1
Watching a livestream of Sukhumvit Road, Na knew she'd feel like a fish out of water...
Bangkok... The lights, the traffic, the faces, streets brimming, floods of activity...
One single city block had more people in its radius than Na had ever seen in her entire life, coming from a small rice farming village in Nowhere, Nakhon Phanom...
Bangkok, Krung Thep, the metropolis, had so many foreigners, too, or, as the Thais called them: "farangs."
Not that she'd never seen foreigners, in person; she'd seen a few farangs, sure, but only a handful, usually graying, overweight, with far younger Thai wives, often Thai wives who'd been single mothers.
Such as one of her neighbors, Bu...
Bu had found and hooked a German online, a man missing an arm, and eventually disappeared to Berlin to join him, with her child in tow.
Ecstatic, Bu had gushed and told anyone who'd listen that she'd finally see snow...
Another young single mother, Mod, in a nearby village, had met a vacationing Norwegian, and the 60ish, tall, leathery-skinned, lanky, mustached chap had married her, stayed in the village, and built Mod and her family a sizable 4-bedroom baby blue house; the house rising above all others; its portico, stucco roof and small swimming pool out back the aspiration and envy of the entire block...
To top it off, the Scandinavian had also bought a black Hilux pickup truck that Mod hosed down, meticulously, every day, in their Bougainvillea-lined asphalt driveway...
Na envied Bu and Mod's good fortune, particularly since her luck had always been so horrible...
It was only last year that her deadbeat father, rarely seen, returned home one rainy night, crashing in, on an angry motorbike with the tail of a comet.
Her wild-eyed father, in a cataleptic fit of meth-induced rage, had robbed, beaten, chased and slashed her mother's legs with a kitchen knife, and then disappeared, probably back to his hometown, on the jungle border with Laos...
Na's elder brother, had bullied, molested, and raped her, pimped her out to his friends, and later, after drinking and smoking ganja and falling off a buffalo he and his friends were attempting to joyride, her brother, the bucktoothed sadist, declared he'd found redemption in a pile of buffalo dung and thus had had a religious awakening and left home, became a monk, hitchhiking to a monastery near Chiang Mai.
Worse yet, at 18, Na had fallen pregnant. With whom, she didn't know. Possibly her brother, one of his friends, or the older boy in school who'd forced his way up her dress behind a storage shed.
Her baby was healthy, chubby, and beautiful, though; the only perfect thing in her life.
And her mother, aunts, and female cousins, neighbors took turns, breaks from rice farming, animal husbandry, and all chipped in to care for the infant, the round little giggle-machine, while Na returned to finish high school.
Na's options after graduation were limited.
Her grades were satisfactory for university applications, but not for full scholarships, and she lacked the necessary funds for tuition.
(Perhaps if she'd studied more sedulously, spent less time on her phone, she lamented!)
She could take out student loans and be burdened with debt for years, but she didn't want that, not for her, her mother, or her baby, and, really, she didn't enjoy school that much anyway...
Her only other options were to work at 7-Eleven as a cashier, toil in the scalding tropical sun as a farmer, for even less money, or work at a bar, karaoke joint or massage parlor in Phuket, Pattaya, or Bangkok...
One of her former high school classmates, Pear, a light-skinned, doe-eyed lovely, a year older than Na, had been working in Bangkok and was making $2000 or more per month, sending most of it home to her family, who'd been able to buy a Hilux truck and whose father could be seen flashing a shiny new gold necklace with a glittery malachite Buddha pendant.
Pear and Na were friends on LINE and Pear inveigled Na to join her at Pear's bar in Nana Plaza, promising that it was easy work, far more lucrative than rice farming or 7-Eleven...
Na, being an observant Buddhist, had her reservations, but decided the remuneration was too good to pass up, and, now being 19, her window of time was limited, so, she took the job offer...
Although upon arrival in Bangkok, she'd need to pass an interview first...
Officially no one under 20 is allowed in Thai bars, but fake IDs are easy to get, and Na purchased one online and it arrived the next day.
(Many of the bars in Bangkok, Pattaya, Phuket had 18, 19-year-olds in them, but not too many, as there'd been more and more crackdowns on underagers, anyone under 20 in recent times, often undertaken in cooperation with international NGOs...)
((Pear said that, like herself, Na would have an edge with her youth, because most of the girls at the bar were early to late 20s.))
(((About 28 or 29, ID age, was the general "retirement" age for bargirls. At that point most of the ladies who wished to remain in the skin trade, offering certain special services, would switch to massage parlors or freelance.)))
Na rode a red-eye, all-night bus to Bangkok, arriving at the Ekkamai bus terminal in the late morning, waking up to Bangkok's smoggy downtown skyline, in awe of her surroundings.
She'd never seen such colossal buildings, so many cars on the streets, so many people, so many different types of people everywhere.
Sundries of Thais in business suits and surgical masks. Farangs in cargo shorts. Arab women in abayas, dark facial veils.
And oh, the traffic, never had she seen so many cars, motorbikes, buses, such big buses, windowless buses farting tornado clouds of black smoke, and there was every type of truck imaginable, all packed, bumper to bumper, flooding and jamming the narrow roads!
Stepping out of the bus, gazing upwards at the concrete jungle, the thicket of skyscrapers, she marveled at the ivory white, sleek skytrain as it snaked by, like something from a futuristic sci-fi film.
She'd wanted to spend the day seeing the sights of Bangkok, most of all to visit the Royal Palace and pray at the many sacred temples.
But there was to be none of that. Not on this day.
In the antechamber of the bus station waited her receiver, her recruiter/interviewer who Pear had only referred to as "H". He held up a white A4 paper with Na's full name scrawled on it in neat Thai handwriting.
Surprisingly, the man turned out to be a middle-aged Japanese (!), a rather odd looking fellow, a short (155 cm) man with a scorpion's face and unsightly sloped head pleated with a shock of thinning coal black hair combed to the left, clumped in a heavily gelled, greasy quincuncial grid...
Despite his unpleasant physical appearance, the man wore expensive, designer clothes- a pink button-down shirt and perfectly creased, tailored black slacks, brown leather wingtips.
Na waied respectfully, and the man, in fluent but broken English, asked her for a quick self-introduction, in English, which Na rattled off with ease and alacrity...
(Na spoke quite fluent, albeit grammatically imprecise English, having taken a liking to American movies, TV shows, and it being her favorite subject in school, since they'd often been able to watch American TV, usually episodes of "Friends", during lessons. She'd also played mobile phone games popular with foreigners and used her English online to chat with gamers from around the globe.)
((Her English proficiency a big reason why Pear recruited her. For Nana bargirls, English ability, at least an intermediate level is a must, a prerequisite for employment. Very few foreigners, especially tourists, speak Thai.))
The Japanese man listened attentively and provided no flummery, just nodded, grunted, and whisked her into his black Mercedes S-Class, onward into Khlong Toei...
Na figured she'd passed the first round of the interview...
2
They arrived at a tall, glitzy, cobalt-blue glass condo tower, and a pair of valets in brown liveries, golden epaulets, received them, opened the car doors, waied and ferried the car off to the building's underground garage.
Na had never been in a building this luxurious; its massive lobby with a lotus pond, sky high ceilings, ornate crystal chandeliers, Carrara marble floors, and jade chimera sculpture near the elevators.
They ascended in the silver elevator up to his suite, and entered the 200 square meter condo, Na stunned by its panorama windows, 180-degree, vista views of the metropolis.
Na wasn't quite sure what she was doing there. Her Japanese receiver, hadn't spoken to her during the ride, instead listening to loud 80s hair metal throughout the journey.
Once the door closed behind them, he finally spoke.
"My name Haruki..."
"Ka..."
"You must provide demonstration."
"Demonstration?"
"Erm..." Haruki grunted, and unhooked his Gucci black leather belt and dropped trou.
His naked lower body was covered in tattoos, and his smallish uncircumcised penis hung limp in the chilly air-conditioning...
Na understood what he meant, grinned and gamboled over, knelt in obeyance before him, and took his flaccid penis in her mouth. It grew, rapidly, becoming far larger than she anticipated.
Haruki held her by the temples as she suckled him, for a minute or two, and pushed her head away, sat down on the chamois U-shaped sectional sofa and pointed to his erect member.
