Until then, I only knew Lek as the little sister of my playmate Saa and had hardly ever had anything to do with her. Forgive me for this strange term "playmate", I want to explain it and use it to describe a little about life as a foreigner in Bangkok, before I tell you what there is to say about Lek and Saa, so that you can see what can happen to you in Bangkok. If you are not interested in such reflections, you are welcome to skip ahead to Part II and read on, where things get really juicy.
Part I
Instead of calling Saa a playmate, I could also call her a friend, or a mistress, or - quite trivially - my "regular hooker". But we are here in Bangkok, and everything is a little different here... "Same same but different", as the Thai say so aptly. The girls in the city's countless gogo bars and massage parlors may be available for money, but their everyday life is nothing like that of our common prostitutes. There are so many of them in Bangkok, literally thousands of them, that they form a scene of their own, at least in their own areas, and move freely and carefree within this scene. They are so very different from the stigmatized, pitiable creatures in the squalid zones of our western world, hardly any of whom have not migrated more or less involuntarily and for whose plight the term "migrant background" would already be a whitewash. In Bangkok, 99% of the female part of the red light scene consists of Thai girls from Isaan, the agrarian hinterland in the north-east of Thailand. So they are always among their own kind, these girls, and that is certainly one of the reasons why many of them are quite happy with their lives. They are only occasionally willing to return to the rural poverty of their families, which can offer them nothing more than a life in poor huts and hard, peasant labor.
In addition to these obvious sex workers in the gogo bars and massage parlors of the city, there is also a very extensive grey area in which girls and women of various kinds combine the potentially pleasurable with the lucrative and where a clear distinction between paid sex and sex for pure pleasure is no longer possible. These can be students or even schoolgirls, and yes, there are always some among them who may no longer be children, but are still under 18 and definitely too young for what they are doing. Often they are also employees with a modest salary that can no longer satisfy the consumer needs of a modern, urban girlie life, or they are real pro-fis and sharks of this gray area, real war profiteers of the gender struggle.
They are all more or less regular freelancers in the relevant bars, clubs and venues, where sex for sale is more or less hidden and is not a minute-by-minute ordering process, as in the gogo bars, but requires a minimum of initiation and manners and where the girls, depending on their market value, choose their partners with very sharp fingers. The older and less attractive among them, yes, they will take anyone without much ado. But at the upper end of the scale, there are lu-pen-pure dream girls who look like models, or even are models, and who can really choose their partners and only let the really good-looking guys with really thick pants (back pocket!) in. All too often, late at night in the bars, I saw with secret joy and satisfaction how pot-bellied tourists in shirts and shorts stared in bewilderment at the beautiful girls they had just cold-shouldered. A picture for the gods. Anyone who isn't a seasoned party animal and charmer, or alternatively can wave banknotes without a care in the world, has to be modest. And at the upper end of the scale, that's where really good money is earned, worlds away from what girls could ever earn in an almost normal job. And it's not necessarily about ex-and-hop casual sex, but often also about (relatively) long-term relationships between such playmates and their sponsors.
And for the very clever ones, a marriage with such an American, European or nowadays perhaps even a Russian might be on the cards in the end... That's where they all want to go, that's the main prize, the redemption, and that's where the front line of this very special gray area of the battle of the sexes runs, that's the deeper meaning of the trial of strength. If the girl wins, she gets married. If the man wins, he has had what is known here as a "GFE", a "Girl-Friend-Experience", the overwhelming illusion of a beautiful, willing young lover for a certain amount of time, until the deeper, the emotional, the humanizing takes over and the girls' demands for this or that, and above all for a shared perspective, become ever louder. Then the men either fall into this Venus trap and marry her, or they leave the girl and look for the next one, which is inevitable and only a matter of days or hours...
Oh yes, there are also cases where two people have found each other and just really love each other, no more and no less than anywhere else in the world, but you can safely neglect that, it's just the rare exception that is only the rule... you know... In real life, what a Thai girl understands by a relationship is worlds away from what the average Western man imagines it to be.
So my playmate Saa and I were both veterans in this game of shades of gray. Neither of us were the youngest, I was in my early 50s but in good shape, she was in her mid-30s with a body that would make a 20-year-old look good. We'd already been through all the games and bitter experiences, several times... We'd already reached the point where you just try to avoid any drama because it's so unpleasant and exhausting and where a certain fairness and looseness was almost everything that makes a "good relationship". We saw each other two or three times a week, went out together, had fun in one way or another in clubs and discos, and in the end she came to my place and we had lots of good sex. Of course, that also had to be right and was part of the all-important "chemistry". And it always meant that she got some money at the end, the morning after, for her living expenses. Those were the rules of the game. Evil tongues claim that the girls don't get the money for staying and having sex, but for leaving afterwards. Saa was never the only one for me, and I wasn't the only one for her. Nobody minded and they just tried to avoid encounters at the wrong time. As long as everything stayed in the shallows, this was a real man's dream...
But the city is also full to the brim with men who ultimately lose themselves and break down because of this emotional emptiness and irrelevance, or because of raging jealousy or the omnipresent lies on both sides. It's no wonder that those who stay and don't perish are all married at some point. That's just the way war is, nobody really knows who is the winner and who is the loser, especially not in the long term.