I.
Gop’s email has been sitting in my inbox for nine days now. Five words. I have opened it maybe forty times, at this counter, on this laptop, the aluminum under my wrists gone warm enough that I have stopped feeling it, and I have not answered it, because the honest answer starts with a sentence about Dave and I do not have that sentence, and every hour I do not have it is an hour in which a man in Bangkok goes on believing I am broke and too proud to say so.
So instead of answering him I am going to do what I do, which is codify.
I’ve always had rules.
Not the sort of rules that get printed on signs and nailed to walls: no running by the pool, no diving in the shallow end, no soliciting in the lobby. My rules are internal, self-generated, the product of twenty-six years of field research conducted in the bars, saunas, hotels, and back seats of Bangkok, Pattaya, Chiang Mai, and the occasional ill-advised detour through Phuket. They are not written down. They do not require enforcement. They are the rules a man develops when he has been doing the same thing long enough that the doing has become a discipline, and the discipline has become the thing he uses to explain to himself why his life makes sense.
Rule One: Don’t fall in love.
This is the foundational rule. The load-bearing wall. The one upon which all other rules rest and from which they derive their authority. Not with a bar boy, a masseuse, a sauna stranger, a tuk-tuk driver, a vendor at the night market, or any other Thai national whose acquaintance you have made under circumstances that involve the exchange of currency for the proximity of flesh. Love, in this context, is a category error: the conflation of a man doing his job with a man doing his heart. And the forums are full of men who did it anyway and are now full of rage and bankruptcy and the particular bitterness that comes from realizing that the beautiful boy who called you teerak was running the same script on the man in room 407 and the man in room 212 and the man in room 819, simultaneously, on a schedule he never once wrote down.
Don’t fall in love.
I fell in love.
II.
Rule Two: Butterfly.
The butterfly philosophy is not a philosophy at all. It is a survival strategy disguised as a lifestyle, a defense mechanism dressed in the language of freedom. He flits. He does not land on any single flower for longer than the nectar lasts, keeps the field open, preserves the crucial asymmetry between chooser and chosen. He cannot be heartbroken, having distributed the organ across enough flowers that no single loss constitutes a wound. Free, then. Wise. Also, if we are being honest about the entomology, an organism with a brain the size of a poppy seed and a lifespan of approximately three weeks, which makes it a somewhat questionable role model for a man in his fifties.
I was a good butterfly. For decades. I flitted with purpose, with style, with the curated expertise of a veteran who could walk into any bar on Soi Twilight and have three boys massaging his shoulders within four minutes. I had favorites, but favorites were not commitments: a favorite was a bar boy you offed more than once, a flower you revisited when it was in bloom, a pleasant repetition that fell short of a pattern by exactly the margin necessary to maintain the fiction that no pattern existed.
I told Gop this. Early on. Silom after midnight, walking the long way back because he wanted noodles, the heat down to the merely uncomfortable, the pavement still giving back the day through my shoes and the smell coming off the carts in bands, charcoal, then fish sauce, then drains, then charcoal again. His hand in mine. Always his hand in mine, always in public, always the claiming, and always dropped the moment a taxi slowed or a face came round, picked up again three steps later as though the interruption had been weather. I told him I had been a butterfly, with the pride of a reformed smoker and the nostalgia to match.
“You butterfly before?” he asked. Parsing.
“Yes.”
“Now?”
“Now I’m… not.”
He walked four or five steps without saying anything. I watched him take the sentence apart in whatever order he takes sentences apart in, which has never been the order the words arrive in.
“Before you butterfly,” he said, slowly, “you have many boy. Now you have Gop. Gop better than many boy.”
My hand was still in his hand. I did not say anything, and he did not appear to need me to, and we walked on toward the noodles with twenty-three years of my life having just been valued, out loud, on a public street, by its new owner.
He reminded me of this often. Not as reassurance. Gop does not ask to be reassured, ever, about anything. He reminded me like a landlord mentioning the lease: periodically, without malice, knowing the agreement is in his favor and that the other party knows it too.
III.
Rule Three: Never get jealous.
Jealousy is the enemy of the butterfly and the poison of the patron. Jealousy is what happens when a man forgets the terms of the transaction: when he begins to believe that the body he’s rented is the body he owns, that the time he’s purchased extends beyond the hours he’s paid for, that the smile directed at him is not also directed at whoever will occupy this same bed tomorrow night and the night after that and the night after that.
Not of his other customers. They are his livelihood. Resenting them is like resenting the other patients in your doctor’s waiting room: irrational, counterproductive, and indicative of a confusion between professional service and personal devotion that no amount of Singha can excuse.
And not of his personal life, which he has, and which does not include you. It includes friends, family, a village in Isaan, a motorcycle, a gym, a phone full of numbers you will never see, a history you will never know, and, possibly, probably, certainly, a girlfriend, a wife, a child, a second customer who thinks he is the special one, a whole parallel existence conducted in a language you can’t speak and a culture you can’t enter and a register of intimacy that operates on principles so different from yours that comparing them is like comparing the weather on two different planets.
I am not speculating about the child. “Maybe I have baby,” Gop said once, in a taxi, apropos of a billboard with an infant on it, and has not said it again. Maybe. I put the word in the drawer where I keep bidness and up to you, and I have not opened it.
Never get jealous.
I don’t get jealous. This is true. This is also, if I am being precise, the easiest of the rules to keep, because the alternative would mean admitting that I care who Gop is with when I’m not there, admitting that the body I know better than my own is being known by other men on other nights in other hotels with other joiner fees and other folded tips beneath other water glasses. That alternative is a door I have chosen not to open, and the choice is cowardice, and the cowardice is a strategy, and the strategy is: if I don’t look, I don’t see, and if I don’t see, I don’t feel, and if I don’t feel, the rule holds.
The rule holds.
Mostly.
This is what mostly looks like.
March, a Thursday, the room off Sukhumvit, one in the afternoon. Gop is in the shower with the door shut. He always shuts it. The water has been going four minutes and will go eleven more, because it always goes fifteen, and I know that the way you know the sound of a spouse’s key in a lock. Steam comes under the door in a flat sheet along the tile and the AC gives up ground to it by degrees.
His phone is on the nightstand, face up, eight inches from my hand.
It lights. It lights again. It lights a third time. A name in Thai script that I can sound out but not read, then a different one, then a third that is not Thai at all, a farang’s first name in Latin letters with nothing after it, and the phone goes dark, and the room is the temperature of the inside of a mouth and smells of hotel soap and the specific chlorine of Bangkok tap water, and I am lying on top of the sheet in my shorts with one arm behind my head, looking at the ceiling, where there is a gecko, and I am composing a sentence.
Who is that.
Three words. I have the words. I have had the words for two years.
Here is the part that has never gone in a post. Three men have wanted him inside ninety seconds and I am hard. Not despite it. I am lying on a hotel sheet in the middle of the afternoon assembling the thing I claim I don’t want to see, and assembling it well, with the diligence I bring to a silver invoice: the room, the farang, the hour, Gop’s face doing what it does when the money has been agreed and the pretending can start. I get my hand under the waistband of my shorts before I have decided anything. Then I take it out, because finishing would make it something I did, and stopping lets me go on calling it a bad thought that passed through.
The jealousy and the wanting come in the same envelope in this room, every time, and I have not once opened it in front of him.
In the bathroom the water stops, and there is that half second where a man reaches for a towel, and my hand does not move the eight inches, and the sentence goes back wherever the sentences go. He comes out with the towel around his neck, picks the phone up off the nightstand without looking at it, puts it face down on the far side of the lamp where it was not before, and asks me what I want to eat.
We had lunch.
IV.
Rules Four and Five got a numbered section each in the original post, and neither of them has ever been a rule. They are Rules Two and One restated, and I gave them numbers because four rules looked unfinished and five looked like a system.
Rule Four: Variety is the spice of life. Which is Rule Two in a chef’s hat. I was a sommelier of bar boys. I could walk into a room I had never entered, into the cold coming off the door and the smell of ice going to water in a bucket of Singha, and inside twenty minutes have read the talent, priced the drinks, and picked out the one whose up to you energy matched the evening. It is a real skill. I was genuinely good at it. It is also the skill of a man who has eaten in every restaurant in the city and has never once cooked.
Gop is the meal at home. He is what I didn’t know I wanted because I was too busy sampling everything else, the one body in a city of bodies that fits against mine and makes all the others, the hundreds, the uncountable parade of skin and muscle and I do everything that marched through my hotel rooms, look like auditions for a role that had already been cast.
Rule Five: It’s just business. This is the one I say out loud, at dinner parties, over the good cutlery and a candle nobody wanted lit, when somebody’s eyebrows start for their hairline at the word Thailand. They’re professionals. Both parties benefit. The money supports a family. It is a service industry in which the service happens to involve orgasms. The rule has the advantage of being partly true. Partial truth is the dangerous kind, because it lets you believe the rest of it is covered.
Gop would agree, up to a point, and the point is where it stops being true for either of us.
Except that Gop does not charge me. He has never asked me for a fee. The off fee goes to the bar, the tip goes under the water glass, and neither is negotiated or demanded or conditional, and I have built an entire moral position on that fact. The position is this. I get to choose the number. That is not the absence of a price. That is a price I set myself, which is the most expensive kind there is.
V.
I wrote these rules for the blog. Codified them. Published them with the authority of twenty-six years’ practice, the earned right to dispense wisdom to the newcomers, the first-timers, the men who are about to make every mistake I’ve already made and will not be deterred by my warning because no man is ever deterred by another man’s warning about love. The post performed certainty. It radiated expertise. It said: I have been where you are, I know how this works, and here are the rules that will protect you from what is about to happen to you.
Two of the five were broken in the writing itself. I wrote Don’t fall in love in love. I wrote Butterfly while telling myself I was grounded, and that is the sentence I would take back first, because I am writing this at a kitchen counter in California with Dave’s running shirt over the back of the chair where he left it on Sunday, and Gop has not been told there is a chair. Dave has known about Gop for three years, by name, in detail, down to the email he wrote him himself. Gop knows Dave as my oldest friend and as the man who once wrote to him about a button, and does not know what the name has turned into since. I have kept him in circulation and kept him dark at the same time, and I am the only one who gets to decide which. I have not stopped flitting. I have widened the field to eight thousand miles and called it settling down. Four and Five I have just taken apart in front of you.
Five rules. None of them load-bearing.
The rules were real. The rules had worked. They had held for twenty-three years against the thing that was now happening. And on the other side of them was a man on Silom after midnight with my hand in his, who heard the whole apparatus out and priced it in four words. Now you have Gop.
Yeah. Now I have Gop.
The email is still open in the other window.
I am not going to reproduce that post. You have just read it, stripped of its confidence, which is the only honest way I know to hand it over. What went up the same week was a second post about a different set of rules: his. Unwritten, unnumbered, unpublishable. He has never broken one.
From the Blog, posted the same week
I Fell In Love With A Bar Boy: Because I Thai
In Which a Frenchman Is Misquoted, Eight Hundred Baht Is Spent on a Dead Princess, Two Plaster Figurines Change Hands Twice, and a Wallet Sits Where It Should Not
Some Frenchman said that a country’s institutions are a mirror of its people and not the other way round. I am almost certainly misquoting him and I am not going to look it up. Apply it to Thailand and you understand the place in about thirty seconds. Apply it to a relationship with a Thai bar boy and you understand nothing at all, but at least you know where the confusion is coming from.
Thailand runs on customs, not statutes. The laws exist, they are on the books, they have numbers and subsections and somebody typed them up in a government building with bad air conditioning, and no Thai I have ever met treats the law as more than decoration. Gold trim on a temple. Present, acknowledged, nothing whatsoever to do with the worship going on underneath it. In the West we say laws were made to be broken. In Thailand they’d wonder why you’d waste the effort breaking something that insignificant.
Gop was born knowing this. His explanation for any practice I find baffling is three words doing the work of argument, evidence and closing statement, which is “Because I Thai,” and I have had it applied to queue etiquette and to ghosts and to the correct temperature of rice and to the absolute impropriety of pointing your feet at a Buddha image while doing something considerably more offensive to that same Buddha three meters away, and in three years I have never once got him to extend it by so much as a fourth word, because making sense is a farang hobby and he has better things on.
Note which rules are the sacred ones. Not the written. The unwritten, the ones every Thai absorbs through the skin and no foreigner will ever get out of a book. Break one of those and you might as well have desecrated a shrine. The actual law, the statute, the thing with a number on it? Furniture. Move it if it’s in the way.
So. The Royal Funeral exhibition, which was somber and genuinely moving and which I would recommend to anybody. At the first stall inside the gate Gop spent eight hundred baht of his own money on a gold-framed portrait of the dead princess. That is more than he spends on himself in a week. He carried it against his chest for two hours in that heat with both arms under it like a man holding something it would be unthinkable to drop, and he would not let me hold it either. [photo of the portrait. it is on his wall now, hung at the height a farang hangs a diploma.]
My wallet was already out at the stall. He pushed it back without looking at it. Eight hundred baht, in a week I could have told you to the baht what he did not have, and he would not take it off me. I have been chewing on that one since. The one thing he actually wanted this year he bought with his own money, in front of me, and would not let me anywhere near it.
Then on the way out he tapped my shoulder outside the souvenir tent and opened his palm. Two little plaster babies he’d lifted off the display without paying. Big grin. “We no pay!”
I made him put them back and he did it, cheerfully, humoring a man whose culture has obviously damaged him.
Now reconcile that with one of the most fundamentally honest people I have ever known. Go ahead. I can’t. The reconciliation isn’t mine to make anyway. In Gop’s arithmetic, redistributing overpriced trinkets from a government stall staffed by people who could not care less does not land on the same scale as, say, lying to a friend about how you feel. First one is a misdemeanor of circumstance. Second one is a felony of the soul. His compass does not point at my north. It points at ITS north, every single time, which is more than I can say for mine.
His work has its own rules and they live in their own moral universe. He calls it bidness. In his taxonomy the service has almost nothing to do with the act the customer thinks he is paying for, and the few times he has complained about a client the grievance is always identical: “Sex, sex, sex. All he want is sex.” Like the man walked into a five-star restaurant and asked for the meal without the room, the conversation or any of the small courtesies that turn a transaction into an evening.
So I have my rules and Gop has his. Mine were made to be broken. His get observed, with the same reverence he brings to a royal funeral and a family obligation and the placement of his wallet in his back pocket, gapping open at the top, in a city of eleven million people, where anybody could take it and no Thai ever will.
Anyway. Then he held the door for a monk on the way out. I have never once been that consistent about anything in my life, and I have spent this month writing two thousand words telling other men how to live.
