I.
Here is what Gop costs me, annualized.
I am writing this down at the kitchen counter at four in the morning, with Thursday’s lot still spread on the felt and the scale still out beside it and a mug of coffee going cold at my elbow, because writing things down is what I do when the thing refuses to stay in the comfortable fog of approximation and demands to be counted. I am a silver dealer. I weigh things for a living: grams, troy ounces, the difference between .925 sterling and .950 hill-tribe alloy that can mean forty dollars on a necklace. Precision is not a personality trait. It is a professional requirement. And the one I have been avoiding weighing, the one I have been keeping on the shelf marked don’t touch, don’t measure, don’t look directly at it or it will look back, the thing is the financial architecture of my relationship with Gop.
Off fee: six hundred baht per night, paid to the bar. At current exchange rates, approximately eighteen dollars. I off him every night I’m in Bangkok, which averages ten nights per trip, three trips per year. That’s thirty off fees. Eighteen thousand baht. Five hundred and forty dollars.
Tip: two thousand baht per night, given to Gop directly. Not negotiated, not discussed, not itemized on any receipt or logged in any ledger. Placed on the nightstand in the morning, folded once, tucked beneath the water glass, in a gesture so routinized it has become invisible, like breath you stop noticing until someone asks you to describe it. Sixty thousand baht per year. Eighteen hundred dollars.
Joiner fee: seven hundred baht per night, paid to the hotel. The hotel’s cut for tolerating the presence of a young Thai man in a room registered to a middle-aged American, a transaction that is not illegal but occupies the same moral territory as a building inspector accepting an envelope: everyone knows what’s happening, no one mentions it, and the fee ensures that not-mentioning continues. Twenty-one thousand baht per year. Six hundred and thirty dollars.
Meals: breakfast, lunch, dinner, and the snacks Gop acquires throughout the day, following the Thai principle that eating is not an event but a continuous process, a stream rather than a series of meals. Gop eats when food is near, which in Bangkok means always. I estimate, and this is conservative, four hundred baht per day in food. Not thirty days of food. Three hundred. I pay for the man’s eating whether I am in the country or not. I do not remember deciding that. I found the line already open in the second year, when the wire transfers stopped being about the gym. One hundred and twenty thousand baht per year. Three thousand six hundred dollars.
Gym membership: I started covering this after the move to Hot Male. Fifteen hundred baht per month. Eighteen thousand baht per year. Five hundred forty dollars.
Protein supplements, vitamins, the specific brand of Thai-manufactured whey isolate that Gop insists is superior to the imported brands and that costs, per tub, approximately what I spend on a week’s worth of eBay listing fees: eight hundred baht per month. Nine thousand six hundred baht per year. Two hundred and ninety dollars.
The bodybuilding sponsorship: competition entry fees, travel to competitions, the coaching sessions with a trainer at his gym whose qualifications I have never verified and whose methods I cannot evaluate but whose results are visible every time Gop takes off his shirt. He takes off his shirt frequently. Call it variable. Call it thirty thousand baht per year. Nine hundred dollars.
That line was supposed to have a second column.
Dave’s Donate button went up eight days after Bakersfield and it is still up. In the first month it took four hundred and ten dollars, and better than half of that arrived inside a fortnight, from six people, two of whom I have met. In the two weeks since, it has done nine dollars. I have never told Dave either number and he has never once asked me for it, which is how I know he has looked.
So the line above is mine. It reads as a sponsorship on this list because that is the word Dave gave it in the car, and I have gone on using it in front of Gop, who has no reason to know the difference and has never asked where the money starts.
Clothing: the shirts I buy that he wears for a day and discards, the jeans, the sneakers, the single pair of dress shoes he owns and wears to funerals and to the one restaurant we visit annually that has a dress code. Twenty thousand baht per year. Six hundred dollars.
The wire transfers between trips: not the gym and not the protein. Those have their own lines above and arrive on a schedule I could set a watch by. The other ones. The brother’s hospital deposit. The month the roof on the red road went. The motorbike payment that was mentioned once, in passing, with no request attached to it, which is how a request is made. These arrive at Western Union with no line item, because giving them a line item would make them a loan and neither of us wants that word in the room. Fifty thousand baht per year, and I am not going to convert this one, because the number in dollars is small enough to be embarrassing and I would rather leave it in his currency, where it built a roof.
Phone credit. Taxi money. The incidentals: a new phone case, a pair of sunglasses, the occasional piece of gold jewelry that Gop buys for his mother using my credit card and my understanding of the Thai family obligation network. Thirty thousand baht per year. Nine hundred dollars.
Total: three hundred seventy-six thousand, six hundred baht.
Approximately eleven thousand, three hundred dollars.
I will round up. Twelve thousand dollars per year. One thousand per month. Thirty-three dollars per day. The cost, annualized and amortized, of being in love with a bar boy from Isaan.
II.
Here is what Gop costs me, emotionally.
I can’t put a number on this. Numbers are what I do for a living, but the conversion rate between baht and feeling has not been established by any exchange booth I’ve visited, and I’ve visited them all: the real Super Rich in Pratunam with the orange awnings, the fake Super Rich across the street with the green awnings and the bad rates, the kiosk on Silom near the BTS stairs that buys but doesn’t sell. None of them post the rate for what it costs to lie awake at four in the morning in a condo in Culver City doing math that has nothing to do with silver and everything to do with the space between trips.
The space between trips is where the cost accumulates, and it is not accumulating in dollars. Dollars are finite, calculable, absorbed into the quarterly P&L like any other business expense. The cost is the hundred and six days. Skype calls where his icon says offline, because Gop treats a phone as a device for making calls and not as a portal to another person’s loneliness. A condo with the air conditioning running in it. The exchange rate at two in the morning, checked for no professional reason at all, because checking the exchange rate is the closest thing to checking on Gop that the distance permits.
And the question I do not ask, which other people keep asking for me, in their own words and never in these. The German at Babylon came closest, in a towel, and did not even put it as a question. Dave came at it sideways at ninety miles an hour in the dark, wanting to know what Gop got out of it, which is the same question stood on its head. The blog’s commenters manage it monthly, with varying proportions of sympathy and condescension. My mother asked her version once. Underneath all of them is one sentence, and none of them has ever said it out loud:
What are you actually paying for?
There is a smaller question underneath it that costs more. I have never put it in a post. I am going to set it down here and then walk away from it.
He has never wanted me.
Not once, not in any way I could hold up in front of a hostile witness. I want to be exact, because being exact is the only tool I have left. He is affectionate. He is generous with the affection and he does not ration it and he has never made me feel like a customer being handled. Most men in my position do not get that. He arrives when he says he will. He touches me in the street where his own people can see it. When I am in the room he is there, entirely, with none of himself kept back.
And in all of it he has not once been the one who wanted. Willing every time. Hungry no time. His body does what it is asked to do and it does it beautifully, and in three years it has yet to cross a room toward me on its own account. He is hard when the work requires it. His profession installed that in him at nineteen, and I have used it, and paid for it, and made jokes about it on the internet. So the single piece of evidence a man would ordinarily read as he wants me is, in his case, worthless. I broke the instrument myself and now I cannot take the reading.
So I check other things instead. I check whether he texts first. I check how long the hug runs past its useful length. I check the arm, the weight of it, the fact that it arrives in the dark when nobody is awake to be performed at. I have built an entire forensics out of ambiguous evidence and I run it constantly and it never returns a verdict, and the running of it is most of what I do when I am not working.
That is the cost. Not the twelve thousand. The cost is that I will pay any amount to be in a room with a man and will never know whether he would be in it for free.
Dave stood at this counter yesterday morning eating my cereal out of the bowl with the chip in it, seven o’clock, hair wet, in the gym shorts that live in my second drawer now and have lived there since some point I could not date if you paid me. He read something on his phone and did not talk to me. After thirty years there is nothing left for either of us to perform, which is a thing I have never been able to say about a hotel room. He put the bowl in the sink and did not rinse it. He has never rinsed a bowl in his life.
It cost nothing. Not the bowl, not the drawer, not the thirty years.
I ran the forensics on Dave once, three weeks ago, for about four seconds. Then I stopped, because the instrument works perfectly well on Dave. It returns a verdict immediately and the verdict is not in doubt and never has been. What is in doubt is the man at the counter at four in the morning, doing arithmetic on a body eight thousand miles away while the evidence he says he cannot obtain sleeps eleven feet down the hall, and has done, on and off, since June.
My mother asked it in her own kitchen with her back to me, drying a pan she had already dried, and I gave her the pan version, and she let me get all the way to the end of it. Then she put the pan down and turned around and looked at me, and she has not asked again in the nine years since, and she sees me every Thanksgiving.
I have had a long time to work out what I would say now.
I still say it. I have said it so many times that it has stopped requiring me to be present for it, and every time it comes out I can hear my mother not asking.
Twelve thousand dollars per year.
I’ve spent more on cameras.
III.
Buffalo die.
This is the phrase: the joke, the cliché, the shorthand that every farang who has ever been in a relationship with a Thai bar boy knows the way a sailor knows the word reef: as a warning, a navigational hazard, a thing to be spotted from a distance and steered around with the wariness of someone who has heard the stories of those who didn’t.
My buffalo die. The text arrives. The email. The Facebook message at two in the morning. The family’s buffalo has perished, and without a buffalo the family cannot farm, and without farming the family cannot eat, and without eating the family will die, and since you, farang, have money and love and the moral obligation that love confers, the cost of a new buffalo: twenty thousand baht, thirty, fifty, the number inflating with each retelling like a dirigible filling with the hot air of manufactured crisis, the cost falls to you.
It is the oldest scam in the playbook and every grizzled expat at the end of every bar has a version of it. The family is always real: the mother in Isaan, the siblings, the paddies, the roof. The animal never is.
Nobody has said buffalo to me in fifteen years. Gop would sooner eat his own phone than use the line.
His text was about his brother’s illness, the hospital bills, the slowness of business, the need for a loan. I felt the reef anyway. I heard the stories. I saw, in my mind’s eye, every forum post, every blog comment, every head-shaking expat who would read this paragraph and mutter, See? Told you. They always do this. The buffalo always dies.
You’re welcome. And fuck you.
I sent the money. Wired it through the same Western Union that had provided the T-shirt. The same booth across from Soi Twilight where Gop had stood, grinning, collecting my previous transfers cheerfully, treating wire transfers as a natural feature of the relationship landscape, like monsoon rains or Tuesday specials at the gym.
I sent it because I decided to remove the bar boy from the equation: not a bar boy, not a Thai, not a body I’d memorized, a cock I’d held, an arm that had weighed eight pounds across my chest at four in the morning, but a friend, and if a friend asked for a loan, I would lend it, and I would lend it on the only terms I have ever lent anything on. A loan to a friend is a gift. I do not ask for it back. I have never in my life asked for it back. Asking makes it a debt, and a debt is a thing one man holds over another, and I have enough of those in the room already. No naysayers, no forum posts, none of the thirty-year baggage of every farang who ever got taken by a dead buffalo. A friend asked for help. I helped. And it felt good. This is the part the cynics will never understand, the part that can’t be converted to baht or plotted on a graph of gullibility. Charity had nothing to do with it. It was the goodness of being the one someone turns to when the world turns difficult. The goodness of being trusted.
Three months later: Bangkok. Short trip, just over a week. Chatuchak on the Saturday, the aisles narrowing to the width of one man’s shoulders, the air going to fry oil and joss smoke and the wet green smell of cut orchid stems in their buckets, the sun coming through the tarpaulins in a sick orange that made everybody the same shade of unwell. Gop bought grilled pork on a stick from the woman he buys it from every time, who did not have to be told, and ate it walking, and put the stick in my hand to hold while he counted his change. The gym in the late afternoons, rubber and chalk and old sweat, three fans turning without moving any air, Gop under the bar with his eyes shut and his mouth open. The room in between, where the AC lost ground all afternoon and got it back around six. The bar at night. Neither of us mentioned the money. The subject sat in the room like the five-hundred-dollar bet had sat in the car on the I-15, except that Dave brought the bet up every forty miles and neither of us brought this up at all.
On the last night the tip goes out before bed instead of in the morning, because the airport car comes at five. That night he came out of the shower before I had done it. He does not come out of that bathroom first. He has done it once in three years, on a night I had come in already clean from somewhere else, which I did not count. It took me until the plane to work out that he had been waiting for it, and that he had been waiting for it all week. The lamp on his side has a broken switch, so the only light in that room was the bathroom’s, coming through the door he had left standing open behind him. He had the towel around his neck and his boxer briefs on and his hair still flat and wet. He said sit down. I sat on the end of the bed. He took an envelope off the top of his folded jeans, where it had been lying under my eyes all evening and where I had not once looked.
Inside was the exact amount I had wired him. Not the tip. His.
He counted it out first, standing over me, note by note into his own palm, so that I would see it was all there and would have no way to pretend later that it hadn’t been. Then he held it out, and I took it, because there is nothing else to do with a hand holding money out at you.
No words. No speech. No dramatic gesture.
A wai. Deep. A wai you give to a monk, or to a parent, or to a person whose generosity has created an obligation that the wai, pressed palms, bowed head, the formal geometry of Thai respect, is the only adequate instrument for discharging.
I translated it immediately, because translating is what I do instead of feeling: thank you, this mattered, I am not a buffalo story, I am your friend, and friends pay back their loans. That is my translation. It is not a transcript. What happened in the room was that a man stood eighteen inches from my knees with the bathroom light on one side of his face, close enough that the shower was still coming off him, the wet heat of it and the hotel soap, pressed his palms together, bowed his head, said nothing at all, and did not raise it again for what felt like a long time, and I sat there on the end of the bed holding his money in one hand, at the wrong height for any of it, with two thousand baht folded once in my shirt pocket that I had not yet put out and now could not, because putting it out after that would have been an answer to something and I did not know what the something was. You cannot pay a man back for paying you back. There is no line for it in any ledger I know how to keep.
IV.
Here is what Gop costs me, compared to the alternative.
The alternative is Babylon, two hundred and thirty baht at the door, and whatever they want they want it once. Nobody at that address has ever asked me for a tub of whey isolate or a wire on the fourteenth for a brother’s hospital deposit. It is a closed transaction and it is efficient and it is what I did for twenty-three years before Gop. You have just watched me do it. I am not going to describe it again.
I’ve read them, the papers on the economics of paid sex, the research from Cambridge on how regular orgasms raise earning potential by five percent, the cheerful arithmetic that converts ejaculations into salary increments. An economist would look at the spreadsheet above and conclude that I am overpaying. Twelve thousand a year for something available at two hundred and thirty baht a head, and he would put the difference down to emotional externalities that a rational actor would have eliminated years ago.
The economist would be right. And the economist would be missing the point so completely that the miss itself would constitute a kind of precision: knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
What the economist would also miss is this. Of the two of us, Gop is the better American. I mean this technically, not sentimentally. He identified his one marketable asset early and has managed it since with a discipline that would embarrass a Wharton graduate. He reinvests his earnings in the asset itself: the protein, the coaching, the gym. He upgrades his distribution channel whenever the numbers justify it, Lucky Boys to Hot Male to, someday, Tawan, which in his industry is the equivalent of making partner. He supports a family on the proceeds. He is building a house. He has a five-year plan and a senior-division trophy picked out for a shelf that does not exist yet. Nobody handed him anything. He is the only self-made man I know personally, and he made himself out of the single raw material he was issued at birth. I was issued the country that invented the pitch, the bootstraps, the ladder, the dream, and what I have made is a feedback score, a condo that smells like nothing, and a spreadsheet proving I can afford him. The bars are not the opposite of the American dream. The bars are the American dream with the fluorescent lights on: a market where ambition wears a numbered tag, capital compounds in mirrors, and every man is worth exactly what he can sell. For twenty-six years I told myself I flew eight thousand miles to escape my country. I have been commuting to its purest expression the whole time.
Twenty-six years ago a man walked into that soi with nothing to declare. A butterfly. Free. He cost nothing and was worth exactly what he paid.
This man costs twelve thousand dollars a year.
Twelve thousand, less the loan, which came back. I have tried three times tonight to take it off the total and the subtraction will not hold, because the money returned and whatever it had bought did not come back with it.
It is getting light over the parking structure across the street. The lot is still on the felt where I left it, forty-one pieces I have not weighed one of, and the scale beside it has been holding a reading of zero all night with nothing on the pan. The coffee is cold and I am going to drink it anyway.
From the Blog, posted the following month
I Fell In Love With A Bar Boy: Money in the Bank
In Which a Nineteen-Year-Old Becomes a Diplomatic Channel, a Bar Boy Offers to Buy an Airline Ticket, and a Five-Word Question Turns Out to Be About Entirely the Wrong Thing
So my nephew Jake is nineteen and my nephew Jake is now, apparently, a diplomatic channel. [no photo. picture a kid who owns four gaming chairs and no chair.]
Him and Gop got to be friends by shooting each other in the head on a screen for six hours at a stretch, which is what men do when neither one of them speaks the other’s language worth a damn. Started when Jake came out to Bangkok on what got billed to his mother as cultural enrichment and was about getting laid, and they spent whole afternoons at Gop’s place obliterating each other, and they have kept it up online ever since. Gop has decided Jake is family. He hands that out with the permanence of a tattoo and the casualness of a handshake and there is no appeals process. Jake has decided Gop is material. “Yeah, I game online with a Thai stripper” apparently kills at fraternity events, so we are all getting something out of this.
It was harmless right up until it wasn’t. “Gop says hi” is fine. “Gop says he hasn’t heard from you” is a guilt trip routed through a nineteen-year-old proxy server. Then I got “we need to talk about Gop,” delivered with the gravity of a boy six months out from losing his virginity, and that is how a man finds out his avoidance strategy has sprung a leak.
So here’s the thing I left out of the last four posts. I didn’t go to Thailand in June and I didn’t go in July. That wasn’t scheduling. Since June there has been a thing happening between Dave and me that neither of us has agreed to call anything, and it turns out you can spend three years flying eight thousand miles to avoid being known and then, handed a second option, just sit in Culver City and avoid that one instead. Efficient, really. Same coward, shorter commute. I hadn’t explained any of it to Gop. Hadn’t explained it to Dave either, but Dave was in the room, and being in the room does most of the explaining for you.
Gop noticed. Of course he noticed. Asking me directly would have been efficient and un-Thai, so he worked Jake over instead, a run of increasingly pointed messages disguised as casual gaming chat, and Jake, caught between loyalty to me and actual concern, cracked like a cheap plate. And then called me.
Here is what Gop had worked out on his own, eight thousand miles away, with no help from anybody. My finances were in trouble. The tourist economy has been soft for years and his regulars keep turning up apologetic about their domestic economies as though a bar boy in Bangkok tracks the Eurozone, and in Gop’s arithmetic the simplest explanation for a man who stops arriving is that the man has run out of money. So he had a solution ready. He was going to buy my ticket.
A bar boy. Flying his farang boyfriend business class from Los Angeles to Bangkok. Out of his own savings, which I know the size of, because I am the one who knows. I sat with that one a while. It has everything in it I have spent three years failing to say about this man in a hundred and fifty posts, the directness and the generosity and the flat refusal to let money run one way only in a relationship the entire internet has already filed as a sluice.
I didn’t need the ticket. The bidness, as its senior analyst in Bangkok would call it, is fine. What I needed was to tell him about Dave, and I had been running my two favorite relationship management techniques back to back, which are ignoring the problem and then procrastinating about ignoring it. Neither worked. Neither of them is what arrived, either. Gop’s email skipped the weather and skipped the economic analysis. Five words. One question. “Why you not tell me?”
He means the money. He means: you were in trouble and you didn’t come to me, after I came to you about my brother and you wired it the same day and never asked for it back. That’s the whole case, and he built it out of the only evidence he’s got, which is a man who stopped arriving. In his version I’m proud and secretive and too farang to take help off a Thai. He’s right about all three. He’s got the wrong noun.
I read it four times looking for Dave in it. Dave is not in it. Dave is in me, and has been since June, and there I sat in California getting asked why I hadn’t trusted a bar boy with a poverty I don’t have, by a bar boy who was offering to fly me business class out of his own savings. Huh. That one looks worse written down than it did in my head.
So no, I haven’t answered him, and yes, I know what some of you are going to say about that. He asked the right question. He just asked it about money.
