Easing into the tuk-tuk's backseat, Bird looped her arms around my neck. Her head was thrown back and her face was hanging like a half-moon over her pill blue surgical mask. Staring at me pensively, her hooded eyes thinned.
Fake lashes fluttering, she tilted her head sideways, and shoved me off her, playfully, and muttered a Thai curse word as she whisked her raven black hair over her right shoulder.
Then she lowered her mask, revealing puckered, pouty pink lips. It surprised me she'd even wanted to breathe, with the pandemic and all, not to mention the city's atrocious air pollution. Sukhumvit Road's toxic vapors were their usual gnarly, rendering respiration akin to sucking on a running tailpipe.
Coughing at my hands, I felt warm wet droplets of breath and noticed that, for some unholy reason, I wasn't wearing a face mask. I rarely leave home without one. Even before the pandemic, I'd always wear a mask. Bangkok air necessitates wearing a mask. It's deadly, the Bangkok air. Albeit it's not as deadly and terrifying as the roads...
The roads, oh, the fucking roads. The roads in Thailand are a damn warzone, a chaotic jungle of rubber, concrete, and steel...
But traffic was too clogged to be malevolent. It was moving slower than a retard on Xanax.
Bird's pink lips curved into a smile. Her teeth white and thick as pearls. Then her shimmering smile slowly died. Her face shifting from a smile to scowl and her opal eyes dropped as she whipped out her phone from her ass and flicked the Oppo on.
She then started stabbing at the Voodoo Doll app, happily slashing and cutting her ex-boyfriend's threadbare body with a variety of kitchen knives. The poor bastard's pudgy mug had been photoshopped over the doll's head and his contorted face seemed to be quivering.
Sneering devilishly, she muttered, "He no love me..." in her singsong Thai accent, hitting a lingering down tone on that last vowel. She shoved the phone back down her ass and dug out a hot pink motorcycle helmet from under the seat, strapped it on and lowered the mirrored visor. I could see my reflection in it. My face flushed crimson and my forehead crinkled under my silver cowboy hat.
I was wondering why the fuck we were in a tuk-tuk, anyway. I never take one of these things. They're mostly for the tourists. I've been in Bangkok for 7 years. I'm no tourist. Though, in the eyes of the natives, because I'm a "farang," a paleface foreigner, I always will be, in a way, a tourist, no matter how long I stay...
Looking forward, I spotted the driver slumped at the wheel. The skeletal, late middle-aged man, with a face reminiscent of a Thai Snoop Dogg, was gurgling, spitting up chunks of what looked like purply pieces of puke.
"Hey! HEY! Who gave coronavirus to the tuk-tuk driver?" I squawked as I gawked, suddenly gasping as I felt a surge of acid scratching at the back of my throat.
Then I swung my head to see Bird on the back of a nearby motorcycle taxi. She was waving me over, like a traffic cop. Jumping out of the tuk-tuk, I threw the driver a 100 baht note, in case he didn't die.
Then I mounted the motorcycle, sitting behind Bird, and I snuggled up to her. Hugged my arms around her soft, slender hourglass frame. My arms on her tender hot flesh, I felt a rush at the silky touch of her bare midriff under her baby blue half-shirt. Her light brown, milk chocolatey skin looking so damn delicious I could eat it.
I was a happy cannibal. And we rocketed to high speeds on that bike, the driver ragging on his 2-stroke engine, the engine buzzing like a chainsaw as we weaved furiously through the idle traffic, the way only motorcycle taxis in Bangkok can. Traffic laws, which are arbitrary and mostly voluntary in Thailand anyway, seem to apply even less to motorcyclists...
Our exhilarating, roaring motorcycle ride was wildly fun. Its usual art. An oeuvre suicidal, brilliant, efficiently quick and kamikaze, filled with fits of starts and stops, skillful maneuvering, near collisions, frenetic speeds, and welcome whaps of face-cooling air...
(My buddy Crazy Carl said that Thai drivers, particularly the motorcyclists, motorcycle taxi drivers, most all believe in reincarnation. So they don't fear death. Their thinking being that they'll just come back anyway. Crazy Carl said some must look forward to death, because being a motorcycle taxi driver in Thailand probably sucks... He said the ones happy in this life are those carrying protective amulets... Always try to ride with a Thai motorcycle taxi driver who's wearing an amulet, Crazy Carl preached...)
When we reached the hotel, which was on a side street in lower Sukhumvit, I noticed Bird was gone and that the motorcycle driver had no head.
I paid the headless motorcycle driver and, in the process, found my money had bloodstains on it.
The headless driver waied me and zoomed off into the humidity of the night, a gigantic plume of black smoke spitting from his exhaust pipe, almost as big as a mushroom cloud. The smoke was so thick and dark that the glittery neon skyline in the background appeared as if it were an impressionist oil painting.
The hotel was cold as a morgue. It was a dimly lit, teakwood cave, full of tiger-skin rugs, rainbow sashes and pink frilly drapes. The hallways looked to be an intricate complex of tunnels that didn't seem to end or start.
At the front desk, the hotel staff were foamy brown blobs. Floating about, they were dressed in traditional Thai attire of golden pantaloons, colorful sarongs, and pointy hats with tips like temple spires.
A short fellow checked me in. He had a heavy black garbage bag over his head, with slits cut out for the eyes and mouth. He was like the Thai version of the Zodiac Killer.
Zodiac's bony arms twitching, he spoke to me, telepathically, in a Tony Soprano-ish New Jersey voice, imploring: "Look, don't you never wrong a Thai woman. They'll cut your dick off while you're sleeping. My sister, she sliced off like four dicks. But she don't throw 'em in the duck pond, like youse always hear, yanno. Nah, she's saved 'em. Keeps 'em... Trophies in a glass case..."
I rode the complimentary hotel Segway through a maze of winding hallways, and the Segway braked, automatically, when I arrived at my suite. Right after I stepped off, the Segway zzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZzzzzz-zipped away on its own.
I slid my room card, hard, and the door beeped a Black Sabbath riff. Then I turned the L-shaped handle which caused the cherry red door to shatter into more than a million fragments resembling rose petals.
Inside, I found Bird already there.
The room was small, painted peach pink. It was practically a cabin in a gay cruise ship. And in its center, it had a jacuzzi without water instead of a bed. Inside the jacuzzi were stacks upon stacks of heart-shaped valentine pillows, and I kicked off my shoes and jumped into the jacuzzi, eased in next to Bird. A Muay-Thai kickboxing match was on the wall-mounted flatscreen TV.
Bird slung her arm around me, and I took a good long look at her unmasked face. She looked like a man. It occurred to me that she must be a ladyboy. How could I not have known?
Normally, they're not my thing. But it's been a while since I did anal sex. So I thought of giving it a go. Even in Bangkok it's hard to find a woman willing to do free, consensual anal sex, and if this one wouldn't do it, well...
The only ladyboy I'd been with was many years ago. I met her in the back of a bar, late at night, in Pattaya. I was stumbling drunk, and I can't remember how or why, but I know she gifted me thrilling, toe-curling head in a toilet stall. It was like an out-of-body experience.
But immediately after I jizzed in her mouth, she retched, crumpled, and hugged the crapper and hurled. And I was so freaked out by her vomiting that I yanked up my pants and ran away.
After that, I remember eating fried scorpions on the beach. Then I passed by a pack of violent ladyboys who were beating and robbing a middle-age German tourist on a side street. Then I vaguely recall passing out, sleeping rough, in the doorway, in front of (what I believed to be) my hotel because the front door was locked, and no one answered the doorbell.
That was my only ladyboy experience.
It was late. I was drunk. And I couldn't see that ladyboy's face too well in the dim lighting of the bar bathroom.
But this one, next to me, in this pile of red pillows, I could see. I inspected every inch of her face's symmetry. It was mannish. She had a real square jaw. She definitely looked far too much like a dude for my taste.
She cuddled up closer to me, eying me ravenously. She might have a female body, but it seemed as if she still had a male brain and a male sex drive. The way she was looking at me, it was like a starving man eying a piece of meat. I started to realize what life might be like for women, dudes glaring at them this way, every day, and I made a mental note to try to be less of a perv in public. Or at least wear sunglasses more.
We'd been locking eyes for a few sultry seconds, but I couldn't take it. She was too manly. I couldn't go through with it. I couldn't bring myself to try anything.
So I swung my gaze back to the TV. On it was now cockfighting.