Gay Boy Thailand

Modest living

Strange things happen in The Mansion. First there was the novel on the back of my invoice. The office gave me my bills as a computer print-out and what appeared to be a work of fiction was on the back side.

The text was familiar. The characters had names like Larson, Duff and Bia. They were in a Bangkok taxi and Larson tried to bribe the taxi driver to go slower.

How did my novel end up on the back of my water bill?

A couple of weeks earlier I had cleaned my desk and I had put old papers in the trash. Among the papers were a complete draft of the Bangkok Novel, which I had printed to edit the manuscript by hand.

The staff at The Mansion must have seen the papers and decided to recycle them. And recycled they were, right back to my own utilities.

—

Our combined security guard, janitor and engineer rang my door bell late in the evening. He was too drunk to stand still. The guard smelled of booze and swayed from side to side as he explained that my neighbour had locked himself out. The guard wanted to use my balcony to go over to the other apartment to get the keys.
- That’s dangerous, I said in Thai.
- Never mind, said the guard.

I could not watch. It was dark and the mission meant that the guard would crawl from my balcony, to my air cond unit, over to the neighbour’s air cond unit and over to the other balcony. He would have a 30 cm wide platform to walk on along the facade of the building and it was ten stories down to the concrete parking ground.

The guard had done similar tricks before, when cleaning the air cond. But then it was daylight and he had an assistant and he only went 1/3 of the way. He was not as drunk either.

I chickened out in the bedroom while he did it. I hoped I would not hear it if he fell, and I would certainly not run downstairs to look if he went missing.

After a minute I heard him in the corridor. When I looked he wore a big smile and had the neighbour’s keys in his hand. The trick probably earned him a bit of beer money.

Why didn’t I refuse this mad spiderman act? My neighbour could stay at a hotel and come back the next day. But refusing didn’t cross my mind. I guess I have been in Thailand for too long already.