juvenescence of a night

Night came without an invitation. The transition was divine. Nights had been always this beautiful. It was the thought of men that made it dirty, spine-chilling and bloodcurdling. I was reminded of my favourite subject during my childhood, Colours. You take the colour navy blue and squeeze it on a drawing paper. And then you take the colour black and squeeze a little (very) around the same spot. You mix them with paint brush and ease the process with drips of water and that’s what you could almost get – the colour of the juvenescence of a night. Divine.

My co-travellers left me behind in the room with the thought that I was a dead man (with a migraine). I doused water over my face and picked up the most vibrant t-shirt and dressed up and scrambled down to the street. I waved at a motorbike taxi and he asked me in return “Yu wan kampong girl?”. Oh shit, shut up that kampong girls nonsense, I thought but gave him a plastic smile in contradiction. “Bring me around the city. Just around the city” I told him. I hop onto the bike. The taxi man, my migraine and I had the ride around the city through the humps, potholes, splotches of mud and the malodorous back lanes of Hat Yai. Young girls in front of their massage parlours waved at me and screamed with papery voice “massage, massage Sir”. The taxi man turned back and said “we got a new Thai girl show in town Sir, just around tis place” and squawked a laugh. The further we went from the city central, the quieter Hat Yai became. Poorly lit suburbs with two-legged-ones hardly seen, with meagrely played pub music, and with less business opportunities except for some hawker stalls with dim yellow light. The stink was stronger. The civilization was a child. And that was a ghost town I saw before I quickly decided to return.

I was back in my room, trying to imitate the me whom my co-travellers left under the blanket with a migraine. I played the dead man again. Outside, a lady people affectionately call mamasan was yelling. Mamasans are the rich businesswomen in Thailand working as the lady-pimps. We are talking about some serious legal business here. Transvestites are the country’s notable treasure and some see them as pundits of unrestrained sexual cravings. Sharing the piece of cake are the real lady prostitutes and the male hookers. Some call them the culture. The culture was knocking doors, she was spitting words I don’t know. The tik tok tik tok of the culture’s stiletto heels was a hammer on my head each. I wanted to open my door and tell her to shut up her noisy mouth but how could I with the migraine on my head. Someone obviously did not pay for the service. I slept. And my migraine had an intercourse with a wild imagination that came afterward.

He was on top of her. Or was she on top of him? They uttered out monstrously the pleasure within the brothel’s four walls, sometimes it escaped like the cookie crumbs from the Cookie Monster’s plate-like mouth. Toe to toe. Fingertip to fingertip. Lust transformed into rides. Rides into a broken bed. Orgasm.