You know what I say they say within my mind: shit happens when you party naked with ladyboys in Bangkok (figuratively, physically, mentally, there’s an endless stream excreting from every orifice below).
The endeavor began with an obscure, escalating fatigue. Yellow eyes in the bathroom mirror, for the fourth or fifth time I’ve had to pee in the last hour, stare back at me. It has something to do with my liver; all the AI programs I’ve queried give the same answer in a different way.
It hurts sitting at my desk. No matter how I adjust, a weird discomfort stretched from the abdomen to my shoulder: a dull, swollen pressure that came with a constant reminder. Sitting made me aware of it. Standing made me tired. Lying down on my bed had begun to put me to sleep.
But it’s a Friday night in an international city, and when I get up to go out, and I’m out in the world doing things, I forget, like it wasn’t really there to begin with. And when I’m out in the world, and I decide to approach someone, unlike in the US (at least for me), it works.
(This phenomenon is something I dub being normal. Some white girl at a rooftop bar asked for my opinion about dating outside the US. “It feels exponentially healthier to experience your sexuality,” I told her. Her answer was something along the lines of women being more aggressive. I told her sitting around waiting for things to fall in your lap isn’t aggression. That really pissed her off, and she walked off. But you know, everywhere else I’ve been, women seem to understand just how hard it is to say hello.)
So, I’m walking at a midnight hour, laughing to myself about a girl I met at a rooftop bar, working American hours in a far-east city. During my lunch break, an Asian gal with a bountiful bosom walked by.
“Excuse me,” I said.
She recoiled, frozen, eyes wide but curious.
“I need help with the city. There is somewhere I need to be, but I don’t know where to go.”
It was evident she didn’t speak English, so I grabbed her hand and kissed her on the knuckle and held it even when she tried to pull away.
“You like?” she asked.
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
She looked confused.
“Boyfriend.” I purred with a Thai inflection.
She shook her head. This answer—the one constant that remains, no matter where I go in this world, is that girls always have boyfriends—means prostitution is legal around these parts, and these working girls fetter the streets of Bangkok’s main city thoroughfare. Bars have prices at the bottom of their menu: Buy a Girl a Drink: 300 baht. This girl with slightly whiter skin than the rest, surely, was one of those.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Donut,” she said.
“Donuts?”
“Yes.”
Now it was this answer that struck such a profound shift in perception. This girl had the same name as another I had met on a dating App a few nights ago. Like this girl here, that girl then had black lacquer hair down to her shoulders. Looking back at the POV from the profile pictures on the dating app. She responded to my inquiries immediately, and there we were, outside the German restaurant I stood with this new girl now. Response time ~2 seconds. Every woman on Tinder I’ve matched with for the past decade in the US: ~10 years and counting.
What a name these ladyboys have. Even the regular gals in the city—Washing Machine, Chub Chub, Wifi. Immediate associations with inanimate household objects fire off at a great rate, and I stand there, stone-cold exterior, stifling the laughter by keeping my lips shaped in a scowl.
Donuts, so sugary and sweet. They are cheaper here than in the US by a great amount. Buying sex is cheaper in Thailand than buying donuts in the US.
Donut, the girl still letting me hold her hand, is a word used to signify she uses her asshole at the professional level. Donut. Connections bridged 95%.
Donut and I sit outside a sports bar connected to a condominium mall and talk business. Like the girl from the dating app, it is only then that I realize Donut isn’t her real name either: 100%, even though I don’t ask. In the dim light, she seems more masculine than I’d first noticed. The Adam’s apple gives it away, the way she twists in her seat, presenting herself, face doused in makeup.
Night lights string together like tourists from across the world. This the very same street I burned a joint with a Russian lad before passing out on the sidewalk, only to wake to a small crowd surrounding me. They asked for my name, where I was staying. Right there behind them, I said, behind the curb I am meeting this ladyboy at now.
“You like me?” Donut asked.
“Yeah.”
“I am not woman. I am ladyboy.”
(The neat thing about Thai culture is the ladyboys don’t call themselves women. They are ladyboys, and that is final.)
The interior of the five-, six-, maybe more-story mall is shut down at this hour. An Amazon café sits center stage. The elevator leading to the second floor has gone dark. From somewhere deeper within and above comes the distant mammalian susurrus of an empty building. It connects to the condominium of the same name through an enclosed hallway on the bottom floor.
This tunnel is thin, almost funeral, with a back door opening onto a billiards hall to the left and a coworking space on the right. There is a cash machine adjacent to an energy-drink dispenser. Further down the hall, there is a clinic for STI testing on the right.
The condominium entrance requires a fob to pass through its glass-fronted doors.
“I’m a man.” “I’m a man,” the ladyboy quacked as we walked.
There was no one about, except for a receptionist I had spoken to only once. Dim lighting for the lobby. A single door for a fast-food shop. Floor-to-ceiling glass enclosed a body-sculpting clinic.
The elevator smelled of cigarettes and marijuana. This ladyboy smelled of soap.
Banging prostitute starts in the bathroom, showering. You wash yourself. But they don’t brush their teeth. My greatest vice was making out.
“I’m a bad girl,” she said, lounging on the bed as I considered her from the couch.
I think it was from kissing, the sickness.
In the 2AM glow of the outside city lights, as this ladyboy explained to me how she washed his / her ass with a kind of squirt bottle you stick up your butt, “You must poop out the water,” she said, holding up images you’d see for ecommerce products (like turkey basters and shit), an idea pounced upon my brainwaves.
The title of this masterpiece: Banging a Ladyboy Simulator. It could be a simple game made by a master, like Taking a Shower Simulator. This shower simulator game is an old one, probably a decade old at the time of writing this. You wash yourself in the game, and do things such as poop in the shower, which causes cockroaches to materialize. It’s free to play, but my game would be somewhere around $50.
BALS (Banging a Ladyboy Simulator) could incorporate this ladyboy’s propensities:
He / she is telling me to spank his / her ass and call them a bitch.
“I’m a bad girl,” the ladyboy would say.
“What do you mean?”
“I smoke methamphetamine. Cocaine.” The ladyboy explained, before trailing off, like she’s tiptoeing around something, as she wiggles his / her ass in the artificial city light.
The main character of the game would have to face some weird anxiety dilemma, having to push through the awkwardness and squawking to get laid. I’m a man! I’m a man!Master difficulty fills the hallway with people, like close associations the main character made the previous nights in Bangkok. Easy mode has no one. Such as for tonight: easy mode.
There’d be leftover fecal matter near the edge of the bathroom counter (how in the hell did it get there?). Every time the main character reaches to clean it, he hesitates, hit by a sudden dizzying swirl of consideration. Because, depending on how well he was protected during this sexual encounter, depends on how sick he’ll be. The sicker he gets, the harder basic tasks become, such as walking downstairs to see a doctor.
The main character sleeps with a gal like this one, Donut: “Spank my ass and call me a bitch,” she says, and I do. Therefore, so do they, the main character of my game.
The following few days after banging this bitch, the main character wakes up in a sweat if they’re under the covers. They wake up with chills if they’re above them. A few steps to use the bathroom make them sleepy.
There’s no rash, so those videos that suddenly pop up about HIV rash or yeast infection offer him relief. All immediate advertisements after this excursion somehow become HIV prevention medication and treatments. The character never searches for anything related to what he’s done. The digital slipstream simply knows.
The main character has a group of friends that all say it’s always HIV. These friends from Meetup, the close associations that appear in that enclosed hallway down below on master level difficulty, the same folks you share a group chat with on WhatsApp, indirectly reference you with their conversations:
“It’s always HIV,” they say.
The thing about Meetup in Bangkok is many of the dudes are gay or bisexual. You’re literally surrounded by HIV during board game events. It’s a blood bath. Group messages circulate of excursions to gay bath houses. All the women have boyfriends they cheat on other men with except you. The main character considers all of this in an overload on the couch, sometime around midnight, for the next few weeks after banging the ladyboy.
They were already sick before these sexcapades, you might say. Yet as the fatigue escalates and the virus hits its advent—maybe it was a bacterial infection, this new STI, TVII—the main character replays the memory again and again.
The jaundice was there before the sex. The stomach cramps happened before the main character started sleeping with ladyboys. The whole reason I personally stumbled into this was because of the fatigue, so they would do the same.
Such considerations trigger another rehearsal:
Jaundice was a sign of Mono. It explains the persistent fatigue. Jaundice was also a sign of hepatitis.
I could have caught hepatitis from the food. I’d been food poisoned twice before, both times from the same place: Phed Mak. Food poison cramps start in the stomach, tightening until it feels as though someone has reached inside and begun wringing everything by hand. Then comes the sweating, nausea, and strange little shivers that have nothing to do with the flu but feel like the flu. Ending with a discharge in the toilet. Diarrhea is a symptom of HIV. But diarrhea, in Bangkok, for me, always happens, whether I am sick or not. I blame it on the change in food. I have never, not once, out of all four times I have travelled to this country, not had diarrhea upon landing.
Therefore, the main character would experience all this in video game format, too.
All this would rattle the main character’s mind realms while a ladyboy tries to get them to smoke meth on the bed or transfer money between bank accounts.
That is something I would not do. No meth, no money transfers. I dismissed the second Donut of my life and led her outside, and that was it. I did not fall for the money transfer scam. Honest.
It was like her immediate dismissal heralded in the fatigue I thought had left. Soon to be striking at the lymph nodes in my throat. Then a consistent pain that made me conscious of every time I swallowed. Taking work calls somehow alleviated these symptoms for thirty minutes, before putting me back down.
Headaches bombarded me now and again. I had an appetite, but the fatigue and pain of swallowing made it hard to eat, and whenever I felt like I had to and didn’t want to, I could sleep it off and forget.
What are the odds? The main character of this game I’ve brainstormed would ask himself.
The next part of BALS would incorporate an influencer rubbing his lips around the handlebar mustache I had at the time—while he (the influencer) did not have one. “Same sex on sex action exponentially increases the chances of HIV, Garrick,” the man seemed to yell through the screen. This adds to some type of meter in the game. A sidebar that, once full, causes the character to contract AIDS or some shit. Maybe the character would buy Xanax from the ladyboy to handle the stress of it all.
Maybe it wasn’t a male influencer rubbing his moustache as he did for me. Maybe it was a female influencer yelling about language.
The main character thought of this, sleeping for the next two weeks as the sickness increased, even as he returned home to the States. He’d lounge at the pool, and the fatigue would continue on. Or as he went to a movie with his family. Playing golf at a driving range. Working a new job. Falling asleep the entire time.
The game never tells you what you caught. It only says you’re still playing. You’ve already made it this far. Might as well keep going.
Still, though. What the hell did we contract?