Bangkok Hard Time by Cole Jon

Author:Cole, Jon [Cole, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789814358330
Publisher: NBN_Mobi_Kindle
Published: 2012-01-16T07:00:00+00:00

Strung Out And Locked Down

Each day of the next few months till my court date arrived passed frustratingly slowly. Using my medication only sparingly so as not to attract attention from the other surrounding junkies had me almost constantly on the edge of going into a jones. The arrival of Mariano, who was a very sharing person, helped to throw the jackals off the scent. Pablo, another guy from Mariano’s smuggling group, came in a day later, likewise making it past the intake with an egg also, only to lose it to Thai prisoners once inside. (In junkie’s jargon, an “egg” is a rock-hard quantity, about sixty grams, of compressed heroin the size and shape of an egg. It is specially prepared and sealed for transporting internally – that is, rectally.) From then on, whenever I was perceived to be high, I took the easy way out and claimed that I got some little bit of dope from someone else.

From the window of another cell in our building, you could see part of the women’s prison across the moat. With a pair of binoculars that I had paid a guard to bring to me, one could see the second floor of a cell block that had a balcony enclosed with a chain-link fence. The girls would walk out from time to time wearing their damp sarongs as they hung laundry up to dry. Watching them was interesting for awhile, but in terms of real contact, they may as well have been on another planet.

The majority of farang prisoners were being strung along by their shyster Thai lawyers and fighting their cases on the flimsiest of threadbare defenses. Some were so silly that they would have been laughable if they had not been so pathetic. Drowning men do clutch at straws. I guess that if one day you feel like you are walking on water and the next day you feel like you are drowning, then a threadbare lifeline can look pretty damn good. Unfortunately, many of these inmates would spend almost all of their money on lawyers only to end up broke and with a sentence double that which they would have received had they pled guilty.

An extreme example was one young and desperate foreign inmate who had signed a confession upon being arrested, then let his lawyer convince him that in order to prove to the court that his confession had been coerced, he should burn his chest with a cigarette so he would have the scars to show the judge. Months later, the lawyer left the courtroom with the last of this client’s money in his pocket. The gullible young man, his chest covered with burn scars, went to Bang Kwan prison with a life sentence and shortly thereafter hanged himself.

At last, my day in court arrived. I sat on the prison bus with chains on my legs like all the others headed for their own day of judgment. I was preoccupied with trying to remember my rehearsed statement, which Sompong had helped me with.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.