By George F.
During a week-long toot through the seediest fleshpots of neon Bangkok, I lost my kindle. All I remember is that when I woke up on that empty coconut cart next to a go-go bar blasting techno, it was gone.
Up until that moment, I had been alternating between the works of two authors who would have recognised that situation of complete and dangerously irresponsible inebriation in one of the sleaziest cities in the world. They had probably had similar experiences in the Bangkok of the West, Los Angeles, when they lived there as contemporaries.
As I dusted myself off and went to find a quiet street to force pad thai into my alcohol-shrunken stomach, I wondered about whether Charles Bukowski and Philip K. Dick had ever crossed paths. I imagined them at some cafe in Hollywood, Bukowski morose, hungover, withdrawn, Dick talking ten to the dozen about some ethereal mind-warp, whizzing on speed and passing pills over the coffee. Bukowski wouldn’t have liked it; he once compared the meetings of writers to too many flies on a turd. Dick might have laughed back, saying about sci-fi writers that “our knowledge is limited, our fiction is terrible.” Maybe Chuck would have offered Dick to come in the back alley and fight. The image of these two word pugilists sizing up and beating the literary crap out of each other was appealing.
Yet the more I imagined this scene, the more I had read between the novels of Bukowski’s lowly dredge through life and Dick’s mind-bending canon of science fiction, I began to see more and more of an affinity between the two. Both were working stiffs with a love of the word –– Bukowski famously making his menial work the subject of Post Office and Factotum –– yet Dick also made his money getting paid per word to churn out pulp science fiction to feed his habits and his family. I found weird similarities and synchronicities beyond a shared city and a penchant for substance abuse. In many of his books, Dick uses German, repeatedly creates some alternate reality where the Nazis won the war, such as in The Man In The High Castle, but sometimes it is inexplicable why his characters will drop some in. Perhaps just because he knew of the associations that would be made, unexplained, in the post-war world. Bukowski too uses snippets of this language, and references his birth in Andernach, Germany, to German parents. Both authors were involved in the Reserve Officer Training Corps too, though neither chose to pursue any further involvement with the military after that. I began to wonder: could they in fact be the same person, split into different dimensions, into different personas, as in the protagonist from Dick’s A Scanner Darkly? Two authors, inhabiting the same body, but writing and living as two distinct beings?
***
The sun was just starting to rise, the effect in the subtropics akin to blearily opening one’s eyes when hungover, light creeping through closed lids to hit the retina and those struggling moments of half-consciousness whilst you try to piece together what happened the night before.
Bangkok just before dawn is populated almost entirely by elderly Thai men moving boxes of fruit and elderly Thai ladies sweeping dust from the pavement into piles of dust on the kerb. The neon lights flicker off, one by one, surrendering their bold iridescence to the insipid, smog-choked sunlight like fireflies dying on the branch. I am scuffing my way back towards Khao San Road, slipping through the ragged packs of farang tourists still humping the corpse of last night. I stop by the cash machine, my wallet bereft after the night’s saturnalia, and beep my way to solvency.
“Hey! Where you go?”
As I turn, I nearly bump foreheads with the slender, glitter-streaked ladyboy who has manifest behind me. She is smiling, buck-toothed and bright eyed, close enough to kiss me.
“Home. Home. Sleep.”
“I go with you.”
“No, no.”
“Then you go with me.”
“No, no.”
“I give good price for you.”
“No, it’s fine I––”
I feel it as she touches my arm, senses flaring: I’m being robbed.
Almost too quickly:
“Hey, where you go friend?”
A small, smiling Thai man in an Acapulco shirt has emerged. Everything happens at once. I feel a slight pressure on my arm. Everyone is talking at once. I pull away, retreating. Suddenly they have both disappeared.
I stagger away. Of course the money I just took out is gone. The ladyboy slipped it delicately out of my wallet whilst squeezing my arm as a distraction, just at the moment the man in the Acapulco popped up. Very slick, and thankfully quite painless. I sigh, just another mark with ATM on his forehead, and circle back round to the cash machine to get more.
What would Dick and Chuck have made of ladyboys? Perhaps here was a living embodiment of the concept of multiple personalities in one form, of recreating one’s reality and one’s world through gender-transformation, a blurring of normative distinctions to create new possibilities.
Dick’s summary of his writing deals with two questions: “what is reality?” and “what is an authentic human being?” His answer to the first was “reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t disappear.” Well, just because you don’t believe a man appearing as a woman is really a woman, they don’t disappear, so therefore represent some kind of reality. Especially if they are pickpocketing you.
I pull into a cafe, just off Khao San, and slump down into a wicker chair. The waitress giggles her way over, smiling smiling, and I order a breakfast and a pitcher of Chang. There is no other way to proceed at this juncture. In less than an hour, Khao San’s markets will blaze to life with pounding music and chattering hordes of tourists and sleep in the little cupboard I’ve hired which still seems to be under construction will be impossible. The whole of Bangkok seems to be under construction, growing and evolving new tiers and terraces as the concrete and asphalt swallows the last vestiges of its pre-boom past. As the beer arrives, I watch a farang stagger down the road clutching the hand of a square-shouldered angel in six-inch heels, tottering through the trash and beer bottles. Bukowski must have run into many transexuals and transvestites, pushed as they are to the dive-bars and gutters of society, yet he never mentioned any explicitly in his writing. In Factotum, he captures a scene when drinking alone in his room by saying that “reality is still out there, but at least for a while it doesn’t have you by the throat.” Nursing my Chang beer in the relative safety of the cafe, I felt I could relate to that. Out here on the streets, you never knew how long it would be before reality had you pinned to the wall yet again. The sex-workers and pushers and hustlers of Khao San knew it all too well, whilst the tourists bought themselves only momentary respite by virtue of their overseas budget and tourist mentality.
Suck beer. Eat greasy eggs. Stare back at the two waitresses giggling to each other behind cupped hands. One of them approaches.
“Where you from?”
“England.”
“Oh, like David Beckham.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“You have girlfriend?”
“No.”
“You want to meet me later? You take me out.”
“OK then.”
I take her number, give her mine. We arrange to meet at the cafe in the afternoon, when she finishes her shift. It feels genuine, two people just meeting, wanting to meet again. Probably best not to overthink right now, just go with the flow, keep it serene and surreal. Repeatedly in his books Bukowski plays with the idea of “authenticity” –– his protagonist is called “Hank Chinaski” –– as it is apparent that it is he himself, starring in the novels of his own life. There are repetitions, elements of him remembering his past in Factotum are developed into a full reminiscence of his childhood in Ham On Rye. The themes of a parallel, almost fictional reality is developed in his later book Hollywood –– about his experiences writing the screenplay for the film that would be released as Barfly. In that, he describes a moment that could have been straight out of a Philip K. Dick novel, when he stands on the edge of the shoot, watching an actor playing him as a young man, creating a simulation of his own life.
I finish the beer, mop up the egg with bread and with some difficulty force it down. Paying, I stagger out into the tropical smog and feel immediately the stifling claustrophobia of Bangkok sink down upon me. Dodging traffic and the constant mewling calls of street-hawkers, I skip narrowly into a pharmacy and smile at the proprietor like a good wholesome customer.
“Hello. I have a flight to catch. I want to stay awake.”
He smiles, happy, nodding.
“Yes yes, I have. Here. Fat-burner. Fat-burner. Help you burn fat.”
“OK then.”
I smile, thinking how skeletal I look after two weeks of beer and humidity and budgeting a minimal amount for solid food. I buy a fistful of the little orange pills, pocketing some and downing the others. This seems natural, effortless. Bolstered, I step out, back into the heat of the streets.
I buy some bottles of Leo at the 7-11 and park myself on the street, lighting a cigarette and flapping my flip-flops idly as I settle in to watch the parade up and down Khao San. Tanned, sarong-wrapped psytrance bunnies sashay past, hulking great Anglo-American college kids with loud voices and arrogant swaggers, grey old leches cruising like killer whales, some supported by an escort of young, delicate Asian girls. Aliens, freaks, a weird medley of colours and shapes and ideas blending and melting into one another. A vision of the future, dystopic and cruel; yet somehow that mutual savagery works, the society functions, the swill makes a new social soup. Bukowski’s final novel and his clearest attempt at fiction is the flawed yet fascinating Pulp. This swansong piece, which he completed only weeks before his death and feels like it could have benefitted from some rewriting, blends sci-fi elements within a film noir context. There is a reference to “that drunk Chinaski” as a peripheral character; Celine is alive and living in Los Angeles; Lady Death hires a private dick; aliens are among us on the earth. The main character –– a hard-boiled detective with a thirst for the drink –– deals with these supernatural and extraterrestrial flavours with complete credulity. In a Philip K. Dick book called The Simulacra there appears a character who, at first seems human, then is revealed as an alien, and finally turns out to be a Disneyland animatronic simulant. As I watch the schools of farang, intermittently populated by sweeping Thai sharks and lumbering policeman, I look and look, piercing the layers of people’s facades, looking for that deeper spark within them. Some walk heavily, laden with lust, whilst others float and flit transcendently. But how deep can I truly read them? Do they create their mask, or does their mask create them?
***
Drunk suddenly, I am staggering through different crowds. This isn’t Khao San. The sky is dark once again, inked an insipid orange as the city lights hit the smog. The mood has shifted, the bars now pounding techno-dance-beats at a frenzied BPM, the neon-saturated mezzanines filled with the staring eyes of lycra clad nymphs. A girl, face streaked in warpaint glitter, steps out into the road and screams at me.
“OI!”
She mimes shoving something long and cylindrical into her throat, and then into her groin in a grotesque street-performance. The effect is repulsive, and I reel on, trying to escape her. How did I get here? I have a can of Chang in one hand. I don’t remember buying it.
Patpong –– one of the famous red light districts of Bangkok. Here as well the cruising atmosphere of Khao San –– herds and packs and solo predators sleekly mingling amongst one another. A raging catastrophe of sound, sex and seething desires. The eyes seek one another, wanting to hypnotise and seduce, wanting to possess and control.
Somehow I am talking to a huge, swollen fruit of a man in garish Hawaiian shirt, a woman clinging to his side like a lizard on a durian.
“Both of them use broken narratives, lost sections, even parts where characters ‘read’ their own story, in a weird warping of literature reflecting a tenuous grip on reality,” I am babbling, my tongue and thoughts nimble with amphetamine. “For Bukowski, it takes the form of alcoholic blackouts, where he is informed later of his antics by co-workers, normally shortly before calmly accepting his pink slip and lay-off pay and heading off to a bar. In Factotum, during one of his drunken debauches, he and his girl turn up at the apartment of a woman who had evicted them just the day before, and they only realise when they see the horror-struck look on her face.”
The guy surprises me by responding in a thick, Texan drawl:
“In Lies Inc, also known as The Unteleported Man, the original book was published missing about 30,000 words. Dick died before rewriting the sections that were lost over thirty years before. The end result is sections of the narrative that stop mid-sentence and restart somewhere else, often with some wild non sequitur in what is happening. The whole experience has a feel of a delirium tremens flashback that Dick would, I’m sure, be proud of, y’all.”
***
The bar we are sat in has a wall full of sex toys: dildos of all shapes and sizes, ball-gags, a selection of ropes, a bullwhip, cat-o-nines, spanking paddle, an eye-watering range of butt-plugs and other devices too weird and incomprehensible for me to deduce the purpose of. In the centre of the room is a cage tall enough for a man to stand in, into which the Texan has crammed himself, like a pig in a pen. A woman in a peaked biker-cap is stalking around him, cursing him in Thai, occasionally spitting on him through the cage bars.
There is another young Thai woman, dressed in a leather harness, kneeling between my legs, her hands braced against my knees, trailing her hair over my crotch. She lifts up a burning candle to drop hot wax over my stomach. I have a drink in one hand –– gin and tonic –– and I suck an ice-cube thoughtfully as wax splatters onto my navel.
“You want private session? You come upstairs?”
“Sure.”
She leads me by one hand to the wall, and together we choose a variety of toys to take with us. Up the stairs we go, as she explains the system to me.
“We use safe words, OK? Green is go, yellow danger, red is stop.”
“OK.”
Both writers used words to save themselves and stay sane. Dick created a Gnostic metanarrative based on his Christian background to give sense to the world. Despite the paranoia and confusion, Dick maintained a thread of optimism, a hope for redemption in the midst of madness. In Ubik, he asks:
“How does one fashion a book of resistance, a book of truth in an empire of falsehood, or a book of rectitude in an empire of vicious lies? How does one do this in front of the enemy?”
In the bathroom, we strip naked and bathe together. Her name is Poo. I laugh, supine on the inflatable mattress, slugging gin-and-tonic as she soaps my back and stomach. After we are clean, she leads me to the St. Andrew’s cross and ties my wrists and ankles to it with blue rope.
“Can you pass me my drink?”
I have to ask two more times, and clink the ice in the glass gently before she realises what I mean. She takes the glass from my hand and delicately feeds me some. A little runs down my chin, and she catches it with a sweet-smelling finger, feeding the droplets into my mouth. She begins to attach clothes-pegs to my ears, nipples, ballbag, glans.
To find meaning. Bukowski remained defiantly nihilistic, locked in the meaninglessness yet finding sense in the poem, the novel, the word. He used writing and inebriation to deal with post-war America: the simulants and automatons of the everyday work world, the screaming endless women who fought and scratched and caused such chaos. Phil had 5 wives in his time. Chuck dedicated a novel to prostitutes –– Women –– in which he sums up his belief in nothing most succinctly:
“I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn’t have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn’t make for an interesting person. I didn’t want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone. On the other hand, when I got drunk I screamed, went crazy, got all out of hand. One kind of behavior didn’t fit the other. I didn’t care.”
“Red! Red! RED!”
She undoes the peg that caused so much pain. I feel my body flush with adrenaline, nerve ends tingling, head swimming with a rush of blood. I am babbling, ecstatic, pulling on the rope restraints and shouting. The Thai girl is smiling, her almond eyes sparkling with delight as she grabs the cat-o-nines and begins to delicately thrash my chest.
“If LA is Disneyland, then Dick would be riding the thrills –– ow–– exploring the Epcot Centre, wigging out on acid and mescaline, rapping with –– ah –– rapping with Mickey and Goofy, paranoid that the Disney security was following him. Ow! Green! Bukowski would be working there, mopping up lung-butter –––yeah! Green! –– and sneaking rum and whiskey in the Pirates of the Caribbean backroom. Ah! Yellow!”
***
Outside now, I am vomiting gin and noodles on to the tips of my flip-flops. I can feel it splatter against my feet, my shins. I don’t care anymore. Behind me, the city traffic brays and chokes the humid night with toxic fumes. I have to find a way back, but I have no real idea where I am, and my body seems to be reacting violently against my excesses: I am poisoned.
Looking around, I realise I am poolside at the Bangkok Hilton, on a sunlounger, with the sky burning above me and tourists staring incredulously. I have just been sick off the balcony on to the rooftop below. I pull my shades on and lie down.
On the lounger, I hallucinate. Waiters emerge and approach me, offering watermelon and coconut to quench my raging thirst, yet when I reach for them they melt into the ground, becoming ephemeral flashes of the past. A young girl in a sailor outfit leans over me, asks if I am alright. When I respond, I realise there is no-one there. I am talking only to myself.
“Their settings weren’t glamorous sci-fi utopias but the drabness of everyday lowlife. In Dick’s works, often new worlds colonised just end up becoming new suburbs –– the endlessly weird and monotonous suburbs of the States spreading to the moon. Colourful backdrops, maybe, but filled with characters who are alcoholics, psychopaths, drug addicts, wastrels and rejects. The scum of Hollywood and skid row captured for posterity by Bukowski, sent to the distant stars by Dick–– but inspired by the same experiences and culture.”
I shake and sweat and mumble in my delirium, the silver towers of Bangkok stretching up to pierce the azure sky, oppressive overhead, the heat and the smog choking my lungs and my mind. If I could just get a drink, I know I’d feel better. I begin a long search for the waiter and his Pyrrhic medicine.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
George F. is a writer, performance poet and natural farmer who has travelled extensively across Europe and Asia working with socially excluded groups ranging from the homeless in London to heroin addicts and street kids in Kuala Lumpur. His first book Total Shambles — about anarchy, alcohol and squatting empty buildings — is available now from Influx Press. You can read more of his articles and interviews at: www.thelifeanarchic.com
