Bangkok Blues by Stephen Shaiken

Author:Stephen Shaiken [Shaiken, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

Nineteen

MAJOR PARHAT and Colonel Somchai sat on the couch in Glenn’s living room, watching the news on CNN. Glenn and Sleepy Joe were out on the terrace. Glenn was enjoying one of his dwindling Romeo y Julietta 1875s, occasionally taking a hit off the fat joint Sleepy Joe rolled as they watched the early evening Bangkok traffic. Glenn did not call it rush hour, since to him, almost all Bangkok traffic was rush hour regardless of the hour. He did notice more horn-honking when people were driving home.

Watching traffic taught Glenn a great deal about the different strata of Bangkok society. The affluent sat in the back seat of imported cars as their drivers nudged their way through the morass. Those who had no car and driver but could afford taxis passed the time in lesser but air-conditioned comfort. The daring might own a small 125cc motorcycle or pay the equivalent of a dollar to be taken home at record-breaking speed by an orange-vested motorcycle taxi driver. For somewhat less money, there were the air conditioned BTS Skytrain and the underground MRT subway. They worked if one was going where there were stops, constantly being added. There were a few air-conditioned buses, which cost more than the inexpensive battered old gas-belchers which ward off heat prostration by removing windows and doors.

The poor rode those crudely ventilated buses or walked. Bangkok did not have the inexpensive songtheaw, pickup trucks with planks for seats lining the sides of the bed, widespread elsewhere in the Kingdom. The tuk-tuk, a motorcycle towing a passenger side car behind it, was a common person’s transport in other parts of the country, but in the Green Belt of Bangkok, they existed to charge tourists outrageous prices, and hopefully drag them off to buy Chinese-made junk at inflated prices, with the tuk-tuk driver getting a kickback. When one of his Thai girlfriends took him to the Klong Toey market to buy fresh fish, Glenn learned there were often tuk-tuks in the Thai parts of the city used as normal transportation.

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