Days Volume Two

* Hard eyed girls served him drinks in the girly bars, their hands massaging him like black moths. He didn't like any of it. The boys were out for a drink. It was their world. Naked appetites. Things not seen. Rooms. Places above the stairs. Levels of desperation. Hard, black eyes which never smiled. All was a farce. All was different. Beyond this point there will be no memory. He was shadowed by something he could not see. He was walking hand in hand with someone who simply wasn't there. He courted psychosis and let it die away, like an ancient breed. The world had become a very complicated place. He was skipping across fate lines because there was no choice. There were shadows everywhere, in the pot holed streets. Wealth cut swaves through the indigenous poor. Surely there were more important things than drunken westerners stumbling into bars, begging to be fleeced. There were other ways of being. Other paths. He was shot through with envy and happy to be alive; fragile, ques

* He had woken up at the end of his own life; felt frail, felt feverish, indistinct, unreal. Outside the sun beat down mercilessly. Yet all was frail, all was unreal. He could not connect. He did not want to go outside. He did not want to see what there was to see. Mass murder was just another item in a crowded life. Too much had been absorbed. He was skipping across fate lines and was now at the end of one path, the beginning of another. Times were quiet, muffled, indistinct. Shadows were everywhere, yet he couldn't see past them. There were other things to be doing, yet he could not do them, not here, not now. It was going to be a long time before he felt sane again. If memory kept him alive, they too were feeble and indistinct. If life boiled down to only a few distinct fates, what did it matter what path he chose? He had done as much of the right thing as he could possibly manage. He had done the right thing by his children as best he could. There were paths and there were path

* He was fragile, sick on the gut, looking out the mansion doors across the scaped garden and the guard at the gate. It's the wild west here, the wild west, David says. Cambodia is a dangerous place. Dangerous place. We began at the Riverside Bar, and it was as if we had always been here, or he had been here before. First time deja vu, it was always strange. Time crawled and yet the universe was his answer. He had surrendered and died and spun out from a former life. He had been here before and he had never been here. Moments were everywhere, time splashing. He couldn't help himself, he was back to zero. It was awful and it was nice. At least he knew he was alive. Until he woke up in the morning and all he could remember were the hard faced girls in the Ten Bar; all of them attentive if you wanted. He could surrender. He could die. But things would never be the same. There wasn't a solution to this. Sick to the core, he tried to stop from vomiting. He wasn't going back,

* Everything turned to dust, or more precise than that hoary old cliche, everything he had ever believed in turned out to be false. That was the way of it. Bukowski, Ballard, Burroughs, they were all wrong. We were born to strew flowers down dead avenues. Really? Well, perhaps. He was surrounded by diseased consciousness and crumbling overpasses, crowded train carriages, empty lots and soaring apartment blocks. Everywhere wealth and poverty, extremes, jostled against each other. In a city of 14 million people that never stopped. He thought, ever so briefly, of revisiting the Miami Hotel where they used to stay forty years ago. A young man, a different man. Bangkok was astonishing; and the people he met, petty English crims, gangsters, harsh times, loud mouthed Americans. He had the picture clearly: if he heard one more loud mouthed American he would turn into a whirling dervish and slice their heads off; and the meeting would be full of bouncing balloon heads shouting: get yourself a s

* A man can stand almost anything except a succession of ordinary days. Goethe. Sick blocks of yellow and green floated before him. He couldn't stand the crowds. He couldn't stand the claustrophobia. He couldn't stand the Americans. And then the kids started coming, Chuck said loudly, they were always called Chuck. And this 15-year-old delivered the most death squad hard core AA speech I had ever heard, and he finished: if you have a substance abuse problem, and you don't go to meetings and you don't get yourself a sponsor, God have mercy on your soul. Everyone laughed, even he to some degree, as whole patches of the room disappeared beyond the real. There isn't anyway, in the middle of the biggest open air brothel on the planet, that he could feel comfortable. There were too many ghosts haunting the belfry, he was simply too old to do it all again, or even to take it seriously. Wars were fought far off. Young men died for no good reason. Injustice stalked the e

* It was too cruel; and indifferent; and whole slabs of fate just pealed away; flapping, diseased. It's not linear, a voice said. Why did you think it would be? Nor is it constant. Love comes and goes. Opportunity comes and goes. Now he was staring across the Thailand sea. No butts: For King, For Country, For Wildlife, says the sign. Even now, at 7am, prostitutes cruise Beach Road on Pattya, picking up westerners who have been out in the bars all night. There were times of need. There was a hunger which was so morbid, so filled with wrong thoughts and inappropriate gestures. Little Willy didn't work anymore, had become disconnected from the brain, from the body, from the life it had once been so ready to entertain. A dick has no conscience, he said to Rebecca, and they both laughed. See, she said, you've got your first line already. We didn't get to walking road last night, we didn't even get to go out dancing. She's 47, no children, very good looking for her ag

* "There's a pidgeon here, it's sick," Ian said in the front garden. He didn't bother to look at first. He was reading City At The End Of Time and did not feel well - and Ian's endless enthusiasms were exhausting. He looked inside to the cool of the house. The pool burbled occasionally beside him. Not so far away, the ever chaotic traffic of Bangkok growled and snarled; and people sat inside their tin cans. He deliberately looked down now as the Sky Train flew high across the darkened streets at night, the open air markets, the derelict buildings, the condos, the ancient style Thai shops and the glistening malls. "It was as if nothing had ever happened, as if he had woken up in the future of his own life," someone said, and he shuddered because he could feel the contradictory forces pulling him in all sorts of directions. Perhaps he had woken up in the city at the end of his own life. Next morning, as he pottered about after yet another restless, se

* One sick eff, that's all they could say. He was covered tattoos. He spent most of his tims e in his room; too much time in jail over too many years. He was most comfortable in a confined space. One sick eff. There was not a kind word in his heart, not one. Sucker, he would say dismissively of anyone he had ripped off. There was a long queue. There were many tails, of high, dangerous times, of very flash cars and significant amounts of money, all of it illegal. There was an inappropriate Buddha tattooed on his chest. An aging gangster, wheezing from too many cigarettes, nothing sadder. When the times had passed, when he found himself in the future, when a million voices had overlaid and overwritten his past actions, leaving no trace of what they had once thought of as pioneering, sharman like activities, the Byronesque quest, he was left as one tiny pinprick in a very crowded world, with nothing to say and dread in his heart; the churning disease. It had seemed so adventurous, so

* He was reading a marvellous science fiction book called The City At The End Of Time and in a way that's how he felt in his own life, he had woken up in the future. He found himself crushed in the carriages of the Sky Train high above the Bangkok traffic. He found himself talking to old Asian hands while the neon lights flashed outside, while the bars called, while middle aged, sometimes even elderly white men walked the streets with Thai prostitutes on their arms. They were all so gorgeous and the world was irradiated with glee. The muggy heat closed in. The traffic snarled. He spoke to no one and he spoke to every one. Something was calling, perhaps it really was the city at the end of time. Old souls, old souls. There was no way to be free. I've always busted coming off the bupe before, why would this time be any different, he thought, and recognised all the sick rationalisations that had bedevilled his life. It's inevitable, get it over with. How cruel the torments, an

* Every day was crueller than the last. More confused, more sweaty, his head doing handstands. Why was it? Every other time had been a disaster, why would this time be any different? He couldn't sleep. Not now, not ever. Sticky, uncomfortable, uncomfortable in his own skin. Ian found himself a cute Thai girl. They view prostitution differently here, went the motto of the Western male. He saw them everywhere, the middle aged men with the gorgeous girls hanging off them. Ordinary looking men from ordinary towns. Oh how was it possible? Why did nothing stay still? The true mask was coming; the day following day, already the sound of traffic on nearby Sukhumvit building up. The chirp of the birds. Everybody else with their life. Everyone else accompanied. Sometimes, maybe you are one of them, I think it is like a meeting of old souls. Old souls from another time, old souls who had lived before; and now were trapped in these fragile frames, these fragile lives. If everything was coming

* He could feel himself ebbing away, whatever resolve, whatever person he may have been, about to be consumed by the chaos of the city outside. It was so close. He could see the alcohol in every one's glass. He could smell the maluka honey vodka Ian was drinking; and the double shot of bourbon and coke he consumed with glee and he watched with envy. Nothing was right. He was tired of being in withdrawals, as he had been for the past month coming off the bupe, and he was sick of having temptation thrust in front of him at every turn. There were days passing by and yet all he could think of was his traditional post: oblivion seeker. The gate swung open and he looked across the neat Thai garden. The gate swung open and he could see the devil's heads on posts: all neatly marked out, all leering at him, come to me darling, me, me, come to me, they chanted in a sickening chaos. He shut the gate and entered the house, walking past them, hoping they would disappear, hoping they were no

* How was it possible? As if by magic, suddenly he was in the ever fascinating city of Bangkok. He watched a crippled monk in the street with wheelchair and begging bowl. He was exhausted, there wasn't too much doubt about that. He watched Thai teenagers, only a year or two younger than his own, swapping homework in MacDonalds on their way to school. He was exhausted to the bone. Would the tumult and the shouting never die down? It was muggy, muggy all the time; and his head was doing "head miles" as they used to call it in the old days; and he was friendly to all. The city spread out vast and chaotic in every direction. The traffic, because he was not part of it, was choked wherever they tried to go. There were no apparent road rules. The mugginess and the sweat made him feel even more exhausted. He wanted to be straight and he wanted to be in the bars with all the rest of the "falangs"; getting drunk and obnoxious and pulling gorgeous girls towards him. There