As if he hadn't known all along things would end badly. Crimes against humanity, crimes against nature. It was always going to end in a Godless place where the horror dripped in the heat and his own self abnegation had reached dangerous depths.

It was easy, only now, to understand the mistakes that so many Westerners made. But all up, all up William wished it was over; that there was a different peace, a different time. Toss the sex workers out of hotel room and get a wriggle on; for while all seemed briefly lost, he was free in a way that he hadn't been free for a long time; and expensive mistakes were just short term failures. There were other projects; other bodies to break his heart over; other personalities to be briefly entranced by; and he would survive; at least a little longer.

Ditch the twink and come back to Bangkok, Gary texted, and he could have been betrayed by anyone, but chose to be betrayed by himself. He paid the price, a very high price, for these randoms lusts and strange desires, for having crossed the border so long ago it didn't matter, for creating text where no text lay before.

While they partied on Koh Chang like there was no tomorrow, back in Bangkok the death toll from the riots had 27 killed and almost 1,000 injured during two months of protests.

Wat Srapathum was inside the Red Shirts' barricades.

The temple, the news reported, was experiencing the same loss of clientele as businesses in the area. There would usually be hundreds of people inside but many are too afraid to come into the city centre, even to a place of worship.

Nevertheless, Deputy Abbott Pra Thavorn Jittatarwaron said the temple continues to offer spiritual guidance and support to anyone who enters its gates.

"The nature of the world is not stable," he said.

Early in May 2010 Thailand's Red Shirt leaders said they would consider ending their protest in central Bangkok on Monday when the government lifts the country's official state of emergency.

The state of emergency meant that large groups of people ccould be forcibly dispersed by police.

William decided it was time to leave Koh Chang and head to Chiang Mai.

As they left he discovered Baw had run up a 6,000 baht bar bill. William had assumed he had been providing more than enough money for him to at least pay for his own drinks.

William had misread so many vital cues and had come to hate the island, his head full of stray thouthts. The most handsome boy in the village. I want to go with you. Entirely acceptable in this culture. Not known, not known, these voices, this past, these desolate places inside his own head. While the sun drenched dread of a tropical island curdled every belief. You take advantage of me, William declared angrily, and of course it was true. Why did he have to like the straight ones, not the swishy boys? Was it ever going to end differently? Of course not. He couldn't believe his own destroyed psyche, how unhappy he had been his whole life, when these handsome people laughed together constantly, thought nothing of getting off with each other, celebrated everything. Oh how he dreaded his own heart.

Always, always, the constant crime. Against humanity. Against nature. Against, truly, himself. You couldn't be alone for long; not here. They regarded it as entirely unnatural. William didn't like himself anymore, just a misshapen wreck on a remote highway. Very remote. So far from anything he had known; any normal culture in his own country. And yet here, nothing mattered. Everything was fine. You think you make a fool of yourself and it was just nothing, to them, to anything, the owner of the guesthouse advised. Nobody cared. He was a wild stranger and a dark force. And stabs of jealousy shook his heart while he repeatedly declared that everything was alright. I don't mind, I don't mind. William minded very much. I don't believe you, Tammy the local bar owner said, and of course it was true. He hunted the beach. He searched everywhere for his obsession. And everyone looked the same, these slim toy men, so handsome, so astonishingly handsome, their shirts off in the hot weather. And he could die in any obsession.

William looked at the handsome boy in his bed, betrayed, always betrayed, and he found no heart in his predicament and cried early and long; because these were the obsessions which brought so many westerners to their knees. From tropical dread to Chiang Mai, back in Chiang Mai, at least now he was on his own turf, could take control again; was not in some tropical paradise with nothing but bars and a boy who thought nothing of knocking off a bottle of whiskey every day. Why this random pick, of all random picks. Off a soi in Bangkok, he said, joking to the boy, who had never been in a plane before and was staring excitedly out the window. Be careful, be careful, the locals warned, when he said: I like him too much.

And so it was, after Baw’s first flight in a plane and the coolness over the size of bar bill settled and they stared with wonder out the window at the beauties of Thailand, they ended up in Chiang Mai. Back in a room. Back in domestic bliss, or so it briefly seemed.

Very very hungover Baw, having polished off two bottles of Jack Daniels and more in the previous 24 hours, determined to sleep for three days, "for the power". Back in Bangkok two policeman had been killed and 13 people injuired. Here in an out of season Chiang Mai, with tourists thin on the ground, they reached their agreement. You want take care of me? Not drinking not girl not every day. You no want to take care of me, you can go. There are many handsome boys in Chiang Mai, Burmese boys, famous for their beauty, William declared. Cheaper than you. Baw nodded in an agreement he had no intention of keeping.

There were plenty of meetings for reformed alcoholics in Chiang Mai, full of old American military retirees, and William made the decision to go back to the program, to try and stop drinking, again. At least he would went, made an effort, which was more than a lot of people ever did. Strangely enough, despite the chaos, he had found his home here and did not want to go back to Australia, not in a million years. Not to a place where people said: you might be one of them, you might be a poofter, you might be gay. Tell me tell me! I tell you nothing, you dum effing red neck. Leave me alone. Let me be free.

This is not the only life, William thought. This is not the only path. There will be so many others. There have been so many others; in the travel of this ancient soul. So there it was; a stupid thing, a stupid old man, crashing his heart on the charming, astonishing flanks of Thai sex workers. And broken once, but never broken again, he thought. How wrong that was to prove.

Trouble continued to flair in Bangkok. A 25-year-old anti-government protester was killed during clashes with soldiers, the latest bloody incident in Thailand’s ongoing political crisis. Fighting flared up again after Maj Gen Khattiya Sawasdipol, an active-duty soldier who had sided with the Red Shirt supporters of ousted former PM Thaksin Shinawatra, and who helped build barricades of tyres and bamboo around the downtown business district, was shot in the head during an interview with foreign media.

During the following year Baw would always reminisce about Chiang Mai as if it had been the most perfect of times; with the evenings spent at the local bar drinking and playing pool and joking with the girls. William remembered it entirely differently.

They were far away, In Chiang Mai, natural Red Shirt territory due to its location in the North of Thailand amidst the rural poor who were their major supporters, Red Shirt propaganda spewed from every shop and every television screen. But there was little in the way of protest, because there was little to protest against. Chiang Mai was not a land of upmarket shopping malls.

Finale: after having got drunk across half of Thailand, they returned to Bangkok, to the streets, the brothels, the karaoke bars. They booked into the Plaza Hotel on Surawong. He regularly woke up with two boys, both called Baw, in the room. The boys, both being straight but keen for a tip, often enough brought girls back to the hotel in the early hours of the morning. Much to the horror of the management, until generous tips got them saluting again. He knew deep in his heart how pathetic he had become. An old man trolling the beach, the streets, the bars, looking, looking, for love, for fun, for the sole object of his desire; and knew, too, it was crazy to be like this. As if he hadn't known all along that things would end badly. Crimes against humanity, against nature. Ending in a Godless place, horror dripping in the heat, self-abnegation reaching fatal depths…

As he was booking out of the Plaza and paying the bill the woman behind the counter, in her broken English, said “Good Night”, although it was midday. “It feels that way,” he said, as he headed off to Cambodia on yet another visa run.

William didn't mean for any of it to happen, none of it at all, didn’t think the situation through for a second. It never occurred to him that a relationship based on money and sealed on the first morning with four shots of Vodka before breakfast might be a fraught one. Proudly sober for weeks, he was starting to feel, well that was the trouble with being sober, he was starting to feel all too much, emotional beyond belief. But he had no thought of becoming part of a tribe-let of marauding Thai boys, haunting karaoke bars – decaying dens packed with cheap girls and the smell of Thai men; on the hunt, always on the hunt. Oh they’re so naughty, the dry old queen – his alter ego – sighed. My money, their whiskey and girls.

It took months of not drinking to recover from the escapade, to once again take control of his life, of marching through evening storms. Of other boys declaring: I go now.

There is a Thai saying, bad things are a good thing, because after the bad comes the good. Maybe that was the only truth he could take out of what had happened. Paradise dawns for a brief time, paradise is in the day, not in the heart; in the heat of the sky and the dawning shreds of being. Just purely in the joy of the day. Something the Thais seemed to understand instinctively, but which had escaped him all his life.

He stumbled back into meetings, sometimes having had half a dozen shots of whiskey just to get there.

You have a cool heart, he’d been told by the Thais when he first arrived; and they would point upwards at the night sky to indicate the coldness and the distance of the stars. Back then it had been true. In a particular sense; not having re-partnered after separation, his heart had gone to sleep, or at least into hibernation. In Sydney, feeble attempts at forming relationships, usually with women, always faltered on the alter of his own uncertainties and lack of confidence. In some strange way Baw had helped to restart his heart, but it all ended badly. Baw had been one of those warning him against Aek from the very beginning, but William had ignored him; thinking it nothing but ill will.

Towards the end of that first episodic two months with Baw, criss-crossing across Thailand, William realized he would have a much better time if instead of getting jealous he changed his attitudes. This was not a country for the possessive kind of love that dominated in the West. And in the end that is exactly what he tried to do. Back then, in those early days when he returned to Bangkok after the first of the Baw episodes, he thought himself finally happy with another boy, Aek, and would declare: "I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t been there."

He knew he shouldn't go to see Baw again; that toxic siren luring him onto the rocks, now that he was domestically ensconced with a boy who at least on the surface didn’t drink, smoke or take drugs. But he did anyway, as if seeking an end to the story. Baw was living in a large cheap apartment block, one of those typical Thai arrangements, four to a room. They smoked. They didn't drink but he might as well have. Things went awry very quickly.

Often enough they would do that one thing in Bangkok that they had between them, visiting karaoke bars at dawn. I couldn't be seen like that. Not gasping, not panting. Not just desperately wanting everything to end. Not able to achieve a heightened place. Money saved at every turn. Bangkok brothels mounted in corridors, each to be explored. He couldn't care less what the consequence. I love you. I miss you. These things were dancing on a very fine pin. I love you; when the whole of the city beckoned; redolent with glory, puhm poohey, plump, chubby, an observation of status or derision. I love you, that is what I have come to know. We were going to make the swiftest break, the most immediate of corridors, sweeping, beautiful. Dizzy, you bet you. Spewing out of those Colognes, out of the swirling spear, out of the elegiac ear piece, out of Christmas and New Year, out of wind tunnels and constellations not just of exquisite despair but mind numbing beauty, as if consequence was the only answer, as if we said too much just by being here. As if he lied and lied and lied. Just to cto be there in the instance, paralysed, transfixed, whole ancient scenes and absolutely modern cities glazing in a transfixed hallucination straight before him. Nothing would be the same, nothing would be the same.

Indeed he went back to see Baw several times; their heads winding through the clouds and their teeth clenched, instant ecstasy, dripping crystals as he gazed across the Bangkok landscape from his tiny Balcony. Finally he had the very clear thought: I leave you to your fate. Even after that final visit the calls were frequent, urgent; every instinct told him: answer, rescue, be kind. Instead he threw his phone in the bottom of a drawer and left it there for a week. And indeed, left the boy to his fate. And embraced his own.

That story, Liquid Desire, should have marked the end of any contact William had with Baw. But somewhere along the line, common sense really did go out the window.

CHAPTER THREE:

MANY MISTAKES: TAHM PEET MAK MAK

One of the strangest of the many strange events that was to over take William’s life in the midst of that appalling post-Aek bender, when a series of ragged and colorful characters passed through the house; as if passing through the scene of a honeymoon that never happened, a mausoleum which had once been a gift of hope.

This event also involved the bar X-Size and a deliberate attempt to set him up or get him into trouble with the authorities; anything to protect Aek, his lies, thievery, betray, disloyalty and deception, and nothing to protect the client.

But it also occurred at the height of his own madness.

Some of the scenes that followed (sketch in):

Going out with his mad woman friend to X-Size, because he was sick of listening to her talk about big cocks and thought they might as well do something about it, while Nok, the Laotion boy without a licence too closely connected to the underground networks around Night Boys for comfort but in contrasting ways a very decent country boy.

Nok talked often through Google translation programs about his desire to return to the village of soft wood. That he wanted to be an artist with wood. That he wanted integrity back in his life; and didn’t want to be a Bangkok boy anymore. He had been the one remnant of that supposed party on the night of Aek’s supposed return who had actually stuck around, whether as a spy or a genuine companion it was often difficult to tell.

But they laughed and played cards and that was enough.

For some reason which was soon to come to appear to be complete insanity, particularly considering he had a perfectly nice boy in the form of Nok already asleep on the couch when they decided to go out, he picked up an extra boy from X-Size. He had spotted him over the months and thought him handsome, at least from a distance. The impression did not hold up in daylight.

The totally false accusation that he was Thailand’s number one drug driver had by now taken a firm hold, undoubtedly assisted by his own bizarre behavior. Some times, many times, he would not sleep for ten days at a time, polishing off a bottle of whisky each day and deteriorating mentally and physically with each passing hour; insanity piling in upon insanity. He could not walk anywhere without attracting attention or negative comments. He must have looked like a piece of human wreckage; he just felt extremely nervous, scattered to the four winds. The alcohol was doing little to keep him calm, only acting to block the worst of the tumult of voices teaming through his head.

Bangkok had gone from a place of astonishing urban landscapes and intriguing late night bars into a living nightmare. Kah Koon Kahb Aek, he would sometimes say out loud. Thanks mates. Most Bangkok locals in that area would barely even notice a drunken falang if it had not been for the persistent and hostile propaganda so maliciously pitched against him.

But while he was later to admit he had made the whole story up; the insanity of the number one drug driver rave had taken hold; meaning his every action was closely observed, every situation uncomfortable, from walking down the street to sitting in a bar.

Well for reasons that defied logic and certainly the disapproval of the lady he was with, the one waiting to see Bin Laden after days without sleep, he picked the boy off the catwalk at X-Size and took him home.

The Mama Sam at X-Size offered some ice; primarily to the boy; because it helped to get them going, particularly when the customer was old or unattractive, as by this stage after more than a month of dissolute behavior he no doubt appeared. In any case, it was often part of the service in many of the bars. Yabbah, on the other hand, was strongly avoided and strongly disapproved of; it made everyone mad sooner or later, and often confused the situation rather than making it erotic.

His lady friend disapproved of such a public and indiscrete transaction; but drunk as he was, somewhere along the line he must have given his approval. But the ice, nahm keng as the Thais called it, was for once not immediately available. Instead they were told it would be delivered to the house.

This did not happen until considerably later in the night, around 2.30 am. The boy in question refused to get off the floor where they were playing cards, claiming some sort of injury, and he was told to go fetch, basically, from the taxi where the Mama Sam waited in the soi; deliberately placing him in a compromising position which he always avoided.

As he was later told, the handover was all recorded on video and the Mama San or in another version of the story the taxi driver, probably at her request, promptly rang the police.

Nervous beyond nervous, driven to distraction by the cries of drug driver coming from every corner, William decided next morning as he heard the unsettling sound of motor bikes in every soi for a mile around; it’s time to get out of here. Let’s go to Laos. So William, Nok and the X-Size boy threw their bags together and set off in some haste; with the strong feeling they were about to be busted.

They found a taxi; and after some discussion caught it all the way to the Laos border. It put him back about 6,000 baht.

He was easily recognizable wherever he went. A stop at a shopping mall in order to access an ATM turned into yet another nightmare, pursued, watched, observed, but not arrested.

It was a long drive from Bangkok to Laos and William began to doze off a little in the back of the taxi. The X-Size boy, whose camp mannerisms, general bitchiness and failure to do the job for which he was hired had already earned William’s intense dislike, entered a long conversation with the taxi driver.

They thought he didn’t understand enough Thai to know what they were talking about, but after a year in the country he did; even if, being tone deaf, he couldn’t speak it all that well.

It had leaked out during the long drive that over the time he had been with Aek he must have spent upwards of about a million baht on all the various gifts and demands, car, motor cycle, computer, telephone, holiday, school fees, family emergencies, expensive accommodation, a trip to Australia, the list was endless. Quite for why he was so generous in the end he would never know. The sex might not have been anything to write home about, but he didn’t claim to be any great sexual maestro himself; at least it was easy, familiar, comfortable, undemanding, not what most customers would settle for. But it had been a long time been drinks.

When William heard the X-Size boy calling him an Indian for having wasted such a ridiculous amount of money on a go-go boy that was the end of his patience as far as that particularly nasty little queen was concerned. For a Thai there could be no greater insult than to call someone an Indian.

The situation became increasingly melodramatic or movie like as they approached the Laotian border.

By then, the hysteria over his allegedly being Thailand’s number one drug driver had hit its peak. For the last several kilometers the traffic crawled, there were a number of road blocks and the taxi was checked several times. He pretended to be asleep in the back and they were not stopped.

As they approached the border a posse of police on motor bikes set up pursuit.

The taxi did not stop at the normal Thai border crossing. Doing a splendid job, the driver did not hesitate, crossing into Laotian territory. The atmosphere was by now entirely surreal. William alighted from the taxi with the two boys. A hundred meters away he could see the police on their bikes stopped at the border, like unleashed Dobermans blocked by an invisible fence.

The Laotian border guard he instantly befriended looked up at the scenario and said two words: “Bangkok mafia”.

“Exactly,” he replied.

William handed over his passport, with a decent tip accompanying it, and explained the lack of documentation for the Laotian boy.

“Come this way,” the guard said; tucking William out of sight in the nearby public toilet.

Once the formalities were competed; and the foaming dogs on the other side appeared to accept defeat, the three of them were escorted to a nearby hotel, still firmly on Laotian territory.

He was out of his own territory, far from any comfort, on the run for no other crime than having got smashed in the wake of a breakup and offending the wrong elements in Bangkok. The situation was light years away from the future he thought he was building. He had nothing but a little cash to protect him. The future was unknown. Those comfortable if sometimes boring days back in Bangkok were nothing but a vanished dream. The days when he existed under the illusion of happiness were long gone. He was being pursued not just by Aek, but the forces he and his allies had unleashed. He had gone from being the grand and generous benefactor to the hunted and pursued, all in a matter of a few dramatic, disintegrating weeks.

Having already heard the “Indian” comment by the X-Size boy William did not keep up any pretence that they were on talking terms. Having had the opportunity to view him up close he realized the idea that he was handsome was another illusion created by makeup and the low light of the clubs.

But like all good lads stuck together in a hotel room, they checked internet porn sites to pass the time. And after he had watched sufficient straight porn to stir him along, under the cover of the hotel’s thin blankets William continued his easy physical familiarity with Nok, who although straight was, for whatever reason, the one who was kindest and most physically affectionate to him of all the boys he had been with.

Meanwhile the X-Size boy cruised gay porn sites in stony silence; and then pointedly went to sleep with his back turned.

In the morning, as previously arranged, the border guard showed up to help them across the border. Plans shifted and changed. At one point Nok was going to be taken up the river to Luang Prabang by boat to avoid any difficulties over his lack of a passport. This plan foundered after the Mekong proved too shallow in parts to negotiate.

Before they left the hotel William made it clear he was only continuing on into Laos with Nok, and the X-Size boy could go back to Bangkok where he belonged.

As arrangements were being made in the sparse hotel lobby, where they were treated with little but suspicion or contempt by the staff, he watched with some curiosity as the X-Size boy applied his makeup and eyeliner, checking his appearance in the lobby mirror. They don’t make men like that in Australia; masculinity is much admired and femininity dismissed.

The boy insisted on a tip to cover the cost of his return. William had previously tipped him for the sexual encounter that never quite happened, being back in Bangkok far too nervous and strung out to be able to do anything.

William pointedly refused to hand over one single further baht and this resulted in the calling of two of the local tourist officers to the hotel to try and settle the matter.

They told him the boy said he really liked him, loved him and wanted to come with him to Laos.

“He called me an Indian to the taxi driver, that’s what he really thinks of me,” William told the kindly middle aged woman. When the boy protested that he had no money he just laughed. “They’re go-go boys,” he said dismissively. “They’re all actors. It’s all bullshit. Every Thai boy pretends they haven’t got a cent. He’s not getting any more money out of me, I don’t like him, he doesn’t like me, and that is the end of the matter.”

At this he walked off, dispatched a hotel boy to get him a coffee across the street on the Thai side of the invisible border; and pointedly sat on his own at a table outside, refusing to engage any further.

It was at the height of the “drug driver” hysteria generated by Aek and his colleagues. Nothing he did was invisible.

While Nok was dispatched up the Mekong to avoid the official border crossing, the border guard who had been so helpful the previous evening escorted him through the border crossing.

Every step was an obstacle and required more baht to resolve. He was ably assisted on the way. No doubt it wasn’t the first time there had been a difficult border crossing.

Then the nasty little queen from X-Size, his pancake makeup out of place in this setting, also made the crossing into Laos. He began loudly making accusations that the falang had tipped the guard to get across and attempting to draw attention to them; as if he required any more attention.

His “friend” rolled his eyes at this patheticly bitchy behavior, spoke to or tipped each official who examined his passport, and they moved on through, leaving the shrieking little Bangkok idiot to do his worst.

Finally William found himself at the last hurdle, standing beside a long queue of cars. A driver his friend knew was dispatached to collect a vehicle, and promptly disappeared. Officials and police officers watched his every move, speaking into telephones, making little effort to hide cameras. His “friend” disappeared to get the appropriate exit stamps out of Thailand, helping him fill in the forms. But the man dispatched to collect his vehicle disappeared, perhaps frightened by the level of attention William was attracting.

Finally after what seemed like an hour of being stuck in no-man’s land his friend whispered to him: “This is just too spicy. Follow me.”

They went outside, found a taxi, and drove out the back way, thereby avoiding the official exit point.

Then he was left with the taxi driver while his kindred soul went back to the border with his passport to clear everything up.

William went to breakfast with the driver, where even in the café it was obvious the news had spread. Then, wanting to change his appearance in the hope that might make some difference, William opted for a haircut. Several different places pointedly refused to cut his hair or have anything to do with him. Finally one hairdresser agreed. The man cutting his hair said little, but as by this time he was obviously upset did not display quite the same level of hostility as virtually everyone else.

They ended up at a café where both Nok and the X-Size boy put in an appearance. The Mekong, at low levels after a sustained dry season, had been too shallow to negotiate. The X-Size boy was still trying to cause trouble, and approached the back of the taxi as if to steal his computer. That he wasn’t putting up with either.

Finally and somewhat to his disappointment, thinking after all this tension and high drama shouldn’t one just book into a nice hotel and proceed to waste the rest of the day, William and Nok were dropped at a bus station. He knew perfectly well Nok was working for two masters, spying on him for his Bangkok enemies while also being strangely kind to him.

All he had wanted to do was go to Luang Prabang, sit in a nice hotel and recover from recent traumas. But William was being jerked around by far away strings and felt increasingly powerless. Instead there were a sequence of enormously long bus rides before they finally arrived at a town near Nok’s obscure Laotian village. He did not spot a single foreigner through the whole travail.

Thanks to Google translation programs he and Nok had already established a higher level of rapport than was normal. Nok admitted that he was connected with one of the networks in Bangkok and was working for them; but spoke too of how evil he thought they were and how strong his longing was to return to “the village of soft wood”, as he kept calling his home, and to do different work, to be an artist or a carpenter, to work with wood, to return to a different life. But at the same time; that if he did not work in Bangkok then his family had little if anything to eat but the fruit they might be able to find on the trees.

He also told the story of how he had got to Bangkok without a passport.

After a series of events they eventually arrived at Nok’s remote village, nowhere near Luang Parbang where he wanted to be. Word of the presence of Thailand’s “number one drug driver” spread rapidly, and he was treated with outright suspicion from the start, finally hidden away for comfort. Shortly afterwards it was decided he would be better off at Nok’s fathers house which lay in a picturesque rural setting several kilometers outside the village itself.

Even there, in that normally quiet location, word had spread quickly that the much reviled “drug driver” had arrived. He could hear the outraged voices of concern and outrage rising from the surrounding houses and sat at the back of the wooden dwelling, out of sight.

William was guilty of being drunk and stupid, but he was not in any way a “drug driver”. Those who so knowingly and deliberately generated this false story for their private gain, for revenge or to divert attention from their own wrong doings were as guilty of a crime as everyone else in the story.

But in this situation reality made no difference whatsoever. Not a single journalist ever rang him for his point of view; and he was happy enough to acknowledge that after such a sustained bender he was not looking his most credible best.

As dusk fell, as he suspected might happen, he was called into the village to speak to the district’s head of police. His life having fallen apart thanks to the determined efforts of his enemies in Bangkok and the network of Aek and his colleagues exploitation. He was taken driven into the police compound in the village, where beers were bought, and then began hours of negotiation and a good deal of sitting around waiting for an English interpreter, the local school teacher, to arrive.

The interpreter did not arrive for several hours. When he finally did arrive discussions began in earnest.

At last the police chief stood up, pointed out that the Mama San of X-Size had delivered ice to the door of William’s house and declared: “Whatever he is, he is no drug driver.”

But it was suggested that instead of returning to that house outside the village the authorities would much prefer if he stayed at a local hotel, indicating that it was nearby.

Far from being a few hundred meters down the road; they found themselves in a police vehicle being driven down an obscure set of obscure dirt back roads for more than 70 kilometers, to some sort of military compound. By this stage William had no idea where he was, hostage to circumstance.

There were a string of rooms within the compound and he was pointed towards one. When he turned around Nok had disappeared. He asked where he was, and was informed he had just gone off to the local shop to get cigarettes. He did not return, and by four am he started to worry. Maybe he had just gone off to party; but it wasn’t like him not to let him know what he was doing. Inquiries got him nowhere.

In the morning he found himself minus Aek, in a place which he did not even know the name of and dreading what would happen next in the increasingy bizarre series of events that had overtaken him.

Having given up on Nok, his questions over the location of a bus station or a taxi were met with unfriendly denials that any such thing existed.

Finally it turned out that as they had arrived at the compound Nok had been promptly arrested and taken to the local police compound. He found himself with sitting outside it with his weeping mother, his sister, the usual large gaggle of children and others from the village.

Finally they were let inside to see Nok. His head had been shaved so he looked like a monk and he was locked up, but otherwise he seemed alright. His apparent crime was to have had a fight with a Vietnamese boy in the village some year or two before.

Finally the head of the police district appeared, shook hands briefly with William and then promptly disappeared, leaving further negotiation to his underlings.

All of this had taken hours. Finally William found himself sitting in front of a bank of military officers and an interpreter, their arms crossed as they sat behind a line of desks.

How much are you prepared to pay to solve this problem? He was then asked.

One million kip he promptly replied.

No, 10,000 baht came the response.

OK, he said. Produced the money, handed it over discretely. Suddenly the tension in the air relaxed. An official read out some document which apparently absolved Nok of his alleged misdoings.

Then he stood up, shook hands politely with each of the officials, and they returned to where the family had gathered under a tree inside the compound. Nok was free to go. While Nok was warmly greeted, nobody bothered to thank him.

William spent an uncomfortable night in the dwelling which was part of Nok’s mother’s home. Some of the men of the village gathered and drank beer, at his expense as usual, and then Nok and he briefly settled under the covers of the hard floor. William dozed off for perhaps half an hour; woke up, discovered Nok missing along with all the money in his wallet and his Bangkok Bank ATM card. Nok and his mates, now loaded up with his cash, had, he learnt next morning, gone out for a grand old party with plenty of yabbah, beer and girls. It was a pretty poor thank you for the money he had spent getting him out of jail. Much of the rest of that lonely night he sat by the side of the road in that inhospitable village, waiting for the sun to come up, waiting for the opportunity to just get out of somewhere he had never wanted to be.

Something else he could thank the Bangkok operatives for.

CHAPTER FOUR:

LOHP LUHEN – TO DECEIVE

There would be many strange endings to what had already been a strange story.

A month or two before Aek had told him he was going back to work at

X-Size, the same place they had met almost a year before. The same place that happily supplied ice to customers and many of whose boys would test positive if they were tested. The same place he had complained to about Aek having tricked and stolen hundreds of thousands of baht from him. But they seemed perfectly happy to have him back.

For reasons that defied reason, on his first night back at X-Size William went back down to the Twilight Soi and bought him out of the bar for the standard four or five hundred baht fee and despite all the money that had been stolen from him later paid him 3,000 baht, well above the standard price.

Despite the amount of money that had been stolen from him and the tricks played upon him, there did remain some odd kind of affection between them, even if it was just for the pretend good times when they had lived at Silom Lofts. All the talk that Aek was sick of Bangkok and wanted to return to his home in Ratchidah where they would buy a house for his family and a house for themselves had long since disappeared, as had the plans to start various businesses together. Up up up Aek would say, suh, suh, strong, strong. But none of it was to be. All of it was fantasy. All of it a lie. But they had dinner on the rooftop of a nearby hotel, went back to the house, had sex upstairs just as they had once done, in virtually the identical manner; and then went out drinking at Hot Male. The plan, supposedly, considering the price he had paid was above the fee for a “short time”, had been for Aek to spend the night, although he had long got used to the fact that these plans were just lies. At about 2am, fed up with the constant refrain of “drug driver” and “buffalo” that surrounded him, William got up and left. He wasn’t sure where Aek was in the club, and later telephone contact confirmed he had gone back to X-Size, no doubt to pick up another customer. It was another piece of craziness in the dissolution of their “relationship”.

Why do you keep letting these people back into your life who do nothing but hurt you? One of his friends asked. It hurts just to watch you doing it.

I don’t know, William responded. I really don’t know. They can be very charming, charismatic, appealing. For some reason I just suspend belief, or believe they are the people I first thought they were.

He discovered why he couldn’t access the cable television stations, of which there were supposedly 80 channels or more, was that the money he had given to pay for it had been simply gone into Aek’s pocket. He never saw the notices or final notices for payment.

Aek supposedly took care of all of those things, and instead took care of nothing. So he discovered another 3,000 baht he had been ripped off for. Along with all the rest.

That same night Aek rang purportedly to give him his latest number, up to yet another trick of which he was not sure. You tahm nahm, work? Aek asked.

Because that day William had finally got onto the computer company and managed to cut him off the so-called Aek network, and therefore off his computer. Up until then he had often discovered Aek on his computer, and it had been all too easy to follow his every move, tricks he had learnt no doubt during the course William had paid for. Sometimes he would find up to half a dozen people or entities riding on his back, or his computer clogged with programs he had not put there.

Aek rang on 18 April 2011 to boast that he had a new falangs boyfriend, an Englishman called Alan, who was much better than he was. Who took him shopping. “Why you ring, to laugh at me?” Aek cackled. And continued his taunts. “Me dee jai, happy,” he declared. “He spend lots of money on me, new phone, everything. Tour England.”

So you can embarrass his friends and relatives like you embarrassed mine, he said. Good luck to him. How much are you going to steal from him? I hear you also have a Thai boyfriend. And how many other customers?”

“You want sex?” Aek asked and laughed.

“I love you mak mak, I miss you,” he mimicked the words Aek had used so often. “I love you mak mak. I miss you.”

Aek continued his taunts.

Then he lost it: “You really are the most vicious nastiest little queen I have ever met. The most dishonest person I have ever met. I can’t believe I ever cried over you. Good luck to the falang.”

It was yet another piece of pointless emotional cruelty, a juvenile and stupid phone call.

The call set off a cascade of emotions he could cheerfully lived without, and when he went out to the office to pay three months rent shortly afterwards and to look at what cars might be available, he was more emotional than he had intended to be. As he told the Captain of X-Size later in the day, he fervently hoped it would be the last he ever heard of him.

Of course it was not to be.

The next day Aek rang and asked if he wanted the car back. Yes, he said. You give me some money, me study now mak mak, kow chai, understand? You sad? he asked. You miss Aek? He didn’t answer that question. Perhaps Aek had already discerned that he had woken up crying because of the bugging and camera devices in the house; whatever the case, he couldn’t stop crying for most of the day. It was still early days and he was crashing in some cruel process.

The house was clean and clear, he was clean and clear, but the after shocks continued.

And then Aek came around, declaring he had made the whole story about the English boyfriend up, the captain at X-Size had spoken to him. He shrugged when William asked him why make up stories. And shortly afterwards they went off to have coffee at Starbucks in the office block nearby, at which point he discovered all the money missing out of his wallet and the new ATM card he had only picked up the day before missing. Baw and some friend of his were the only possible culprits.

Baw no good, Aek said, which was true enough. William got teary all over again and they sat outside Starbucks drinking their coffees. He had to go off to to see the psychologist in Sukhumvit, getting the timing wrong so that in the end they only talked for about 10 or 15 minutes and rescheduled for the next day. It was a long trip for nothing.

But Aek accompanied him for the trip, declaring he had a couple of days off school. And on their return Aek was insistent they go upstairs. His plan to send Baw out for food, proved unnecessary, as he was already passed out unconscious on the couch with a bottle of whisky in front of him. Aek must have been short of money, but these days he wasn’t paying anything like what he used to. His insistence that he would return later and spend the night and everything would be the same as before he did not believe; and it did not happen.

Aek rang about ten o’clock with some story about having to work at a hotel for five hours as a cleaner. As if. You have another customer, he stated, up to you. He didn’t care anymore, he really really didn’t. Lying came as naturally as breathing to some of these people; and he had finally got used to it.

The assurances that the car would come back he would also believe when it happened. Baw just laughed when he relayed Aek’s assurances that he didn’t have a Thai boyfriend, news passed on by Mr Tong.

Don’t fall in love, the woman at the office told him dogmatically; and it was better advice than some he had received.

There would be still more final endings. Aek rang up and asked if he was hungry; came around without food, declared he wanted to spend to the night; and they sat in the perfect garden lit by overheard lights.

Aek had declared that he would be back around five or six in the afternoon and in the process would return the car. William understood from radio reports and from other people that Aek had been interviewed by the police and instructed to return the vehicles he had so deftly tricked or stolen from him. As William understood it, Aek admitted to making up all the stories about him and admitted that he had pretended they would be living together in the future. While he might be regarded as a hero on the gay sois, the sight of such a well-known falung being so thoroughly cheated by at Thai rent boy was bad for the image of Thailand as a whole, and certainly bad for the already well tarnished image of the massive Thai sex industry.

Perhaps he had misunderstood the radio reports; in any case neither the car or the bike were ever returned.

Baw left the house, ostensibly to leave them time alone together.

But unexpectedly Baw, perhaps uncomfortable in his old environs, who would know the real story, rang shortly beforehand and then came back about 1.30am.

In response, Aek suddenly got dressed and despite his frequent declarations that he would spend the night, disappeared. William point blank refused to open the gate for him, because the firm arrangement had been for him to stay the night. So as Baw arrived, Aek departed in a panic, this time over a back fence, breaking a piece of a bench in his desperate rush to leave.

It didn’t make sense at the time, in the middle of the night; and he went back to bed feeling cheated, saddened, disappointed. But later it became obvious enough, with Baw around Aek could no longer so easily deceive him in the way he had once done.

He had learnt one thing, to trust no one. Not to expect sympathy or empathy. Not to rely on anyone. That everything in this deceptive land, the land of hungry ghosts, was not to be taken at face value. Believe only half of what you see and half of what you hear, Baw had lectured him sternly long ago, when a tired working looking working girl the two Baws he was then living with in the Plaza hotel had dragged home in the early hours complained that she had to go home to feed her child. It’s a trick, Baw had whispered sternly all those months ago on their way to the ATM, because some men pay more for the breast milk. You like a baby. You know nothing. Well, paying extra for a breast feeding prostitute was certainly a new one on him.

Yet another of the many peculiar endings to the story was one April afternoon just before the Songcran festival, where water flies everywhere and young men run around with their shirts off, when Aek as asked him if he was hungry and came around to visit.

It was following the day when he was supposedly going to move back in, something he knew would never happen and so did not take seriously. The phone never rang and he never bothered to ask why. He knew by now the false starts were always false starts; that the monitoring of his activities would always discount any return.

Aek looked healthier and fitter than he had for some time. He brought with him some simple rice and egg dish, as most people by now knew he was not very good at looking after himself and apart from breakfast at the street stalls down the road often enough would skip lunch and dinner unless he was with company.

Aek, through his constant talk in various medium, particularly radio, and by the distribution of the unflattering pictures of him smoking, had made his life in Bangkok more than difficult, and increasingly he stayed close to the house; avoiding the blizzard of negative comments and hostile glares that accompanied him where ever he went. “Go Home” was becoming a more frequent comment; and the mood between them immediately turned nasty after he made some comment that his life had become almost impossible, he couldn’t walk five feet without being ridiculed. You the hero for cheating the falung, he said.

Aek’s response, far from an apology, was to inform him, if he understood his Thai properly, that he had become the most unpopular foreigner in Thailand, was a marked man, that he was gow, old, didn’t have any children to look after anymore, didn’t have any boy living with him either, and pointed out as cruelly as he could that he was now alone in the large house.

With the humiliation of a recent cabaret show broadcast on television which ridiculed him mercilessly and made Aek out as the handsome hero still fresh in his mind; and worn down by the hostility that greeted him at almost every turn, well beyond the normal animosity that Thais often felt towards foreigners, he asked Aek if he was dee jai, happy, at seeing their relationship turned into a public spectacle.

Yes was the belligerent response, accompanied by a comment on how good the falang was that his friend had, a Dutch man living in Tahiti who appeared to have ample money to stay in the up-market hotels and various cities the Thai boys loved so much. A weekend shopping trip to Hong Kong was considered a status symbol. Personally, hating shopping at the best of times, he couldn’t have thought of anything worse.

I’m sure you think him much better than me, he said acidly. Above them the mango trees provided shade over what had once been a peaceful scene. There was nothing peaceful now about the feelings passing between them.

“Why did you come round, just to laugh at me?” he asked. “Just to ridicule me? Why? Why bother?”

Aek shook his head in a way which spoke little truth and declared: You many boys, which was not particularly true. The ones he did bring home in a drunken daze in the midst of the bender were almost invariably a waste of time and money. Nobody could get it up or get if off, they were all too whacked. You many customers, Wiliam replied. Sure, he said, shrugging as a boast that in his own way Aek was as popular or more popular with the customers than ever. Now he was famous in every disco and gay venue, talk- back show and television station in the country, demand no doubt had increased.

This interaction was in sharp contrast the humility Aek had once shown in such apparent gratitude at no longer having to work in the bar. Before I meet you I have nothing, now I am something, he would declare.

But on this day, when he suggested he should at least return the bike, Aek declared: I get everything. And laughed.

Aek dismissed his suggestion that they get the Thai English translation program working on the computer. Enough talking, he declared and he stood up dismissively.

I’m just going to the Seven to get some credit, I won’t be long, he declared, only a few short minutes after he had been arrived.

You can use the phone, he said, but Aek shook his head determinedly. And as he closed the gate William observed: “You’re not coming back, are you?” Aek shook his head, it was obvious enough.

Once again he asked the question, coming perhaps from resentment over the chaos that had overtaken his life and that he couldn’t even go out to his favorite places anymore, “Are you happy?”

“Yes,” Aek declared standing in a spiteful pose at the end of the soi; “I’m happy, I get everything, the car, the bike. And he should have added the gold, the camera, the computer, the parties, ample cash.

Aek disappeared, but then reappeared shortly afterwards at the corner gate, declaring, “You not the same as before, you ting tong, crazy, you old, you buffalo.”

“You are a liar, thief and a cheat, and you call yourself a Buddhist, William shouted back.

And inside his head he thought, what a vicious little queen you really are; and out loud, unkindly and unfairly said: “may all your customers be sadists”.

But why come around to boast that he had managed to trick him out of the bike and the car and so much else, that he had got “everything”. Why declare himself happy at his thievery? Why taunt him that he now lived alone in a big house? That he had become the most unpopular foreigner in Thailand?

Yet another strange ending involved Aek’s declaration that he was dying of brain disease and would probably be dead within the month: he was staying down with his family but could he come up to see him, for old time’s sake. You have AIDS, William stated, a claim vigorously denied.

But sympathy overtook him and they arranged to meet at Soi 4 off Silom, a soi featuring the gay pubs The Telegraph and The Balcony, where one could sit outside and watch the various goings on and where they had occasionally gone in those days back at Silom Lofts, when it was only a short walk away.

They ran into each other on the steps of the Sky Train; and indeed Aek did not look his usual healthy self. He had pimples and his skin was blotchy. He ran the story several times: you understand, I will be dead within the month unless the operation is a success. The family is taking care of me.

William expressed due sympathy; and it was arranged that they would hire the same taxi driver they had hired before for trips and head off down to his family home at Ratchibury; although he was later informed that even this was a lie and the place was called something else entirely. The plan was that they would go to his family home, where William would keep him company. Despite the number of his customers he was probably the only one who cared enough to pay for a taxi and drive more than 100 kilometers in sympathy at his supposed impending death.

Instead of heading to the family home, already spicy and easily recognizable thanks to all the false rumors that he was Thailand’s number one drug driver, they stayed at some remote hotel he guessed was about 20 kilometers from the family home. While Aek, supposedly sick, went straight to bed. Thanks to the beauties of Google Translation programs, which had only recently started to include the Thai language, he sat drinking with the taxi driver, with whom he got on well; and told him everything that had happened, just how much had been tricked and stolen from him.

In the morning Aek offered to score some yabbah, declaring it was easy

and safe to get in that area. So Aek set off supposedly to score all of two yabbah tablets. Within 15 minutes, all too quick to be plausible, Aek was on the phone crying and declaring that he had been busted by the police and they were demanding 25,000 baht or he would go to jail.

This, as only Aek would know, was the exact limit he could withdraw from his ATM card on any one day. “Kuhn lop luhen mak mak,” was William’s response. “You deceive very much.” Even if the story had been true, the police would never demand that amount of money from a Thai person; maybe 2,000 tops. He looked at the taxi driver and said the same thing, this is just another one of Aek’s tricks.

The driver agreed. One of Aek’s brothers or friends, a suspicious looking character you wouldn’t trust to walk your mother across the road, appeared with earnest protestations that the police had Aek and they needed the money now. Bullshit, was all he thought, looking at the character of the person delivering this message.

With word that the police were also going to come and examine the taxi, the driver declared: “We go back to Bangkok now.” And that is exactly what they did.

The driver did not relax until they were out of the province. And while William did not have the full fare when they returned to the Sathon house, the driver never came back to collect. It was one of the few signs of sympathy ever shown towards him over how much he had been deceived

That night he wandered by X-Size; and when asked if he had heard from Aek said, he reported that he had tried to extort 25,000 baht, nearly a thousand dollars, from him earlier that day. Yes, we heard about that, they said, as if it was a joke.

Somehow or other Aek experienced a remarkably rapid recovery from his supposedly terminal illness; laughing it off when William mentioned it later.

You go back to Australia, Aek advised him on more than one occasion. Thailand lop luhen mak mak, there is much deceit in Thailand. That much was true, certainly amongst his milieu.

One evil can keep away another, one life course negate another. After a succession of disastrous and sometimes messy people passing through the house, and one in particular attracting far too much attention, the outraged cries of “drug driver” echoing from the houses all around each time she left.

Nobody could care less what anyone else got up to in Australia, and he found it hard to adjust to Thai sensibilities; while the cretinous shrieking and ceaseless derogatory comments from the neighbours increasing his own disturbed state.

When he briefly let Baw move into the house William briefly thought he was doing the right thing. Baw was expressing determination to move on up in the world - and certainly to get away from that low class madness inducing drug called yabbah and the people who took it. And this included the ice queen he had become so entangled with.

Stupidly William thought: it's good for Baw living here; too many temptations and memories where he was. And he hated being in the large house on his own. As they say in the classics: do not enter your head alone, it is a dangerous place to be. These thoughts of good will to one of the city’s aging street boys would once again prove naïve, almost fatal.

The hurt kept compounding because the media never seemed to grow tired of the story. Asked later on radio how he viewed the relationship Aek replied: tahm nahm = work.

Sick of the cat cries of being a drug driver or looked down on as some ghastly form of life, a hastily organized trip to Issan, with Baw and a couple of Baw’s friends, they departed in a large hired van at around one in the morning so as to arrive at dawn. It had seemed like a good idea at the time: to get out of Bangkok, let things cool down.

But Issan, such a beautiful province in so many ways, was to turn into another nightmare, as he quickly discovered the ways and means by which Baw had betrayed him.

The news broke as they arrived in some small rural Issan town: there was a video of him smoking ice. And he promptly realized that the 3,000 baht Baw had taken to buy a gram of ice, over his protests that he wanted everything clean and clear, was nothing but a setup. William was sick of the trouble, sick of the danger, sick of the people involved, but Baw went off and scored anyway. Then he deliberately set him up in a corner of the house where Baw knew there was a camera.

As far as William was concerned, that was the final betrayal. Apart from that occasion, when it was clear he was protesting against the idea, he never touched that gram of ice. Meanwhile Baw remained as high as a kite for days while bad mouthing him, “singing a song”, to everyone he could think of, from the authorities to the media. While the police interviewed everybody else they did not interview him. The set up was too obvious. That night Baw and his friend Blah, charged up on the ice they had procured with his money, went off to karaoke; coming back in the early hours to boast about how many girls they had been through.

When he got back to Bangkok he prized open Baw’s well locked door, cleared it of any drug paraphernalia, tossed the pornography he had bought into the house, some it including young school girls, probably for the purposes of setting him up again; and removed the screw driver which had been turned into a simple but lethal weapon with cloth wound around one end of it as a handle so that it could easily be used to stab someone.

William had always thought from the minute Baw had arrived a week or ten days before that it was like having a viper living in the echo of a dream. He could not be trusted and he knew that perfectly well. His rationale had been that one evil could ward off another. It didn’t work out that way.

In the end Baw and Aek, once mortal enemies, colluded together in an attempt to destroy him; out of simple vindictiveness, a hatred for foreigners and in an attempt to destroy the evidence of their own crimes.

Their ultimately clumsy collusion was also no doubt an attempt to curry favor with the so-called mafia which owned and operated Bangkok’s go-go bars.

On a trip to Pattya with Baw and two of his friends; he found himself sitting next to some Russian mafia type at a table outside a gay bar when it had all simply become too much, Baw had already headed back to Bangkok on a mysterious and of course cash expensive mission he never understood; perhaps just another story within stories, who would ever know, nor did he care. So William was suddenly alone with the blizzard of hostility or stares wherever he went, the infamous “drug driver” who dared to walk the streets, although nobody seemed to be able to understand how he had got away with whatever it was he was supposed to have got away. “I don’t expect to see him again, should I say hello,” he heard one of them ask. He swallowed his beer rapidly and left, shortly afterwards catching a taxi back to Bangkok. And, it seemed, back into a sea of treachery and trouble. favor with those he had offended.

But while the house they ended up in, at the Karaoke girl’s family home where her two-year-old boy was being cared for, was set amongst picturesque farming country, all around he could still hear the same cries: geur, buffalo, falung ting tong. Baw’s double cross, as he arrogantly strutted around the house high on ice and ignored the contempt everyone else directed at him, just depressed him. William had been stupid enough to let him back into his life and back into the house on the conditions that this was a new beginning, clean and clear. He let Baw set himself up in the spare room and had given him 11,000 baht to get his motor cycle out of hock. The theory was that he didn’t want to be seen as some falang’s boyfriend or bum chum, even though they were not sleeping together. He wanted to work and having a bike would enable him to do so.

While he spent a lot of time staring at the picturesque fields, in the end he became so angry with Baw and his attitude he declared loudly:

“In my country we call people like you dogs.”

Baw’s response: “You want to die. You know I can kill you.”

Another death threat. He was starting to get used to them.

When he discovered the hard copy of what he was working on missing from his bag he finally had had enough. He tossed Baw’s clothes around carelessly as he searched for the missing manuscript; the boys sleeping the sleep of the sexually satiated, which he was most certainly not, as he tried to find the things they had stolen from him.

Then he sought the help of some neighbors; and headed back to Bangkok.

On that first day back in Bangkok, when Aek came around and they had spent the day together, including heading off to Pantip Plaza together to get a new chord for his computer having the lost the last one in his rapid departure from Issan.

The last time William saw Aek, in early May 2011, he denied the accusations he had heard on radio that Aek had been caught out on video climbing over the fence and attempting to plant yabba in the house. His neighbor confirmed the story. But no fool like an old fool, beguiled once more by the charm he could turn on so well, they spent much of the day together; and he agreed to Aek's suggestion that they buy a bottle of whisky, that soon enough things would be exactly the same as before.

Aek’s invasion of his house in attempt to plant drugs, all caught on video, happened within hours of their depature for Issan in the middle of the night, and required obvious cooperation between him and Baw.

Baw rang Aek while they were at the Plaza, declaring he was outside the house. There by now having been one betrayal too many, William told Baw to piss off in no uncertain terms. He had already tossed most of Baw’s possessions, including his pornographic CDs, some of which consisted of under-age school girls and were probably yet another this time particularly implausible attempt to set him up for blackmail – because by now half of Bangkok seemed to know perfectly well that he liked handsome Thai men in their twenties; and occasionally he liked women as well. He also threw out of the house and into the garbage Baw’s drug paraphernalia – all William’s demands that the house be kept clean and clear having been dutifully ignored. William’s plan was that he would keep Baw’s bike until he paid him back the 11,000 baht he had just given him to get it out of hock. Baw insisted he did not want people to think he was some falang’s boyfriend and if he had the bike he could get off to a new start working around the neighborhood.

So many stories, so little truth, to parody the old disco line, so many men, so little time.

Instead of leaving or waiting for their return Baw broke the lock on the front gate and took the bike; another bike he had paid for disappearing outside the same gates. He was later to discover one of the windows unlocked; and that Baw had also broken in and taken his passport as well as the memory card from his computer. In any other country it would be called “breaking and entering” and be completely illegal. A few days later there was a soft, confused call from Baw about the memory card; he assumed it was another attempt at blackmail but he couldn’t think what could be all that incriminating, people already having done their worst. Maybe I give it to Aek, he said, confirming they were now in some kind of partnership. After everything else that had happened, after being ludicrously labeled Thailand’s number one drug driver, he just shrugged it off. Do your damndest, he thought. You people have already wasted ridiculous amounts of government and private resources on lies to cover your own crimes, to blacken his name and destroy his credibility.

In the process of clearing out what had so briefly been Baw’s room he also found a screw driver which had been turned into a very effective weapon by cloth being wound around it at one end to form a handle, and a large knife he had never seen before.

Snake in the nest – or “viper living in the echo of a dream” as he so romantically described it - wasn’t even the beginning of what he had allowed back into his house.

Well they might have been living separately for a while now, but the work continued. Aek rang him in Issan supposedly expressing concern at his apparent disappearance and pleading with him to return so things could be the way they were before. Yeh well by now he had heard that story a dozen times; and although tearful he gazed across the beautiful Issan farmland, he wasn’t about to rush back into the arms of an illusion. When he told Baw about the phone call he just laughed: “He wants to kill you.”

But on that afternoon after his return from Issaan, they sat in the garden which had once seemed so perfect and drank a bottle whisky together; and they joked with each other and talked about many things. Joking, he used that favorite Pakistani expression: “I fuck you so hard you never walk again. I want to get money’s worth. After all you take.” Aek laughed.

Around midnight he woke he discovered Aek moving about the bedroom. And when William got up to follow him downstairs he discovered a credit card lying on the floor and his wallet in disarray. Aek had just stolen around 12,000 baht. Later he was to find his passport missing and the sim cards gone from his phone. He got dressed and went straight down to X-Size to complain. He not answer his phone, the Captain said, taking, as usual, no responsibility for the boy they had recommended. And not much later William’s mother was to tell him that the only thing missing from her house after Aek’s visit a few months before, a visit which as a staunch Christian utterly opposed to homosexual relationships had upset her so much, was a folder which included details of his will. His mother kept meticulous records and this theft, amongst so many others, fitted too neatly into a pattern to be coincidence. It was yet another example of the abuse and contempt Aek showed towards those Australians who had shown him such hospitality and had done their best to make him feel at home.

One of the last phone call he received from him, early one morning, was short and to the point: “Meeeoowww”, he said, imitating a cat; and then hung up. He could have done the right thing; apologized for stealing so much from him and telling so many lies about him, but that, of course, would be expecting too much. During the very last phone call he taunted him that his new boy friend who was “lawh mak mak”, very handsome, that Aek let him fuck him, a “privilege” always denied him, apart from on their very first night, in their more than ordinary sexual relationships. Aek’s performance, for which he would always expect or demand several thousand baht, consisted, eyes firmly shut, of a to-the-stroke virtually identical 90 second to two minute “wank” over which William was meant to get excited enough to come on top of him. All this was followed immediately by Aek’s almost cries of “tissue, tissue” and a rapid dash to the bathroom to clean up.

This was no different, or even less, than the performance one got for 500 baht from any massage boy. As long as there was a tip involved, they were happy enough to let you watch them masturbate; but usually weren’t all that keen on you touching them. At first he thought all this, so different to the wild times of yore, was just something to do with sex and Thai men. Later another working boy explained it to him in more graphic detail. Or as an elderly gay friend of his put it: “I wouldn’t sleep with me darling. That’s why we’re paying them.” Oprah put it yet another way: “He’s just not that into you.”

Aek told William how old and ugly while the new boyfriend was young and very good looking and was greatly enjoying the car, the motor bike and the computer William had bought. And no, he had no intention of returning any of the 12,000 baht he had stolen only a few days before, or any of the other money he had stolen, or anything at all. He laughed and sang little ditties as he relayed just how handsome his new boyfriend was; how good the sex was between them and how much his new boyfriend enjoyed all the things he had bought. They were cruel, pointless and juvenile taunts.

One day dear, you, too, will grow old; and you too may make a fool of yourself, in or out of love.

They would all be gone soon enough, the car, the money, the boyfriend, the good looks. His ravenous family would make sure of that. And time is rarely f ever as kind as the young like to think. Our paths are rarely straight. The golden future becomes the murky present all too quickly.

Why on earth had he been such a fool. What did he expect, picking someone up off a cat walk; that they're going to love you for you?

In almost parallel endings, the last time he saw Baw, following several phone calls taunting him over his missing passport and finally admitting to being the one who had stolen it, was on Saturday May 6 2011. The passport was already too old to use and he had acquired a new one through the Australian Embassy, but nonetheless carried entry stamps and visas. Its theft would have required a trip to a police station and the Department of Immigration, both tedious chores. He came around with a smirking Blah, the boy whose name was exactly the same as the Thai word for fish and who had pretended to be physically affectionate to him during the Issan period; while spending his money with Baw at karaoke clubs, taking him for a fool as they had always done.

But this time, with guests in the house, he was not alone; not so frightened. Want some ice, they asked, smirking at him as they waved a packet through the gate grill, “we have”.

“Piss off,” he shouted. They didn't get the 10,000 baht they were demanding for the return of his passport. Even Baw must have realized stealing a passport was so completely illegal it put him at risk, not the falang. The Russian girls now in residence weren’t putting up with any shit from these two smarmy street boys; and handed them a wad of notes which barely topped 1,000 baht, grabbing the passport in the exchange. When he raised an eyebrow in concern just before the exchange the other assured him: “Don’t worry, she’s a professional.”

So he had his passport back; and now was free to leave the country at any point.

After a night with Baw getting pissed at Soi Twilight, one of those nights when they just wanted to be out on the town, he made one final visit to Night Boys. While he had sometimes fantasized about smashing a bottle of whisky in Tong’s face, he had been so integrally involved in deceiving and stealing from him, it was not the sort of fantasy he was inclined to carry out in practice. But ostensibly to kill time until the discos opened they decided to go and wander by, just to make them feel uncomfortable, something to do. They couldn’t shoot him in broad daylight, much as they might like to. Mr Tong was the protector of Aek, his adjahn, his teacher, and he was the one who had taught Aek all the tricks on the how to cheat the falung.

They ordered two Singha beers and almost immediately at the sight of his smug, round, lying deceitful face he lost it; throwing a beer in his face. He didn’t care about consequences anymore. He had just had it. For the beer in the face trick he was immediately attacked with Tong, towards whom he had often been generous with tips, drinks and dinners, kicking out and kicking out at him.

Realizing they were vastly outnumbered, he made a quick exit on the back of Baw’s bike. As they left, Tong was demanding money for the two beers. No, he replied. After all the hundreds of thousands of baht you bastards steal from me. Not to mention the 10,000 baht one of his young men had stolen from his wallet only a few weeks before. His response when confronted with the theft was to claim it was a tip. As usual, Night Boys took no responsibility for the theft, and no attempt to repay it.

As far as William was concerned the bar should have been shut down long ago; everybody is entitled to their view. If Thailand wanted to protect such bars then that was up to them.

There was blood streaming down the side of his face when they arrived home. Typical scratch from a typical cat, one could say.

In the following weeks every club he went to echoed with songs celebrating Aek and repeating again and again, buffalo die, buffalo die.

Sometimes he was stared at with curiosity as word would travel rapidly that “Aek’s buffalo” was in the room. If they wanted to insult him they would say “Kow Jai Aek”, “Understand Aek”, loudly enough for him to hear. Others thought they might as well see if there were any pickings left.

After having stolen 12,000 baht from him on his last visit along, it would appear, with the memory card from the computer, apart from the boasts about his new handsome boyfriend, the great sex and their joint enjoyment of the car, motor cycle and computer he had paid for, he wasn’t to hear much of Aek. Except when he went to a disco; where almost every single song seemed to celebrate him in one way or another. Perhaps it was partly his imagination, more likely it was the clever mixing of the DJs. Whatever it was, it was impossible to escape the sound of his name being chanted over and over and over again. He tried his best, but it didn’t make for a great night out.

Baw, on the other hand, was more persistent; and must have run out of money. On the Monday he rang a good five times, finally reporting that he was down at Hot Male on Soi Twilight; come down and say hello. In the end he took his Russian friends and did exactly that; and they sat at an outside bar on Soi Twilight with Baw and Blah. The soi was quieter than normal and the bars shut early, there again being some sort of government crackdown. The licensing laws in Bangkok were bizarre for a city of its size and international nature.

He had been working hard and stuck at home for days, and so was in no rush to go home. Before long the soi was almost empty; while sleepless they ended up once again at Swing, that club for stop outs which didn’t open until four in the morning and attracted an interesting crowd. All night Baw had looked particularly depressed and on a number of occasions he asked him what the problem was.

Finally William joked to the girls, who already had a poor impression of him from the passport incident a few days before, that Baw couldn’t make up his mind whether he would make more money out of killing me or being loyal. Baw looked at him but did not laugh. William had heard there was a price on his head.

Baw and he played pool and shared a bottle of Jim Beam at Swing, one of the few clubs in town for the late night crowd. It opened at 4am. When William refused to hand over a thousand baht at the end of the night, having already provided free drinks for the night and now being more obliged to watch his pennies than he once had. A thousand baht for what, exactly? And having frozen all his electronic banking for fear of interference by those he believed were tracking his every key stroke through a Trojan virus or some such similar mechanism, Baw became belligerent. They had only just finished watching a fight where a drunken woman had to be forcibly dragged from the dance floor, and the Russian girls made it immediately clear there wasn’t going be any nonsense, this evening or any other. All night Baw had kept trying to lure him back to his room in Ratchida with offers of ice, blandishments he ignored. I don’t trust you anymore, he said. To be friends requires loyalty and it’s probably just another set up. Baw took none of this well.

Watch your house, he spat menacingly as he left the club.

The disco featured song after song celebrating the triumph of Aek and the idiocy of the buffalo who cried. Alright, alright, he felt like shouting to Aek, to both of them, to all of them, you win. You took everything and you gave back nothing, you were neither generous in the bedroom, in friendship or in the heart; and you win.

There wasn’t going to be a good ending to this story. It had already ended badly. Life in Bangkok, indeed in Thailand, had become impossible due both to his own mistakes and idiotic behavior and to the vindictiveness of the boys William should have known better than to have anything to do with; and probably wouldn't have if he hadn't been so lonely or sick in the head or picked up that first drink. In the end he came to see Aek and Baw as the same low class person, cheaters, liars and thieves. He understood all too well how utterly they had betrayed his generosity. The good times weren’t worth the bad. There wasn’t a shimmer of gratitude for the money he had wasted on either of them. If the public, or sections of the public, wanted to see either of them as heroes, that was their business. He hoped that in the end the Buddha would provide them with enough compassion and wisdom not to do to others what they had done to him, not to viciously attack and undermine in every possible way a foreigner just because they were flawed, old, foolish or stupidly kind. He thought about Nepal, a cosy cottage in Khatmandu or soul cleansing walks through the Himalayas. Anywhere but Bangkok, where he no longer felt safe walking the streets. Where the bars he had once loved had become dangerous places full of vindictive glares; and others where Aek had warned all the boys not to sleep with him, that he was old, ugly, smelt, had no power; while some of the most malicious captains of that rotten to the core industry had pilloried everything about him. Ironically, it would have been so much easier just to have done the right thing.

William had already been made to look the fool, his heart torn to pieces by those he had trusted, betrayed by those towards whom he had shown kindness and generosity, ridiculed and humiliated by the baying of the mob and while on the mend, still bleeding from self-inflicted wounds from one of the worst benders of his life.

It was time to find a different truth, to remember that tomorrow is another day. To start again. He was reaching the point he had reached with London in the 1980s, he didn’t care if he never saw Bangkok again.

ENDS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

After majoring in philosophy and anthropology at university John Stapleton did his post-graduate thesis for a Diploma in Social Sciences on the subject of gay bars. As a young man he travelled widely as a result of free air fares through his father’s job as a Qantas captain. He then wrote for a wide variety of Australian publications on a freelance basis, including The Bulletin and The Financial Review, before joining the staff of The Sydney Morning Herald in the mid 1980s, following the publication of his first front page story while working as a casual. At that time the SMH was regarded as one of the world’s top 20 newspapers.

While writing since childhood, he experienced his first success in 1972 as co-winner of the Adelaide Arts Festival’s Short Story Competition. His play The Police Commissioner’s Grandmother was also performed in that city.

As a general news reporter in Sydney John Stapleton covered literally thousands of stories, from the funerals of bikies, children and dignitaries to fires, floods, droughts, from the demonstrations of inner-city worthies concerned over the plight of refugees to the sad and pointless deaths of youth in the city’s poverty stricken housing estates.

He spent the last 15 years of his journalistic career, until 2009, working as a general news reporter on the country’s national newspaper The Australian.

John Stapleton is the very proud father of two children, who are both now attending university in Sydney. His son is studying medicine and his daughter is studying commerce.

His articles and fiction have also
appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies over the years, including the books Men Love Sex, Australian Politics and Writers in the Park.

His book about Sydney life in the 1980s The Lure Of The Illicit, previously only given narrow distribution, will be re-published shortly.

In 2000 he joined a group of small group of separated dads at the community radio station 2GLF in western Sydney as a volunteer, thereby helping to found Dads On The Air, now the world’s longest running and most famous radio program dedicated to issues concerning fathers. The fact the show continues to prosper without him and has attracted a talented team of contributors is one of his proudest achievements.

Stapleton’s last book, Chaos At The Crossroads: Family Law Reform in Australia, published in December 2010, is readily available for download in all major electronic bookstores including Amazon and Barnes and Noble and in all major formats, including IPad and Kindle. An interview with the author can be found in the December 2010 archives at www.dadsontheair.net. An article on the book can also be found at Australia’s most prestigious intellectual and culturally focused website: www.onlineopinion.com.au

His interview about the founding of Dads On The Air can be found in the August 2010 archives.

He is currently living in Bangkok.

Days Volume Three

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Draft The Twilight Soi 81,358 Words and Rising