Playing Poker Without Money...

There's a cafe here in Chiang Mai where I go for breakfast sometimes. They have a guest house upstairs and get a lot of alt travelers - many of them Europeans traversing great distances across Asia or up from Oz, riding massive, off-road style motorcycles.
A very friendly and attractive 30ish German couple called Franz and Marie were in town for a couple days. They were open and matter-of-fact about the purpose of their journey - to expand Marie's sexual horizons by soliciting the services of European beach boys hanging around the fleshpots of south Thailand. Why they didn't just fly there is a mystery but maybe the anticipation was part of the thrill -  or perhaps they'd been getting her serviced all the way across Asia - that was never made clear.
Anyway, I was sitting nearby and caught a few of their Skype interviews with prospective service providers. One of them was a clean and healthy looking young guy who sounded Eastern European. He'd sent them a full CV with stills and videos. This Marie woman was loud and enthusiastic about meeting him. Her husband, Franz, smiled and nodded indulgently. He was the videographer for their project and was even now taping her conversation with the young dude on the hotseat. She giggled and said she wanted to see his package, both at rest and while in heat - but not right that moment - later, when they were in private. Michael Houellebecq would be proud.
Word has it the Eastern European kid is part of a growing trend of white beach boys who have migrated to southeast Asia's hotspots cuz that's where the affluent female sex tourist is going these days. These young studs supposedly don't do men, which is a major selling point on the STD front.
But these two Germans, with their cheery and well-adjusted outlook, they were fucking depressing. While talking to her prospective sex toy, the wife was so happily forthright about her exact demands you'd have thought she was hiring a decorator. She and her husband seemed desperate for the whole world to know just how cutting edge they really are. Man, it had to be one of the squarest acts I've seen in ages - an e-bay driven cock-on-demand vacation full of orgasmic awakenings.
A couple days later they were gone, riding their big BMW south toward Phuket and environs, itinerary already planned to a tee - equipment required, candidates to be test-driven, positions to be tried, all culminating in a four-on-one smorgasbord, the whole deal videoed and professionally edited then posted on some swingers site or other. Want to see our holiday slideshow?
Hey, more power to them if that's how they roll and in a way I'm kind of envious. I'm too old to get up the suspension of disbelief needed for that sort of healthy, holistic, arms-length sport-fucking. It's become tough to stay interested if it's not an emotionally convoluted personal involvement that might really fuck up our lives whether we're careful or not. Without that - it's like playing poker without money.

Coming attractions...The Witch's Belt + other Thracian Tales

The new thing I'm working on is a manuscript called The Witch's Belt and other Thracian Tales.
It's my 'roots' book, back to the land of my forebears, Thrace. It's a region in southeastern Europe, made up of northeastern Greece, southeastern Bulgaria and Turkey-in-Europe.
The premise is wildly romantic - and also happens to be true - I think. I began going there, to my parents' ancestral homes on the Greek-Turkish border when I was just a kid. I spent a lot of spring/summer/fall seasons rampaging about among the villages and farms and foothills of the Rhodope mountains, just tearing the place up with other wild children of those flinty, hard-nosed peasants.
When I was 15, during my fifth or sixth trip, I spent about three weeks in a city called Dedahgatch,(Alexandroupolis in Greek) down on Thrace's Aegean coast. I'd stayed with an old girlfriend of my mother's and her family. They had another visitor as well. A 14 year old girl named Andromache, whose parents had gone away for a while. Everyone called her Androula. She was tall and lean and blond, green-eyed, quiet, sensitive, very smart - and a bookworm. My perfect type, in other words.
Androula taught me to read more advanced Greek and I taught her some English.We spent a lot of time wandering along the Aegean beach, talking and just laying around in the sand or in the tall grass. I remember the beaches and hillsides as fairly empty but that doesn't make a lot of sense during summer. We found an abandoned old fishing boat that became our secret consummation hang-out, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. We swam naked in turquoise watered coves and dried off on giant gray rocks. No shit. Exactly like the fucking postcards. Exactly Like I said, it was dead romantic.
After we'd parted, I sent Androula some letters but never got a reply. I was back there two years later and here's the killer - nobody knew anything about her. The family I'd stayed with didn't recall any girl called Andromache. Her house wasn't far but when I went there, some other people answered the door, claiming they'd always lived there and I must be mistaken.
Over the next many years I was in Thrace several times and I'd look for her but without saying much since I didn't want to become known as some sort of unrequited lunatic. So The Witch's Belt and other Thracian Tales runs on that fuel - the protagonist goes to Thrace to look for her - and she'd have been a 34 year old woman by that point. He tries to obliquely follow up some rumors and while doing so runs into various unexpected developments - ie: those goddamn witches.
That's the other intertwining thread running through the manuscript - tales of witchery and good and bad magic, oral histories I picked up from various and sundry natives. A great many of their stories are based on pre-Christian beliefs which were never quite wiped out in that region. From what I gather, a lot of people -well, women for the most part - continue to practice and pass down what's really just high attuned homeopathy. These so-called 'witches' look like your average Balkan village housewife and act more as midwives, healers and arbitrators. What they do is really the original and unaltered form of homeopathy, something that's practiced all over the world, as it has been for countless generations. Of course, the flip side is they can also be deadly as a cobra if crossed, and have been known to poison the odd troublemaker.
The other part of The Witch's Belt is that since I'm the one writing the thing, there are some fairly explicitly described personal involvements. It's not exactly a hang up of mine but close. Or maybe it's more to do with the idea that physical involvement is just another form of communication, and not separate from the head or the heart.
What the eventual published novel will be it's hard to say since my usual m.o. is to work on the how and hope the what and why eventually reveal themselves.
I'm trying to work things out to visit Thrace this summer or fall and do some additional research, maybe even put a few ghosts to rest. We'll see what the good witches have to say...

Of Hoistings + Petards

Being here in Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand, has been nothing but good for me. I showed up last fall pretty much a ruin, physically and otherwise and despite being cynical about holistic treatments, some friends encouraged me to try them out. As one colleague said; Hey, how bad can it be?

Of course all the treatments worked wonders; Acupuncture, Reki, essential oils, acupressure and all the rest. I thought I was unique but I’ve run across a lot of burned out White folks who’ve undergone the Thailand miracle. You come here, groove on the goodness of the place and things become pretty damn peachy. Tough to feel down on a nice sunny day in Chiang Mai.

But one area that’s definitely a minefield is the whole White Dude/Thai Woman formula. Usually it’s a recipe for disaster – or at least hubris.

When I first arrived, I met some Europeans who’d been in Thailand for decades and had made it their home, settling here and raising children. One of these guys, very successful in finance, began to tell me about the infamous Thai Trap.

“Okay, you have your Older White guy from the UK, Oz, Canada, wherever – The West. With an average pension and his other assets he’s nobody back home, an old fool. He’s also sick to death of loud, pushy, demanding White women – the kind that become his boss and turn his life to shit. So he comes here and the value of his money turns into ten times what it is back in the old country. He finds a ‘nice’ Thai female – usually a few decades younger than him. She’ll be traditional and a good girl and have sex with him whenever he wants. The guy’s in heaven, right?  Well… not so fast… She’s got a big family behind her and they start tapping into our stupid White friend, demanding he pay for all kinds. Many of them refuse to pay up and get into trouble with the Thai wife’s relatives. He ends up shocked and bitter he could have been used so easily and runs back to where he came from...”

This Euro guy who was warning me about this trap stopped suddenly and grinned. “It happened to me too,” he confided. “I was here twenty years and always thought; 'Me and a Thai woman? Never. They just don’t do it for me.' But I guess I had to know what all the fuss was about and got myself a Thai girlfriend. Everything I told you that’d happen to the stupid White Dude? Me too. I fell for the same trap – and with both eyes open.”

My new pal paused and shook his head as if to recall a very narrow escape. “My wife wasn’t too impressed with me pulling this mid-life crisis shit and fucking up our marriage. I cut off the Thai girlfriend and just managed to get in the backdoor before my wife called the lawyers. Stupid of me? Oh yes. I’m the stupidest old White Dude of them all but I still had to know what the big deal is." He stopped in mid drink and looked at me. "You want to know what the big deal is: There isn’t one. The Thai wife becomes like every other wife once she’s used to you. No big mystery. Just life going on. It’s basically a racist kind of thing and I thought I was smarter than that.” He pours me another big shot and himself a bigger one. “I guess I’m not as smart as I thought.”

Book Launch Memories: She Deserves It

Recently, I was going through some old files and ran across a book launch review I wrote a couple years ago. It was an event that took place in Toronto. A cold and rainy evening, end of March or so. A few months prior I’d been introduced to a writer named Philip Quinn. Seemed like a decent sort. He’d been commissioned to write some prose and poetry about Toronto’s transit system and it was good stuff.

The launch I went to was for his new novel, The Skeleton Dance - something to do with 'bikers' and 'drugs' - subject about which he obviously knew very little but that's never stopped anybody before so whatevs. It was published by a small press called Anvil. I wanted to check out the local lit scene, such as it was, and figured I’d support the guy. The launch was held at a restored Victorian era firehouse that was now the Arts & Letters Club. The name got me a bit worried but, hey, let’s give it chance.                                                                                                 

Looking to do this Philip guy a solid and always enjoying a high-quality entourage, I brought along four friends. Too bad our group of five made up one third of everyone there, including the host and the bartender. The atmosphere was quiet and reverential – couldn’t be much else.
There was some polite pre-event banter over low-grade Canadian wine and sparkling water. Philip told me the disappointing turn-out was due to a marketing snafu. The Anvil brain trust had admitted to him “they don’t know how.” Great. Off to a flying start.

There was another writer launching a novel that night as well – Dennis E. Bolen and his book was called Kaspoit. He said it's a reference to the sound a beer can makes when opened. Not the ptshhh or pssss you might have thought. Bolen kicked off the proceedings by reading from his new work while an assistant operated a laptop that emitted an audio track of distorted voices, squeaks and burps. It reminded me of those high school classes eons ago when a socially awkward, acne-plagued young man from the A/V department would roll in an overhead projector and help the teacher show out-of-focus transparencies on a dim screen.

Putting aside whether the writing was any good or not, the most memorable part of the readings was that both authors began with scenes featuring the murder, rape and/or torture and/or sexual mutilation of live and/or dead women. It was pretty embarrassing to hear them rattle on like this since both writers were revealing a helluva lot more about their own pathologies than anything else. But they’re not alone. This seems to be a common trend lately among middle-aged male authors and aspiring middle-aged male authors.

Prior to the night question, I’d had the misfortune of spending the past year or so doing the odd bit of 'vetting' for a middling publisher and reading a mountain of unsolicited manuscripts. Many were submitted by the aforementioned aspiring middle aged male authors. The regularity with which these guys immediately launched into the rape/torture/mutilation/murder, etc of a woman or women, both living and dead, prompted one editor I know to declare it a new genre. In addition to Westerns, techno-thrillers, whodunits and so forth, my editor friend said there ought to be a new genre called She Deserves It.

If you talk to Bolen or Quinn, you’ll find they are very nice, polite, good and gentle Canadians. These guys would be appalled at getting a parking ticket. I'm certain they don’t beat their pets or abuse their partners or their offspring. I think it can also be safely assumed that neither has a committed any seriously violent act or been accused of any felonies. So what’s the fuck’s the deal? Are they simply indulging in revenge fantasies because they never got laid in high school? They're certainly not delving into the deeper philosophical questions surrounding what's considered 'aberrant behavior.' Perhaps they’re just exercising their right to artistic freedom.

Possible, but like somebody very smart once said: Your writing will reveal you – whether you intend it or not. Both these novelists and their gore-soaked fantasies made me think of that modern archetype - the angry young techno-feeb, driven mad because the computer has not delivered the visceral power over women's bodies he has long dreamed of. After hours and hours of the internet being unable to satisfy his hellish sexual frustration, he gets to thinking: ‘I’ll show them how dark I really am. I’ll write something so gross and so disgusting and so violent, it’ll be grosser and disgustinger and violenter than all the other gross and disgusting and violent stuff out there put together! Just watch me!’

In other words, that stupid adolescent male urge to make all the girls go “Eeewwww! Gross!” taken to the nth degree when some pea-brained publisher invests enough time and money to endow it with the aegis of “art.” But, I must say, there is one redeeming quality in all this. Both of these books sure do have nice covers.

After a few minutes of listening to Dennis and Phil jack off like this, me and a couple of the people I’d brought along went out in the hall to drink and fraternize. In other words, we had to make our own fun.

My friend Juana had spent some considerable time working as a dominatrix and she wasn’t impressed. “I’d break these boys in no time flat. And it’d do them a world of good.”

“They don’t have that kind of coin.”

She thought about that for a moment or two. “No... but I might do a short freebie, just to give them a taste of the seeing the light.”

“Well, if that didn’t motivate them to go out and make some serious money, nothing would.”

“And they’d be so happy serving me, being given proper instructions and guidelines. Their lives would begin to make sense.”

“You’re preaching to the choir, darlin. Anyway, it’s a nice sentiment and I know you’re a goddamn saint but it would be way too much work. Fuck, lady, each guy would take you years to dismantle and rebuild with any serious foundation.”

She frowned and swallowed the last of her wine. “Yeah, I know... But it’s hard not to feel sorry for them, so stupid and lost.” She looked away, eyes welling up a tiny bit. I handed her my half-full glass and put my arm around her shoulders.

“You can’t help everybody, Juana. You’re just one woman.”

She nodded vaguely, took a sip of wine and looked back into the main room. “It’s just so fucking sad…”

fiction/short story: THINGS WERE LOOKING UP...

I know I can go kind of nuts once in a while but I've got a psych file thicker than a Greater Toronto phone book. A common problem was I'd end up personally involved with some of my shrinks - women mostly. They seemed bored as hell and would sit there, sigh and look at their laptop or clipboard, yawn and ask these dumb, clinically derived questions. It was always "On a scale of 1 to 10, do you-"

I'd say, "Just put down 10 for everything."

That would make them look up and sometimes frown and sometimes smile and I'd say, "What do you do for kicks?"

"Pardon me?" or "What?" was the usual response.

"You heard me, what do you do for fun - to get all this work off your mind. I mean, you look like you work really hard."

"I do?"

"Yeah, you do. You seem like your brain's constantly working hard. How do you shut it off?"

Mostly, I'd get one of two replies: "We're not here to discuss me" or they'd kind of look around vaguely and say, "Well... I take walks..." or "I like to read" or something equally benign. None ever said, "Since I am not only a psychiatrist but a licensed physician and have access to a wide array of powerful narcotics and other interesting drugs, usually given to me as free samples by salespeople from large pharmaceuticals, I spend weekends high as a kite. Care to join me?"

No, none of these brilliant, beautiful, sensitive and often witty women ever said that to me. But I did once have a methadone doctor/girlfriend who exclusively dated her patients - but older, more established users, guys who'd proven their mettle over many years. God only knows where you find the money. Selling the stuff, sure, but that's never enough. All that profit, if you can actually make a profit, gets plowed back into your own use. You still need money for food, rent, clothes, girlfriends, vehicles, whatever. So you've got to steal it, scam it, work a straight job or do your own thing. I think that's why so many users are tradesmen. With so much tax and red-tape these days, your average plumber, electrician, motorcycle mechanic and so on will want to get paid in cash and with all that cash in hand, they can use and work long hours in relative peace.

It also helps to have a serious Triple-A connection. I was lucky enough to run across just that sort of thing after the army guys began returning from Afghanistan. I'd drive out to Camp Borden, north of Toronto, and deal with this Army Captain. He'd set up a regular pipeline of some really earthy Afghani stuff. It was so earthy, so uncut and so unpharmed the smell would hit you right in the gut - a kind of nausea that felt good and sentimental, like remembering a long lost lover, their sweet body in your hands.

I ran into Captain at a car accident near my house. I thought it was him who’d been driving but he was in his dress uniform and took it upon himself to get a hold of the situation after three cars piled up outside a supermarket parking lot. All three drivers spoke different languages and couldn't communicate. All three automatically deferred to him and his dress uniform.

I was walking by and said, "What happened?"

He looked at me, saw I was street and relaxed a bit. "These morons couldn't drive a donkey let alone these full-sized pickups they let them buy."

"Everybody okay?"

"One head injury, non-bleeder. Ambulance on the way." He put his phone in his breast pocket.

"Where are those medals from?"

"Afghanistan," Captain replied and took a closer look at me. "You know a wop guy from Saint Clair West, Frank maybe?" He held up a palm of admission. "I'm half wop myself."

He was asking about me but I played it back the traditional way. "Yeah, I know him."

"Uh huh..." he said and came an inch or two closer. He bore a close resemblance to a pool shark with a big rep at a Porkchop bar at Saint Clair West and Oakwood, a dump called The Verona.

"So how was it over there?"

"Fan-fucking-tastic. You get to take on the Varsity, see if all your training and equipment means fuck all."

"How'd you guys do?"

"Not bad. Those Afghans are tough motherfuckers. They can live on fucking rock dust. We lost some guys to IEDs an shit but overall we did okay." He inclined his head toward me slightly. "Thing is, man, if those Taliboners were equipped like us, with our comms, we'd have been fuckin' toast. Good thing they're fairly shit on vehicle and weapons maintenance."

"You going back?"

He grimaced. "I wish. With my rank and combat pay, I cost too much. So they send kids over - fucking reservists." He turned and spit, as if to be sure he got that word right out of his mouth.

"So... uh... I hear the brown’s pretty sweet."

Captain grinned like an old shark seeing a chicken wander in wearing shiny pointy shoes. "Yeah, so I hear..."

"A lot of guys get hung up?"

"Some..."

He was supposed to be a user himself, from way back. Funny we'd never really talked before, hanging around the same area and so on, but he was a few years younger than me and worked a different crowd - less sidewalk, less woppish.

"You got a number?" he asked. I told him and he entered it into his cell as the ambulance arrived, along with a couple cops. The cruiser had Support Our Troops stickers on it. Before the cop in the passenger seat got out, I saw him take a long suck on his big paper cup of coke or whatever it was, his cheeks hollowing.

Captain moved away from me and stood tall as the cops approached, putting on their hats. "Captain R.M. Napier, Canadian Army," he said in a clear regulation voice, extending firm handshakes.

"Thank you for taking control of the situation, Captain. We'll handle it from here."

"Glad to help out."
As the cops turned toward the geeks who'd been just staring at their wrecked cars this whole time, the younger cop stopped and looked at Captain. "Sir, we appreciate the fine job you men are doing over there."

"Just doing our duty."

The cop's thin lips tightened even thinner. The older cop straightened up and they both gave Captain quick salutes, almost embarrassed but deeply proud too. He went to attention, stuck out his chest as if the Queen herself was passing by and returned their gesture. When the cops nodded and turned away, I thought they might burst into tears.

Captain came next to me again. "These fat fucks," he muttered. "They wouldn't last one night in Kandahar." He looked me over and made some kind of decision. "Frank," he said. "I'll call ya soon."

I watched him stride into the supermarket parking lot and go toward a black Jaguar coupe. A very classy looking, very hot, tall white chick with long dark auburn hair was standing at the driver’s side, the door open, frowning slightly from behind her big sunglasses. She had awesome tits. Her and Captain didn't exchange a word or glance as he walked to the car and they both got in.

Things were looking up.