Job in Nana Plaza

In the hotel room, Na began to undress, leaned in to peck him on the lips, but the farang pulled back, wagged a finger and shook his head.

He ordered her to only take off her shoes, and he took of his shoes.

He held her hand, led her to the bed, asked her how long they had.

She said, "one hour".

"Okay," he replied quietly, his voice quivering...

Toronto set the timer on his phone to one hour, lay at her side, and cuddled up next to her, hugged her, buried his face into her shoulder and began to cry, a slow, lugubrious whimper, soon turning into a bleating wail.

He sniffled and his tears ceased, but still he trembled, clutched onto her, and they lay like that, in repose, for the full hour. Na not knowing what to do, never having seen a man cry.

She simply held him, patted his head, and thought of her baby, saw him in a similar light, like a polar bear cub, an outré infant, and she comforted, hugged, stroked and petted him and said a silent Buddhist prayer, hoping to exorcize whatever demon haunted him.

When his phone's timer rang, to the song from Green Day, "Wake Me Up When September Ends", he arose, embarrassed and shy. He collected himself and paid her asking price, plus a small tip, hugged her again, put on his shoes, thanked her and left.

Na waied him, gathered her things and returned to the bar, baffled by the whole encounter, feeling bittersweet her first night was drawing to a close.

She'd accumulated 19,000 baht. In one night. It was more than many office workers in Bangkok were paid- in a month.

Returning to the bar, her roommates were happy for her and hoped her auspicious, lucky forces would rub off on them.

But they also warned her that not every night would be so lucrative and to be careful with the cash, to send it home or deposit it in an interest-bearing account immediately...

7

The bar closed around 2 am, and Na and her roommates clocked out, dressed and went for a late-night snack of papaya salad, "som tam", at the street side restaurant near their apartment.

Her roomies told her other girls were envious of her looks and luck with customers.

Most of the girls were from Isan and liked each other, but there were a few cliques of local Bangkok area girls, Chiang Rai girls, and Southern girls, and they didn't always get along, sometimes got catty.

Na told her roommates about the Brit who'd done surprise anal on her and said that the other girls shouldn't be too jealous of that.

Both her roommates confided they'd had similar experiences. Jem almost choked to death by a Brazilian guy who was into erotic asphyxiation.

"These men, many are married, and want to do things with us that their wives won't do," said Jem, with a scowl, afterward pursing her lips.

"I charge 6000 baht for anal," Karen blurted out, her mouth full of papaya salad, "but they better tell me ahead of time, and they better lube properly, or else they get a face, and crotch, full of THIS!"

Karen dug out a bottle of pepper spray from her handbag, and the girls shared a laugh.

Her roommates were impressed by Na for being so stoic.

They said a lot of girls quit, ran away after their first night or two, unable to handle the farangs, the farangs' smells and voyeuristic stares, the farangs' eyes like tigers; many girls couldn't cope with being topless, semi-nude on the stage in front of so many people.

They said lots of the less money-driven girls who stayed became putrescent, zombies, heavily drinking, doing hard drugs to divagate...

Na, having never told anyone, blurted out something alluding to what her brother and his friends did to her. What the older boy at school, behind that accursed charnel shed, did...

Sex, Na professed, was salutary, and she'd never enjoyed it, but averred that hopefully, one day, maybe she would.

Her roommates nodded, in tacit agreement, it seemed, and they spent the remainder of their repast quietly staring at their phones.

8

The whir of the ceiling fan was the last thing Na heard as she drifted off to sleep, shortly after 4:30 am.

That night she had a vivid, prismatic dream. A terrifying nightmare...

She was dancing in the bar, holding her breasts in her hands when a cavalcade of Malaysian terrorists entered, shot up the place, wantonly, with automatic rifles, gunning down customers, bargirls, staff...

Na escaped, after hiding in a pile of dead bodies, and ran out the bar to see Nana Plaza in flames; bars, one after another, blowing up, balls of orange and red flames, showers of sparks lighting up the crepuscular sky...

Her head uplifted to the heavens, Na saw zigzagging, phantasmal green, flashing UFOs, firing blurs of laser beams, destroying, incinerating the malignant skyscrapers, those penis-shaped superstructures, all over Bangkok...

Gargantuan, gelatinous, slimy 50 feet high turquoise color cockroach-like alien creatures dropped from mushroom clouds, stomping on vehicles, shooting bolts of fire from their antennae, blasting and burning everyone, everything in the vicinity, and she felt like a prisoner of planet Earth...

Then she awoke in a silhouette of cold sweat. There'd been no attack. All was fine, quiet, save for the occasional roar of a motorcycle engine, barking soi dogs outside.

She figured her dream probably arose from the news she'd read online about the asteroid, and of the backpack nail bomb detonating near Siam Square BTS station, and the city being on edge for more attacks since a major ASEAN conference was being held next week...

Na lay awake for a half an hour, unable to sleep, and her genitals, especially her anus began to throb with pain.

The disgusting, buggering Brit, she thought, wanting to gas him down with Karen's pepper spray.

Na ate another tramadol and slipped back to sleep, this time a deep, dreamless slumber...

9

Na woke up around 11 am, sluiced her face with lukewarm water in the tiny bathroom sink.

During her morning movements, her asshole still hurt a bit, so she swallowed another tramadol after brushing her teeth.

She and her roommates had a noodle breakfast at the same street restaurant as yesterday.

Sitting outside, Na, for a minute or so, shivered and saw everyone around as walking cellphones, squares with limbs, stomach screens displaying battery bars indicating how many years, months, weeks, days, minutes and seconds they had left to live...

Na rubbed her eyes and the phone people disappeared, and the midday heat became more palpable. The thick heat, coupled with the heavy volume of cars, motorbikes, tuk tuks and trucks, caused her to sweat profusely, and she dotted her forehead with a napkin.

"Wait until summer," warned Karen, "I go home from March to April..."

The girls spent the afternoon and early evening in the apartment, playing on their phones, taking selfies, chatting with friends/family on social media, reading up on celebrity gossip, playing online games and watching Thai soap operas and YouTube music videos.

While Na was watching a clip of BLACKPINK performing their song "Forever Young", an ad interrupted the video.

It was a grainy film of a young soldier, a farang, his face obfuscated neon green, walking in the jungle, and suddenly being impaled by a bamboo pike trap that sprang up from the ground underneath him, stabbing through his ass, and out of his stomach.

Then a group of camouflaged yellow-skinned soldiers, far shorter than the farang, encircled the farang, taking his gun, rummaging through his pockets and backpack, as his green face coughed up dark blood...

She'd not been able to skip over or even stop the video, her phone turning cold in her hands, but fortunately the video ended after 15 seconds, and the music resumed, her phone back to normal...

Jem went out, for a quick tryst with a local customer who lived nearby, and came back shortly, 3000 baht richer, wearing a new gold bracelet.

"I'll sell it later... I'm pretty sure it's real gold. It better be after what I let him do..."

Na didn't need to know the details and hoped, too, for her roommate, that the bracelet was real...

That evening, before work, they again ate papaya salad at the same restaurant, and one of the two cooks, the owner of the restaurant, a 70ish lady, happened to be from a village near Na's.

They chatted in their local dialect, and the owner gave Na a small green amulet etched with a laughing, golden Buddha figure and wished her luck in Bangkok...

10

The bar that night was far less packed.

Sundays aren't as busy, Na's roommate told her.

Around the start of her shift, Na had a near dwarf, a pudgy little Irish man, in a stylish 3-piece suit, buy her a lady drink and request a lap dance.

He must have been about 75 and had a toupee and the breath of a corpse...

The Leprechaun groped her tits and ass but didn't want to bar fine her. She estimated that, at his age, he'd be quick work and was disappointed when he refused.

The penurious bastard left the bar quickly and barely gave her anything of a tip, actually tipping the chunky waitress more! The animal!

The rest of the night was pretty dreary, not much foot traffic at Nana, not many patrons in the bar, though Na noticed more Malays around and Arabs than she'd seen last night...

Na was bored and wishing she could at least play on her phone to pass the time. She'd probably only make 600 baht, a far drop from the 19000 she'd made the previous night.

What was a dud of an evening took an unexpected swing, however, when he appeared...

11

Na didn't see him walk in. Her peripheral vision was good, and she'd been keeping an eye on the door, especially since so few people were there that night, and so she wasn't sure how she'd missed that... Him!

He was a barrel-chested, bear of a young man, a farang, with a pale white, clean shaven face, boxy jaw, and cleft chin.

The farang, his head a mess of unruly ruby red hair, wore mirrored aviator shades and was shirtless, wearing just camo shorts and flip flops and covered in red body hair, practically an orangutan...

Normally one needed to be fully clothed to enter Nana Plaza, let alone a bar. She'd never seen any farang shirtless before in there.

What was weirder, though, was that wrapped around his neck and shoulders was a long snake, a king cobra.

The snake appeared happy, comfortable, slithering around in the farang's copse of red body hair as the farang stroked it, and the snake wagged its forked tongue, stared directly at Na...

Na, on the dais, gasped, nudged Karen, nodded over in the bare-chested, bizarre farang's direction, but when Karen craned her neck to see, the farang was gone.

Na scanned the bar. Didn't see him anywhere.

Then she found him.

This time, though, he was without the snake, and was sipping on a glass of absinthe, had a "Jesus Saves" black t-shirt on, and sat on a barstool directly below the stage, a meter or so away from Na.

His Jesus shirt took Na aback. It featured an emaciated Jesus on the crucifix, dripping with blood from his nailed limbs, a crown of thorns on his head, expression of anguish on his face.

What a curious symbol for a religion, she cogitated. Buddhist imagery being so serene. The Christian imagery always so bloody, dire...

But, although a devout, practicing Theravada Buddhist, she greatly respected Jesus Himself, how He had given His life for others. She had a Christian classmate in high school and found the stories inspiring...

"Hey there, darling," the Jesus shirt farang grinned and waved to Na.

"Sawadee Ka!" Na waied and ambled over, her 10cm heels clicking as she crept in his direction.

"Where you come from?" she asked, bending down to speak with the strange stranger.

"Buffalo."

"Buffalo?"

Na couldn't help but snicker.

"Buffalo is animal!"

"Sure is. A place too. On the East Coast, upstate New York..."

"USA?"

"United States, YOO ESS AY, babydoll."

"You on holiday? How long you here?"

"I'm here until I'm not... Staying in .... "

Na couldn't hear his response and didn't care too much, but the hotel a farang stayed, the better the hotel, was an effective barometer of how much cash he had. And how much to charge. So she asked again.

Once more, she couldn't understand his garbled response. Perhaps the music, AC/DC's "Thunderstruck", was too loud.

"Why you have snake? It real? Where it go?"

"All men have snakes, sweetie. Figured you'd know that by now. How far did you get in school?"

Na pursed her lips at his rejoinder, put her hands on her hips, tilted her head and grumbled "mansai!"

"Not you down there snake, sillyboy. Snake you have earlier."

"Oh, that snake, my friend, Satan. He's over there..."

Na looked over to where the farang gestured, the back row of seats in the bar, and saw the snake had grown, exponentially, and curled into a coil, a lit cigarette dangling from the corner of its mouth.

Guns N' Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle" blasted out of the bar's sound system, and Satan bobbed its head to the opening riff...

"Ah!" Na screamed and took a step back, seeing the snake.

She closed her eyes, rubbed them, drew a deep breath and opened her eyes again.

When her eyes opened, the snake was gone, but the farang remained. Na figured maybe the tramadol she'd been taking was messing with her head...

The farang now wore a snakeskin cowboy hat and a plain green shirt, and cut off camo shorts, combat boots.

"I'm looking for Bee. You seen her?"

"Bee? I no know her. I start here only yesterday. She work here? How you change clothes so fast? You play joke?"

"Oh, I am a joker, darling. My favorite playing card and Batman villain..."

"Ow, I see new Joker movie, have on my phone, so crazy!"

"On your phone? You must be playing jokes on ME, darling... So you don't know Bee? You look kinda like her. Thought you might be her sister."

"I no have sister. You want buy me drink?"

"That'd be groovy. Slide on down here, Bee."

"My name no Bee! My name Na!"

"Bee. I'm going to call you Bee. Until I find Bee. You're Bee."

"Okay, mister. What you name?"

"They used to call me Joker, but then another guy had the same nickname, so they called me Joker of Buffalo, but that was shortened to Job, pronounced like Joeb..."

"Joker. Hahaha, you funny man. You handsome man too, ka. You pay my bar fine?"

"What do I get if I pay your bar fine?"

"Everything you want, I do."

"Everything?"

"Everything."

"Can you become Bee? I'm looking for Bee..."

"I you Bee. I anything. I everything. You pay bar fine, no need buy drink."

Na didn't want the weird farang to slip away or change his mind over drinks. That happened sometimes, her roommates said.

The farang had started to grow on her a bit. There was something gentle in his voice. Soothing. She felt safe with him, and figured the snake, his change of clothes was just her imagination coupled with the bar's dim lighting, or perhaps side effects from the tramadol, or maybe a ridiculous gag... He was a joker, after all...

However, she worried she might be stealing another bargirl's customer, a big no-no, but since she was new, and had met pretty much all the other girls, not one called Bee, she figured she was safe, and could plead ignorance.

The crazy buffalo probably had his bars confused, anyway, and Bee was somewhere in Patpong. She decided to silence her mental palaver, her chattering monkey mind, and get down to business. Maybe the joker buffalo, Job could salvage this rotten night...

"How much is your bar fine, babydoll?"

"Bar fine 700 baht. 2500 baht give me after..."

"3200 baht? Prices really shot up, eh?"

"You handsome. I make you happy. Make you never forget. You pay bar fine and we go upstair or to hotel you."

"Hmmm, alright, you drive a hard bargain there, darling. Let's go upstairs. To the sky..."

"Okay, you pay boss bar fine." Na motioned to where the mamasan sat. "I go change."

Na leaned in, to kiss Job on the cheek, but he ducked away coyly and playfully pointed upwards.

Na stood up, stomped her foot and scowled, sarcastically, and stormed off to the dressing room.

In her street clothes, she returned to the bar area and didn't see the farang anywhere and approached the mamasan, who sat with her head glued to her phone.

Walking over, Na nearly stepped on a giant cockroach that was scurrying across the floor.

She purposely dodged it, wondered who it was in a past life and felt bad for it, knowing if a farang found it, or even a less pious Thai, the cockroach would be trampled to death or sprayed with a noxious chemical or fall into a painful trap.

The cockroach ran underneath the stage, safely, passing by an unwitting Korean contingent of middle age males who'd just entered the bar...

Na told the mamasan she'd go with the farang in the cowboy hat who'd just paid her bar fine.

The mamasan, the indolent bitch, looked up from her phone with a discomfited gaze.

"There was no farang here with a cowboy hat. I'd have remembered him. And no one paid your bar fine. You okay? You taking drugs? Smoking the ganja? Don't do that here, on the clock, ka!"

Na's heart palpitated, and she shot back: "No! He was here! He must have left. Maybe he didn't understand. I'll look for him outside and bring him back. Hold on..."

The mamasan growled, not appreciating any bit of their exchange, and went back to thumbing her phone, which morphed into a dead, mango-sized, hairy gray rat...

Na retched and hurried outside, exiting through the black curtain hanging in the doorway, and stepped from the cool air-conditioned bar into a face-slap of steamy night air.

Looking around, she didn't see him anywhere in the plaza, but finally saw him.

He'd climbed up a utility pole on the block parallel to Nana Plaza, Sukhumvit Soi 4, and had lost his shades, his face now painted like a clown, and he pointed, waved, and hooted at her...

At this point, Na's mood shifted gears. From confused to just plain pissed off. Then to enraged.

How dare the farang play his jokes, dirty tricks on her! How dare he mulct her time and make her lose face!!! She would catch up with him, make him pay, sick the bar's security staff to rough him up.

The bar's security didn't take kindly to such shenanigans. The other night a farang trying to skip out on his bar tab got a hard punch in the jaw, his pockets emptied as he lay limp on the ground. Unable to pay his tab in full, security confiscated his watch and phone.

Na wished the same fate on Job, but she'd have to catch him first.

The crazy buffalo, still waving at her, jumped down from the pole, landing smoothly, on both feet, like a gymnast, surprisingly agile for his bulky size. Then he turned and pulled down his camo shorts, mooned Na...

Na seethed, trembled with rage, and ran down the stairs, pushing aside a ladyboy who cursed at her, and flung off her heels (they were cheap fake Chanel anyway) and ran barefoot after the buffalo joker, who'd commandeered a pogo stick- an EXTREME pogo stick...

The farang hopping at a torrid pace, in super-high frog leaps, ten feet in the air, down Soi 4, the kangaroo clown crisscrossing, jumping his way through the idle Bangkok traffic.

Nearly getting run over by a motorcycle taxi or two, Na flagged one down, mounted the back seat, and commanded the driver to follow the high-hopping farang.

The driver shrugged his shoulders, and Na simply pointed him in the bouncing pogo stick's direction and they took off into the night, weaving through traffic, finally stopping only 10 mins or so down the road, in front of Na and her roommates' favorite roadside restaurant, where the pogo stick lay, abandoned...

Na quickly paid the driver the 15 baht he requested, dismounted and chased towards the pogo stick, huffing and puffing, searching around, but the flying buffalo was nowhere in sight.