“My mother’s dead” yelled Jatupon with vehement hate and repugnance as he wadded up the flower in a fist and threw it onto the sidewalk. Then he walked away.
A tuc tuc driver, slowing down in passing, beeped the horn at him. The taxi looked like the distorted shape of a fly. He wished that he had just a chunk of the money Kumpee had plundered. With it, he told himself, he would buy his own motorcycle and become a self- employed taxi driver for his age surely restricted him from getting a job with the Bangkok Metropolitan Authorities. This, he told himself, would be far better than sitting on the monkey bars near the door of a bus clanging the tube of money upon one’s knee. Besides, he didn’t especially want to be one of the many nameless beggars applying for jobs with the Metropolitan Transportation Authorities.
He veered somehow from the sidewalk into a labyrinth of outdoor hallways that ran between stands and quasi-stores, under canvas canopies and through the smell of incense that came from a table that contained a 2-foot Buddhist statue. Upon finding his way out by charging through crowds and hangers of clothes, he heard the blaring of pi phat music, saw a vegetable market, and smelled redolent papayas, durians, watermelons, pineapples, guavas, and tangerines. Further along he smelled tom yam soup, grilled squid, goo-ey tia nam (rice noodle soup), khow laad nhaa gai (rice with chicken and bamboo), and other dishes in an outdoor restaurant. He passed silk stores, jewelry stores that catered toward ruby and sapphire-loving foreigners, and fast food restaurants. Then he went into Robinson Department Store.
In the restroom he relieved himself at a urinal that was furthest from the cleaning lady since her mopping presence there made him nervous and had the possibility of clogging him up. Then he sat down in the food court. His head was in vertigo like small children turning themselves around in the grass or the routine of one’s petty kinetic life. He often noticed affluent men walking around with girlfriends or wives in that male gesture of the hand of one arm clasping the other arm behind the back. The gesture conveyed that they were beyond the third world now. They had money, Bangkok had everything, and they would shop as befitting their status. He wanted to be them. He wanted out of his own skin to be a different person entirely but there was no exit for him in fast motion. The only consolation was in always evolving beyond that one seed, that one dividing cell that had started his life. There was still hope.
He saw a father and two girls with their many bags. He wanted a father like that instead of the one who had made him afraid to stand up, sit down, comb his hair, put on his pants, talk, or be silent without being excoriated. Only arduous work had offered him a respite from that man’s criticism. Only work had offered him that escape from being the cockroach running from his heels. Family wasn’t so ideal. At least his wasn’t. He was always cravenly scurrying away from one or more of them and vibrations they made. His mind spun around more wildly. He kept wishing that it would stay stolid and poised as statues of the Garuda and Kinnara, mythological creatures that permeated Thai art, literature, and dance.
He tried to focus in on beautiful ideas of family. He tried to breathe them in like the smell of drying clothes in the breeze or the smells of life replicating itself eternally in the verdant greenery on the outskirts of the city. All he could do was summon memories of Kumpee and their parents incessantly driven toward chasing any scheme that would put a few extra coins in their hands; Kazem’s secondhand treatment of his destitute brown Burmese woman a couple years earlier; Suthep whom he shared certain childish sympathies; and Kazem who was his protector. His head hurt and span: in school, out of school, struggling for subsistence as a group, the heads of the group dying, the move to Bangkok, and a thousand phantom faces that plagued his mind, exacerbating the throbbing. He tried to think of monks in their saffron robes with strapped metallic bowls dangling from their shoulders in which shopkeepers requiring blessings placed rice; the sweet taste of rambutans when the spiky core was broken and the transparent succulent egg was overtaken; and motorcycle taxi drivers with cardboard and pop bottle games that, with the tap of the nails of their fingers, kept their time of waiting from overwhelming them in boredom. A persistent fly over the table made him nervous and he thought that perhaps to counter the truths his subconscious spewed out in the form of the insect and his own need for stability (not just his environment changing but he, himself, was continually changing) he needed to invent a god for himself if nothing other than the God of Dirty Underwear. The persistent fly continued to besiege him so he left the department store and returned to his friends.
The “friends”—he did not know their names—seemed content with their circumstances. They, like he, were cuddled together under the overpass consuming and inhaling their amphetamine and glue molecule treats, which inadvertently gave them ice cream headaches. This intake delivered them from bleak realities to that of twirling and dizzy children while fantasies stepped forward as emperors of the spinning domain. At times when they were more conscious of their existence and surroundings (especially when feeling intensely hungry) these transients would beg. They had a method. If someone in a suit carrying a cellular telephone were standing in front of the cash register at a nearby convenience store with a long serpentine tail of customers waiting behind him, one of them would enter the store. Shocked by such a lugubrious display and needing to quickly expedite his exit with his bags, such an individual would give generously so as to not be perceived as parsimonious or niggard in the reaction.
It occurred to him that this word, “friend,” was not really what it at first seemed. If indeed people were all users attracted to others who gave them fresh insight into life or a respite for escaping it, these people were dismissed when that resource was exhausted. Still he wasn’t all that fond of them so the issue did not really matter all that much. He tried to smile at them but he could not. He was feeling sick to his stomach and their faces sometimes spun around in an erratic orbit.
It was like feeling the rush of air and dizzying changes of streets and buildings from the open portals of an old doorless bus that cast its shadow onto a bridge connecting Pinklao street to the area around the Grand Palace—how palpitating was this glue and amphetamine trip. At times it was a stronger feeling of thrust and omnipotent dominion like a surfer who could easily be plummeted by the waves he was riding. The waves, however, were verdant and edible. It was verdant the way nature at times looked like a green-berry cheesecake, and bovine, he wanted to eat it.
Seated under the stairwell of steps doing nothing in particular, he at times took out his pocket knife and engraved a puppet man driven on forcefully by its master to the pleasure and frenzy of rape, depositing its seeds in every possible hole (fertile or fallow). This alone was his only conscious achievement that day in a drug induced but sobering mind where subconscious images usurped their rational rulers. Careful not to look threatening with a knife in his hands, he timidly scraped out a master controlling the puppet man depositing himself in that meek lowly being.