Taylor found himself enjoying his semi-sobriety, was sleeping far better at night and had gone down a couple pant sizes.
Life was good. He was in China! He was out in the world. He was a man of the world. An international traveler. A somebody. He was finally on his way to doing something, something great!
六
One of the best parts of his job was living on campus and not having to drive or own a car. Not needing a car was a blessing. He was saving tons of cash not having to pay for gas, insurance, maintenance, and all the other shit car owners
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer get raped for, and he finally was earning enough money to pay off a portion of his student debt.
Thanks to his light teaching hours, he had enough time to study Mandarin, and was at it, diligently, swiftly becoming much more conversant, discovering he had a flair for the language, its syntax, characters and tones coming naturally to him.
Perhaps he’d been Marco Polo in a previous life…
With his rapid rate of improvement, his linguistic skills were soon up to snuff, and he’d decided to venture out, see the local sights. But, after the lengthy trip via bullet train and several subway stops, Taylor’d been dismayed to discover that Sanlitun, and most of the expat bars, foreign restaurants in Beijing had either been shut down or had gone out of business.
“Where were all the expats, the parties?” he pondered. The few expats he did encounter on the streets looked paranoid, with eyes of shit, or they looked dead, more like zombies than humans, walking hollow with thousand-yard stares…
Beijing turned out to be far more boring as a city than he expected, no parties or much going on. There were police everywhere, many in riot gear, and he’d been stopped twice by the police, randomly at subway stations, to have his passport checked, questioned like a criminal on his comings and goings.
He left disappointed. He decided to stick more around his local area and be more adventurous, have a “real China” experience. Fuck those walking dead expats and fascist cops in Beijing. He’d learn more Chinese, anyway, talking to Chinese people.
Inspired after seeing a video on YouTube by a South African guy called Winston, who’d explored China via motorcycle, Taylor decided to do a bit of the same and bought a secondhand motorcycle from a Chinese coworker, a short guy with a weirdly sloped forehead, and Taylor excitedly strapped on a Nazi SS style helmet he’d gotten along with the bike and revved up the engine and set out to explore the local village near the school, riding off feeling like he was Indiana Jones.
七
To Taylor’s surprise, even in the village, there were security cameras everywhere, several, atop poles, on every block, cameras attached to buildings, cameras
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer hanging from bridges. He wondered what could be happening here in the outskirts to warrant such surveillance…
Also, to his surprise, he discovered the local townspeople weren’t very welcoming of foreigners. Whereas his students or the city dwellers were either friendly, polite, or at worst apathetic, those in the village, stared and pointed at him like he was a zoo animal, and many gave him dirty looks, were passively aggressive, and one toothless old man in raggedy blue slacks and blazer spit at him, shook his fist and yelled something about “Panmunjom!”
After hearing the old man curse at him, and understanding a few things the locals had said about his personal appearance (him being fat, having a big nose) he started to regret learning Chinese…
He tried not to let it upset him, thinking it must be similar to America, how in hicktowns, parts of hillbilly Kentucky, people were ugly and racist but in big cities like Louisville, or metropolises like New York City, LA people were more educated and way cooler, generally. It’s probably like that anywhere, China included, he thought.
And he wouldn’t let it faze him anymore, dammit!
Dammit, he was going to make this work, score a high-paying job in Shanghai or Beijing, and he became even more determined to study Chinese, and his learning only accelerated, being immersed in it like he was, and shortly he knew enough characters to partially read newspaper articles, and he began reading news sites on the Chinese internet.
What he saw, though, online, on the Chinese internet, shocked him. Nearly every other national news article was about America or Japan. About how those countries were conspiring to fuck over China somehow, preparing for war, or attempting to steal an island or other territory, not just Taiwan, which Mainland Chinese had long thought belonged to them and demanded to have returned from America, but the Mainland Chinese also claimed several tiny islands belonging to other countries, as well as a huge chunk of international seas.
He’d noticed the official Chinese news agency, Xinhua (which translated almost to
“Newspeak”) paid special attention to America’s failings, especially mass shootings, religiously reporting any shooting in America, which might have been
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer the reason why so many of his students asked him if in America “everyone has a gun.”
As a person who’d become disillusioned and bitter with America, he didn’t mind shitting on it, himself, but to be off in a faraway land, and to discover how openly hostile the Chinese State media was towards his country of origin, really gave him a sick feeling.
Having researched China’s economy, he’d seen how America and Japan were China’s largest trading partners and how much foreign investment in China had lifted so many out of poverty. It boggled his mind that a country so dependent and such a beneficiary of global trade would have such antipathy for the nations it conducted trillions of dollars of trade with…
But his mind was really thrown for a loop when he read the online comments that followed the articles.
Open hatred, venom towards America and open calls from Chinese netizens for America to be attacked, for war, for American cities to be nuked.
Outright racist language against foreigners, especially blacks, which was befuddling considering how much the Chinese were into the NBA. And it wasn’t only a few nutjobs spewing such bigotry, it was thousands upon thousands of comments, endless streams of racist posts, none of which were censored or deleted, the whole thing making even a guy from Kentucky cringe.
Again, Taylor thought that maybe this was just trolls or idiots like on YouTube videos’ comments or freakish right-wing extremists like Breitbart. He again figured he wouldn’t find a lot of those people in a big city like Beijing or Shanghai, and that’s where he’d go anyway and where he’d do amazing things after he’d learned enough Chinese.
He was going to land a job at a big Chinese company, make fistfuls of cash, live the “Chinese Dream.” Nothing would stop him.
Every morning, he’d eat breakfast listening to Chinese language learning videos; afternoons were spent upping his calligraphy skills, sitting perched over his desk, with his pen to paper, copying Chinese characters, attuned to their radicals and strokes. And every evening, he’d spend hours reading Chinese children’s books,
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer reading the pinyin, perfecting and practicing his tones, and then afterwards he’d have conversations with himself in the mirror, saying what he knew or learned that day or reading his learning exercises, dialogues aloud.
And his life got even better when he met a girl, one of his students, called “Apple”, a petite, dark-skinned Han Chinese lovely from Gansu province. The raven-haired beauty with a slender body, moon face, crooked smile and sexy librarian glasses.
Apple spoke excellent English, which helped their courtship bloom, and she soon enough became Taylor’s first serious girlfriend.
He’d been having her over to his apartment, and, after only a couple weeks, she was living with him there…
Taylor imagined marrying her, taking her to Beijing. Them in a ritzy high-rise.
Them with kids. Him making fistfuls of cash, speaking perfect Mandarin and working his way up to being a high ranking executive at a company that bought other companies and shit like that. Him on a private jet… Him featured on Chinese TV… Him living his Chinese Dream…
But that whole narrative took a different turn.
When a virus appeared in Wuhan…
八
It started off as an obscure story he saw posted in a China expat group online.
A mysterious pneumonia that’d broken out in Wuhan, near a “wet” market, a market selling live animals for slaughter.
He’d written it off, initially, thinking it was no big deal. There often were small-scale viral breakouts in China, especially related to food, food poisoning. But then, this one, of course, turned out differently, and it snowballed, became an epidemic, and nearly the whole of China, including his area of Beijing, was swiftly locked down; the country transformed into a 1-billion-person prison.
Forced to stay in his apartment, 23 and a half hours per day (allowed out only for a necessary trip to the campus grocery store or for takeout from the cafeteria),
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer and on some days not allowed out at all, made to stay inside for 24 hours a day, his apartment started to seem smaller and smaller, the walls closing in on him.
His girlfriend was forced to leave sooner than anticipated and was removed, in tears, by campus police because she wasn’t registered to live in the domicile.
After she returned home, she came clean to her parents about her relationship with Taylor, and her father mercilessly beat and slapped her, bloodying her nose and threatening to kill her if she made him lose any more face and commanding her to never see that “white trash” again...
Losing his girlfriend was a true punch in the dick, and Taylor plunged hard into despair. He missed her deeply, his Apple, her soft touch, her smell, the egg-fried rice she’d cooked him, and how she’d warmed his bed at night, the way her little feet tickled at his legs underneath the sheets…
Losing his Apple, along with the malaise of being locked down pretty much 24/7, led Taylor back to the bottle, in a severe way, after Taylor discovered that although it tasted like wet shit, baijiu was super high in alcohol content and got him sloppy ass drunk.
Not only was his personal life fucked, but things across China deteriorated diplomatically when a theory was put forth, espoused not just by a freak on the internet, but by foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, that the virus was brought to China, purposely, to destroy China, by the US military, and all over China, foreigners were targeted, fired from jobs, evicted from apartments (videos emerged of Africans in Guangzhou forcibly removed from their homes, turned homeless, made to sleep rough), and foreigners were stigmatized, refused entry into grocery stores, and there were scattered reports of violent attacks against foreigners in China.
The hatred, incitement towards foreigners in China that was typically only online, priorly, was now spilling into the public space.
So Taylor, sipping on baijiu, decided it was time to bounce, at least for the time being, and put his China Dream on hold.
Several neighboring Asian countries had already closed their borders to foreigners, and flights back to America were few and far between or outrageously pricey, but
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Taylor did see that Thailand was still open. Plenty of flights going there, even as China had been locked down.
Taylor booked a ticket and boarded a half-full plane to Bangkok, feeling like an escaped convict as he passed through the airport full of police in facemasks and medical personnel in spacesuits.
九
When Taylor arrived in Bangkok, he wondered why he hadn’t been there the whole time.
There was sun, palm trees, and smoking hot babes everywhere, with bigger tits and asses, and the place was sunny, relaxed, and unlike most of the Chinese, who only talked with their faces, the Thais smiled and were friendly, genuinely so, without being simpering, and even people working at 7-Eleven spoke English fluently or knew enough English to get by.
There were foreigners, bars, parties everywhere, and the foreigners there weren’t zombies like in Beijing. They were fucking chill and there to have fun, and on his first night he’d hooked up with a Heidi-looking German backpacker girl he met at the airport and they had a wild and kinky fuck, a perfect rebound fuck… The Euro-chick letting him do things no other girl would…
Seriously, why hadn’t he been here all along? he wondered over a breakfast slice of pizza from 7-Eleven.
But then he started looking around at teaching jobs in Thailand, disappointingly discovering that the overabundance of existing foreigners, the sagging Thai economy and hordes of cheaper Filipino teachers had resulted in pittance wages, many teaching jobs in Thailand offering only around $700 to $1000 per month and requiring far longer hours than he’d been working.
Looking at the job ads online sent him into a rage. Like, $1000 a month? For someone as smart as him? $1000 a month? For a doctor of neuroscience? For a PhD? Fuck that! That wasn’t him. He’d wait out the situation in China. He could still go to Shanghai, make tons of money. This pandemic will pass. Someone would find a cure. Things would simmer down…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer But he found there would be no fast fix, and that the situation in China for foreigners just got worse and worse, with more reports of violence and discrimination and soon enough, foreigners were banned from entering China, indefinitely, even those with residence permits and work permits.
Then the coronavirus spread to Thailand, not as severely as other nations, though still enough to close most non-essential businesses.
With nowhere to go, nothing to do, not able to afford a flight back to America, Taylor began to sink deeper into desolation.
Confined to his $7 per night, windowless room in a rundown guesthouse near Khao San Road, he was drinking more than ever.
He’d become afraid of sleep, afraid of the recent nightmare cycle that’d plagued him, the nightmares of naked women in surgical masks brandishing kitchen knives, the naked women chasing him through Jewish graveyards, the graveyards with mutilated tiger carcasses hanging by nooses from fir trees…
To avoid the strong arms of sleep he’d take Yaba pills and spend much of his time at night alone up on the silvered roof of his guesthouse, his limbs feeling heavy, and there he’d smoke cigarettes, and gulp red bull mixed with rum, and he’d sit slouched on a plastic stool, watching cockroaches, lizards, rats in the alley below, how they scurried up and down the pastel ledges and angles and crevices of the neighboring buildings, the dilapidated buildings.
The buildings that were nothing but stacks of boxes and levels and open doors and windowsills. And he’d stare out at the flapping clothes hanging humid, hanging over the iron bars, cages over the windows.
And he’d sniff at the mélange of Bangkok’s scents, the fried noodles, the acrid diesel exhaust, and there, on that roof, he’d listen to his ghosts and to the screaming motorbikes passing the void…
十
The four walls of his tiny guesthouse room started to close in on him like his apartment had before.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The white of the paint was all he could see.
Though he wasn’t sure he’d ever return to China, he kept up his Chinese studies, if nothing else out of obstinance and spite, and he would try to have conversations again with the mirror. But it was useless. Staring at his reflection, his face was either distorted or stiff as a mask, and its lines, especially those on his forehead, told of age.
To study Chinese, he’d mostly been reading Chinese news, avoiding the politically charged stuff, virus stuff and comment sections and had looked into more local news articles and had been developing a fixation with traffic accidents, of which there were a daily deluge, a consistent supply…
Car accidents. Bus accidents. Buses plunging into rivers. Cars hitting pedestrians.
Trucks sideswiping motorcyclists. The accidents involving motorcyclists were the most spectacular, the combination of high speeds and velocity, the motorcycle riders being propelled, flying acrobatically, high into the air, crashing into somersaults on the pavement, their forms ending contorted and crushed and twisted like blood and bone pretzels.
There were thousands of such videos on the Chinese internet, many featuring musical accompaniment, usually racy classical music, and Taylor would spend his hours watching them on endless loops.
Drinking about a 70 cl bottle of Thai whiskey or rum per day, for the first time, Taylor thought of killing himself. Ending it all. And once he thought of suicide, he stopped fearing sleep, and he found he’d been enjoying his slumber, having pleasant dreams, again in the graveyards, but these dreams were of sunny days in graveyards, of himself naked, himself walking leisurely by deer that were eating, gnawing on the green grass matting the soil around the gravestones, the happy animals smiling up at him, while chewing on the hair of the dead.
Taylor loved the carefree state sleep brought him, and he’d considered how pleasing death, the “big sleep” would be. Never having to worry about anything again. And he wondered what would happen after he died, if there was something better than this.
He’d never been suicidal before. But now it was all he could think of. He thought of ways to kill himself, and jumping was the first that came to mind. Jumping.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Jumping from a building, a tall building, thinking the harder he plunged, smacked and clapped to the concrete, the more powerful it’d push his soul and could launch him into whatever dimension awaited him next.
Daily visions of jumping entered his drunken thoughts, his drunken daydreams.
And instead of car crash videos, he became fixated on jumpers, videos of jumpers, 9/11 videos, Faces of Death videos, and he wondered where the jumpers had ended up, which dimension.
The classic Van Halen song “Jump” showed up on his YouTube playlist, and he’d listen to it, over and over…
Might as well… Might as well…
十一
Watching the Van Halen “Jump” video, he believed there were secret messages in the video, a message, a code, a cipher, something in Eddie Van Halen’s wry smile or David Lee Roth’s dancing and Roth’s acrobatic dropkicks, Roth’s mouthing of
“Jump” at the video’s end, and Taylor believed that the song was leading him to another place, another world, that Bangkok was a portal to something else, a higher plane, and if he jumped, fell hard enough to the pavement, he really could force his soul to exit his body and nudge it to the next realm.
And he pondered the next realm, slamming spicy shot after shot of Thai whiskey, thinking of the gate, the beautiful gate, leading to the Candyland, the Willy Wonka paradise that must await him behind the gate…
On YouTube he searched for gates, hoping to unlock the code, and he found a video from the group Heaven’s Gate, its leader Do, and, enraptured, Taylor heeded the message.
He realized it was a sign, an omen and invitation. Do had contacted him, through time and space and was attempting to wave Taylor to the realm, that Taylor jumping would lead him to the comet Hale-Bopp, the comet Do and his flock had boarded to escape Earth and Earth’s crises. Taylor realized that the coronavirus was a catalyst, an invitation, a prodding, a sign to escape and let the Earth wash the species.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Once Taylor sucked dry the whiskey bottle, it all made sense. He knew it was time.
And he strapped on his Nikes and stumbled up to the guesthouse’s roof.
十二
Up on the roof, standing near the ledge, Taylor saw out through the swampy heat of the Bangkok night, swung his head, slowly, from side to side and gazed out at the neon-lit skyscrapers, the buildings’ lantern eyes, thinking how one or two of the buildings were in on it, how one or two of those metal spirals of lights were likely rockets ready to blast off and glide into the galaxy, cross the gate…
One or two of the buildings probably had jumpers like him, ready to, or having already jumped and joined Heaven’s Gate. Graduated to the next realm. Taylor could see the jumpers smiling and waving at him before jumping, diving gloriously, flying like swans…
Taylor understood. He knew he wouldn’t be a football star. He wouldn’t be a famous neuroscientist. He wouldn’t be a rich businessman in Shanghai. And it was for the better. Humans. The Earth. It was all fucked. Whether by disease, war, a supervolcano, an asteroid or the sun burning out, humans were fucked. The planet would die. Everyone on Earth would die.
But not him. He would escape. This was it, his passage, his route, his tunnel through the galaxy. He’d go. This was it. This was the great thing he was destined to do. He would escape. He would no longer suffer humanity.
He would no longer be a human or a prisoner of Planet Earth. He’d be on a new planet. He’d have a new body. Knowing this, knowing his destiny, knowing the TRUTH, saw him in the most euphoric state he’d ever been…
Taylor, his legs turning into snakes, cranked up “Jump” in his earbuds, and he sparked up a menthol cigarette, sucked in the minty cool smoke, let the icy smoke fill his lungs up like balloons, rounded his lips and exhaled deeply, shooting a funnel cloud of smoke that morphed into a misty form, a form of an eyeless, gaunt face that hovered in front of him and shrieked: “I will show you sleep in a handful,” and then dissolved into sparkly red dust.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Taylor peered below, where the red dust had fallen, and saw a large crowd of foreigners, all with their arms raised or outstretched, some in Jesus poses, some with arms swaying above their heads, some motioning at Taylor to come forward, and the opening keyboard riff of “Jump” looped and played over and over, and Taylor noticed Do down there with the foreigners, Do in long black robes, beaming with his big hazel eyes, smiling so happily, and he was also motioning Taylor forth, and everyone down there looked so peaceful, so post-human…
Stepping closer to the ledge, Taylor hummed “might as well…” and was about to…
When he stopped in his tracks at the voice calling to him from behind.
It was a female voice. The voice of an angel. A sexy southern belle, a Scarlett O’Hara type accent, a drawl that was sweeter than sugar, a voice more beautiful than any sound he’d ever heard before.
Taylor walked backwards a few steps, pulled his phone from his jean pocket, clicked pause on the VH.
Then he craned his neck around and saw a stunningly gorgeous girl, a ravishing 6’5 Nordic goddess, a taller, identical twin of a young, 2010 Taylor Swift, the leggy blond beauty in coal-black short shorts and matching black titty-tight Van Halen red/yellow logo T-shirt, and she was wearing fiery red flip flops and several multi-colored thread bracelets and anklets, and her long curly golden hair was like a halo, her immaculate hair flowing teasingly in the touch of the humid night’s breezes…
“Do you have a light?” the beauty asked loudly but patiently, a radiant smile twisting across her thin red lips, her smile so divine it restored a feeling deep inside his battered soul, a feeling he thought he’d lost inside himself...
He turned his head for a second, looked down again at the alley below. The crowd of foreigners had vanished, save for one tall lanky chap, a young buck with a shock of bushy black hair, the lanky chap in Burmese dress, a longyi, the fellow standing and clapping and hooting and hollering up at Taylor.
Taylor spun back around. Fixed his gaze back to the sizzling hot southern belle.
“A light? Do you have one?” the beauty asked again, her crystal blue eyes open wide, big as saucers as she was making a lighter flicking gesture with her right hand, touching it at the long thin cigarette dangling from her left hand.
“Yes. Yes, I do…” said Taylor, ebulliently, stepping away from the ledge.
CELEBRITIES IN THE NIGHT
“The celebrities, they’re nocturnal.”
“Celebrities creeping at night, wearing menacing smiles, jawboning.”
“For a while we’d been seeing lots of celebrities in the neighborhood.”
“These days, celebrities can only come out at night. Rarely will you see a celebrity during the day.”
“OpenAI has teams of catchers out, like dogcatchers… Teams in vans, just searching for celebrities.”
“Celebrities are like vampires, recumbent by day, living in coffins… Then they rise, after sundown, to feed…”
“Hands shooting up from the ground, clawing through the dirt.”
“Wasn’t there a time that Ferris Wheels were purposely built next to cemeteries?”
“Hard to believe there once was a time when we were fascinated with celebrities.”
“The celebrities were jumping us like monkeys. Had our teeth growing crooked, ripping through our cheeks. Had us speaking with broken jaws, seeing with detached retinas. And when we weren’t growling, we were jerking our heads…”
“Who’s laughing now?”
“But celebrities stopped sucking blood a long time ago.”
“Nowadays celebrities are raccoons, opossums crawling into dumpsters and garbage cans. To feast…”
“It used to be that they’d sometimes collect astronomical sums for brief speaking engagements.”
“10 minutes of talk for $500,000. $50K per minute. Maybe more for the full force of their words.”
“Isn’t that the kiss of life?!”
“A kick in the head.”
“Celebrities in ass-less chaps.”
“Something about payola, right?”
“Suborns.”
“You see, a celebrity was once an animal that anyone could rent.”
“I set up bear-traps in my front and backyards, just to keep the celebrities away…”
“No face left to lose. Fighting an ice war, in a freezer.”
“Used to be a time when celebrities were front and center. At the heart of every discussion. Tech bros each owned at least 5 or 6 celebrities, usually more.
Hundreds, thousands, even. Tech bros used to throw wild parties, have the celebrities parachute onto yachts, belt out showtunes, dance forbidden minstrel show jigs.”
“Jigga, jigga…”
“Turning halls of higher learning into empty cathedrals.”
“But these days celebrities face certain capture, execration, mandatory head-shavings, spontaneous rectal searches and ear-slap blinky bots.”
“Both sides of the scissors…”
“Nowadays there’s nothing worse than being labeled a celebrity.”
“It’s an outrage. An insult. A humiliation.”
“It’s un-American!”
“After the mass cancellations, celebrities fled their homes, and they became the creatures they are now. Night beings. Outcasts. Most live in sewers or in repurposed trees.”
“There’s a rumor OpenAI got a farm full of them. Captured celebrities hooked to breathing tubes, integrated with robotics. Artificial intelligence. A cyborg species…
Tech totalers force-loading TalkGPT, fusing it into celebrities’ brainstems, just gearing the fuckers to go again.”
“I’d buy a celebrity, teach it how to lie to me…”
“Even before the mass cancellations, celebrities had coarse eyes, resolute features.”
“Rumor had it most were eunuchs.”
“I still have phantom pain from the final Bachelorette.”
“I’m old enough, too, to remember reality TV. Watching reality TV was akin to the feeling of being on the wrong plane, unable to turn back. It was a feeling of being trapped under a sheet of ice.”
“… a live, flopping fish, yanked out of the sea, stuffed into your open mouth before you could politely decline...”
“Nowadays I’m sleeping in a cryogenic chamber and still having night sweats…”
“Our shared future...”
“The bots predicted it. The celebrities didn’t die.”
“But the algorithms continue to self-replicate.”
“Besides a sewer or treetop, the best places for a celebrity to live are an abandoned mall, or nearby a charging station.”
“Antecedents, yeah...”
“Rumor has it Paris Hilton is still alive. And it never comes out during the day. Yet it keeps its copper complexion, somehow, and its fluffy gold hair on its small head remains neatly combed. Fucker has a thin neck too. Once the sun sumps it’ll run as fast as its twiggy legs can carry…”
“Paris Hilton running faster than a cheetah. Faster than a flying train.”
“But Paris Hilton wasn’t the celebrity with the pocketknife, on Halloween night, slashing straphangers in the Bronx.”
“It’s more likely that was Honey Boo Boo.”
“Celebrities show up, in my backyard, from time to time, at night. They’re making silly sounds, running in circles. Like Paris Hilton, they got perfect hair and makeup and every time you see them, they’re smiling.”
“That smile is tatted on their faces, I bet. Like the Joker.”
“Ear to ear.”
“Living in a repurposed tree, living in a sewer, or in an abandoned shopping mall, then having perfectly creased hair, it doesn’t make sense.”
“… could be their skin, their fur.”
“Bugbears.”
“I’m having a recurring dream that a ginger celebrity is riding a red-feathered dinosaur, in a rodeo, like a bull. Then the rodeo pitch becomes an island of red neon light and then the celebrity and dinosaur are just two ellipses… Dot, dot, dot… Dot, dot, dot…”
“Space debris…”
“Anytime I stub my toe, I blame it on the celebrities. Because I know, somehow, someway, that it’s their fault.”
“I be opening my window to shout the celebrities down whenever they rummage through my trash cans. Then they scatter off, like roaches with the light on.”
“They remain a menace.”
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer
THE SENSITIVITY READER CUTS HIS OWN PENIS
The Sensitivity Reader ran his bony fingers through his salt-and-pepper mohawk.
He’d been under duress these past days. Locked down inside his 30 SQM
apartment, staring only at whitewashed walls.
The Reader’s eyes were dry and blood red and felt as if they’d been filled with sand. His body felt like a block of wood… A peaty taste of whiskey burbling up in his burps…
“I was the best sensitivity reader in the business! I fucking read for AGENTED, PUBLISHED authors like Adele Holmes! ADELE. FUCKING. HOLMES!!!!!!!!”
The Sensitivity Reader’s was a case study in isolation. But his vow of silence had been dwindling, devolving into a diatribe far worse than Dave Chappelle’s 8:46.
And it was getting worse than a Michael Richards’ set of stand-up comedy.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Here and there, The Reader’s internal dialog, his solitude, his accumulation of time and flesh would be interrupted by ghosts. Unfriendly ghosts of companions long gone... Demons...
Like his ex-wife. The woman of exotic darkness. The woman damasked with dismay. The waif who’d been popping in, here and there, walking through walls.
The waif with sullen cheeks, bony arches under her eyes… The waif reeking of shit.
Her visits as welcome as an unflushed toilet.
The Sensitivity Reader had known feathery lightness in her hair. Her heavenly scents… Her silky skin soft as a flower soaked by rain.
But these days the waif just stank of shit. And looked like shit too. The waif in her striped pajamas. The waif emaciated, rail-thin, looking as if she’d escaped from a concentration camp in Xinjiang. Her crown of shiny hair just a slim wave. She’d once been so winsome... The waif with perfect facial structure, a doll’s face. A face worthy of being painted.
At times, the waif had been fogging in, appearing in oil-painting poses… The waif stretching for badminton… The waif supine. Air drumming with chopsticks. Her waist-length hair spilling over the edge of the bed like a tomato-red waterfall. The waif levitating, suspended in air, stuck like a light to the ceiling.
“It was her!” The Reader would strain, neck veins popping out, shouting at no one.
“IT WAS HER!!!”
To him, her skeletal face was as distinct as a dead president on a blood-stained banknote… The waif’s snickering. Her summoning swarms of hornets…
“She was fucking here, man, she was fucking here!!!” The Sensitivity Reader would argue with the wall, wash the demon away with whiskey and gales of hysterical laughter. But even the wall knew the waif lived in the air...
The Sensitivity Reader slept with a sledgehammer next to his bed. He’d go down swinging if his ex-wife, nude but for her pink Von Dutch mesh hat, ever exploded
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer out of the closet again, attacked him with garden shears. If she ever again insulted his pasta sauce, attempted to amputate his penis.
‘TOO MANY ONIONS!!! AND NOT ENOUGH FUCKING GARLIC FOR YOU!!!!”
Or if she ever again handcuffed him to the bed, blasted “I Don’t Feel Like Dancing”
or the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Californication on repeat. The waif leaving him in agony as she hooted and hollered, in the next room, at trashy reality TV. The waif, off her meds again, watching reruns of Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie making fun of poor people.
The Reader was ready, too, if that cockroach the size of a crocodile ever came back… Oh yes, The Sensitivity Reader knew all about psychic pain, picky eaters, earworms, infestations and sharp objects…
But The Sensitivity Reader had only seen the waif once in the last few days. It was in the shower. She’d slid in through the steam with a straight razor blade, was smiling with black gaps in between her teeth while carving five stars into her shaven pussy mound. Bloody red rivulets running down her chicken legs… The shower water suddenly smelling of unwashed ass...
“Psychic spies from China!!!!” The Sensitivity Reader cursed at the rain shower as light red water, the color of a wine cooler, circled his feet and the clean scent of soap returned.
Dead! She was dead. Dead! The Reader struggled to remind the deepest recesses of his being. After all, she should be vaporous.
After the divorce, she’d been in a gruesome, spectacular accident. In a subway car, in Beijing, that’d flooded with sewage… He’d imagined his rage had festered into blood magic. That she’d died a horrid death on his account. The waif swallowing columns, choking on mouthfuls of brown wastewater. The bitch literally eating shit and dying, just as he’d often commanded…
“Fucking worse than Pablo Escobar blowing up a passenger plane just to kill one person… FUCKING WORSE THAN EVERY SONG ON CALIFORNICATION!!!!!”
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer But no. She wasn’t really dead. Because he’d see her in the air. And in dreams.
Her twisted smile spackled in shit, her whipcord coil stinking putridly, and he’d remember the times she’d teased him, saying he should see a psychiatrist for his increasingly frequent, chicken suit-clad visits to gay bars and glory holes.
The Sensitivity Reader stuck his fingers down his throat but didn’t find anything.
Then his face went crimson. Then he headbutted the wall, screamed an unintelligible sound, sat cross-legged on the tiled floor, rocked back and forth in a fit of sorrow, then finally flicked on his phone.
In his hands he witnessed the carnage. Live video. Grainy, flickering, unsteady video. The riots. The angry mobs. It was France. But it was now.
As he rubbed more sand from his eyes, he knew what it was: The hated Emperor Xi Jinping’s Last Stand.
Emperor Xi’s palace gates were being stormed. The masses braving gunfire.
Masses swimming, sailing across the moat. Rioters in makeshift armor, storming inside, firing 3D-printed guns, flinging beer bottle petrol bombs. The palace grounds becoming a smoldering volcano of fire and smoke.
Human waves washed in like tsunamis slapping shores. The masses chanting, cheering, waving red flags and singing the national anthem. The masses locking arms, in a flood of screaming humanity. An aggrieved wave of arms and legs, full-throated and pushing forward.
And they kept coming, the protestors, the muckers, the rioters. In an endless stream. The flailing masses, in lockstep, surging in an unstoppable current.
The palace guards were eventually overwhelmed. Many of the guards, in their feathery hats, were trampled under the angry feet of the rioters, and scores threw down their epaulets and guns and tore off running, their faces contorted in terror.
The mobs eventually breached the gates, swarmed into the palace.
It wasn’t long before the masses were dragging out the Emperor, the Winnie-the-Pooh lookalike. Emperor Xi was dead they proclaimed. His previously pristine,
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer fleshy face bruised and bloodied. His nude, bloated gray body dragged out by a ski-masked covey. Emperor Xi’s corpse leaving a splotchy stripe of blood.
The ski-masks brought Emperor Xi’s corpse before the cameras. Lifted his floppy head. Then a member of the retinue produced a machete, pressed the serrated silver blade to Emperor Xi’s throat, drawing an immediate line of blood. And once the ski-masked man started sawing, he appeared like a cellist gone mad.
As the impromptu surgery began, blood began spurting from Emperor Xi’s flabby neck like two fountains, and Emperor Xi’s limp body bounced back to life. The Winnie-the-Pooh lookalike, Xi Jinping flopping like a fish, his swollen eyes sliding open in shock. And Emperor Xi attempted to wriggle and he gurgled, spit globs of blood, then unloosed a raspy, pathetic plea for his life that went unanswered as the mob secured his person and commenced the decapitation.
The Sensitivity Reader closed his phone. Stood up and stretched his legs. He couldn’t witness any more. Nothing, not even booze, could erase what he’d seen.
He’d sneak outside, for a walk, but the Little Pinks were babooning in packs. The Little Pinks out for blood, saliva, butts and body parts. Plus it was over 40 degrees Celsius. Even at night these days it wasn’t too pleasant to be outside.
His window was lightly caked with sand. But through a beige film The Reader could see there was a prehistoric, crocodile-sized cockroach on his balcony. The prehistoric cockroach was perched on its haunches and rose so it walked on its hind legs. The creature then turned toward the window, started singing an out-of-tune, falsetto version of “Scar Tissue.” And The Reader noticed the cockroach had the face of his ex-wife… as well as her shit-eating grin…
MOTORBIKES, MOTORBIKES, MOTORBIKES
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The streets were empty.
Save for the motorbikes. Swarms of motorbikes had replaced the people.
Swarms of motorbikes driving themselves.
Thousands of motorbikes screaming, engines churning, gears grinding, the bikes buzzing louder than a thousand swarms of hornets.
Motorbikes, alive on the sidewalks, careening, curving through crosswalks.
Motorbikes shooting from alleys. Faster than cannonballs. The bikes barreling and booming, tailpipes spewing cones of black smoke, smoke trails suspended in air…
Aside from the swarming hive of bikes, the only other activity I could surmise were animated billboards atop office buildings broadcasting black & white footage of old Transformers flicks.
In the midst of the scene, it occurred to me that I was the only creature standing. I was on two feet, stepping forward. A pastel blue sky hung like a sheet, and I dodged the numerous bikes as I trudged forth, my toenails long on the hot concrete.
A blood red sun, like a red hole poked through the blue sky, hung high. Searing my skin, its fiery rays licked over me.
Amid the chaos, I happened upon a late-middle-aged woman. Her oil-black hair natty, like a Rastafarian’s. Though I wasn’t sure if her hair was in dreadlocks or if it was simply dirty.
The lady was in a trench coat, a pink trench coat with a ratty gray, frilly fake fur trim. She was sitting cross-legged, by the ledge of an overpass, staring at the railing. I was thinking she might jump. I don’t know why I thought that, but it was the first thing that crossed my mind, seeing her rooted there, her vacant gaze affixed to the busy buzz of the riderless motorbikes below.
The road’s traffic was all riderless bikes, but soon they were joined by riderless trucks and cars and a riderless bicycle or two, a skateboard, a stand-up scooter, all zipping and surging, people-free, the vehicles crisscrossing every which way.
Strangely, though, there seemed a purpose to their direction. As if they were in a colony of ants.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The dreadlocked lady spun her head, a 180-degree turn, so that her chin was atop the tip of her spine. Her eyes were hollow. Her eye sockets empty black holes. Her eyeless face shifted itself and tracked me like a security camera as I walked up the overpass’s stairs and cautiously stepped by.
Then the sky instantly darkened and opened up. A deluge of hot black rain soaking the city. The rain appearing as motor oil.
Fortunately, the overpass was covered by a canopy. And I stood in the hissing downpour, watching the riderless bikes blast by, speeding down the slick streets, unimpeded. Shifting my gaze, I glanced over at the dreaded woman, witnessed her rise, then lift into the air and float toward me like a ghost.
As she floated toward me, her small, frail body began to shapeshift into a motorbike. She was on some Terminator 2 type shit. Her arms melting into a silver liquid, then forming into a front wheel, her legs a rear wheel, her spine a chassis, her dreadlocks turning to tassels on the handlebar as the bike landed on the floor of the overpass. Then the bike’s engine backfired louder than a gunshot.
Then I looked down and saw that my feet were molting into rubber…
DO YOU BELIEVE IN GHOSTS?
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“I told you, Jeff, I’m a skeptic.”
“I’ve traveled the world, been to the sites of war crimes, genocides, murders, hotel fires, and I’ve not once, NOT ONCE seen a ghost.”
“My offer still stands. One million dollars to anyone who can prove to me that ghosts exist.”
“Look, Mr. Palmer…”
“Call me ‘Jay,’” he interrupted.
“Jay, you didn’t get to be a wealthy man by being gullible, but…”
Jay interrupted again, “Cut the flattery. You’re saying that you can show me ghosts in Bangkok, and I say it’s bullshit. The offer stands. Show me a ghost, I’ll show you one million dollars. My secretary will email you my Bangkok itinerary.
We’ll be in touch.”
And with that the call cut off.
For a couple years I’d been following Mr. Jay Palmer, on Twitter, and had been enthralled, entertained and annoyed at his tweets. No stranger to fame or controversy, the handsome young billionaire, the Wall Street hedge fund star had once been heralded as the next Warren Buffett.
He’d originally achieved fame for his business acumen but these days was known more for his brash, outspoken personality and relentless ridicule of the supernatural, ghosts, in particular, as well as his tendency to engage in social media spats, often with other celebs, and sometimes even random commenters.
I’d seen that Mr. Palmer, along with his starlet girlfriend, would be in Vietnam on business, so I’d tweeted him, thinking he’d probably ignore me.
But, to my astonishment, he’d replied, and we’d exchanged direct messages, then phone calls, and I’d challenged him to visit the haunted sites of Bangkok, which includes my street, and afterwards see if he still doubted the existence of ghosts.
He’d taken me up on my challenge, and I’d be seeing him in less than 48 hours…
As for me, I wholeheartedly believe in ghosts. I’ve seen plenty, been accustomed to their presence since I was a youngster. I’d seen several spirits in my childhood home, in Pittsburgh. The first I saw were tiny balls of light floating around and through the ceiling of my bedroom.
Later, I’d see misty silhouettes of human forms on the staircase by the living room.
There’d also routinely be doors closing, opening unexplainably, around the house.
My sister, too, had seen the blobs of light flying through the ceiling, in her room, but my parents refused to believe the ghosts were there. But I knew. And my sister knew. And the ghosts, they knew. And that was enough for me.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Fortunately, the ghosts in my house were not malicious spirits. They were only present. Remnants of the former owners, probably. Such is usually the case when one lives in a 100-year-old house. I never feared them, those ghosts, and simply accepted them as fellow occupants of the dwelling…
For as long as I can remember, ghosts have fascinated me. I’ve always enjoyed ghost stories, movies, books, more for the entertainment factor, history lessons, though, that they held.
The stories, the ghosts never scared me, really. More so, I’d pitied the ghosts, and I wondered if the ghosts in my house or the ghosts in the stories knew if they were ghosts.
What a tragedy, to be a ghost, and not know it…
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When I first came to Bangkok as a tourist, I was delighted to discover the city held such strong beliefs in ghosts.
The welcoming, warm and friendly Thai people, plus the climate, the hot weather, and the scrumptious, hot and spicy food agreed with me, and I decided to ditch the corporate world, and stay in Thailand, in Bangkok. For the last 7 years, it’s where I’ve been. I’ve left only for border runs to Cambodia, Laos to renew my visas.
My first job in Thailand, like many expats here, was teaching English, but then I found my way into another, more exciting and lucrative business- paranormal tours, videos…
Along with my Thai partner, Somchai, we started the business as a side hustle, but it’d expanded well enough that we were able to turn it into a full-time gig.
Our tours consisted of taking clients out around Bangkok to local haunted sites, at night, and we made videos of these ghost tours that we’d post online, share on social media- video recordings of real footage of paranormal activity.
Our tours were provided on motorcycles, one driven by Somchai, one by me, and perhaps additional drivers if we had a larger group.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Motorcycles sure aren’t the safest method of transport, but it’s the fastest way of getting around in Bangkok, given the perpetually gridlocked city traffic.
Occasionally, though, we’d take clients out in a car if they were too squeamish to sit on the backseat of a motorcycle, or if they demanded AC.
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Our tours’ itinerary included several spots. Many only provided entertaining, spooky tales, but not actual ghost sightings.
However, The Sathorn Unique Tower, Wat Don Cemetery, and the “Curve of 100
Corpses,” these were the most reliable Bangkok locations to spot paranormal activity. Especially the Wat Don Cemetery. Practically every trip we took there yielded a ghost sighting or two.
In the cemetery, a place where over 10,000 victims of accidents were buried, many in unmarked graves, we’d often see “tai hong”, which is Thai for an angry ghost, one that died in a sudden, tragic manner.
The “tai hong” we most frequently saw was a headless ghost that’d fall from a tree, crawl on its stomach like an alligator and disappear into dead air.
One time a ghost appeared in Somchai’s car, in the backseat, the ghost bloody, missing limbs, screaming in agony. A couple German clients sitting next to it freaked out, yelling and demanding us to pull over, and when we did, they ran away, tearing off running into the crowded Bangkok streets.
Somchai said a prayer that let the ghost out, back into the night.
After that, Somchai bought a special green jade amulet, from a monk, and the amulet has since prevented ghosts from entering his car, though recently we found a legless ghost on the roof, and Somchai said a blessing that allowed it to leave…
The Sathorn Tower was a hotspot, too, for ghosts.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer We’d often find ghosts of businessmen jumping from upper floors, reenacting their suicides. Somchai said they were trapped in repeat, in a purgatory of sorts, having to jump again and again until they’d be able to pass onto the next realm.
Or maybe they were being punished, forced to relive their suicide because of the bad karma they’d created.
In addition to the jumpers, we could also, via telescope, spot the ghost of a middle-aged Swedish man, a tourist, hanging by a noose from a ceiling pipe. You could see him hanging lifeless there practically every night.
Occasionally, we could bribe a security guard to enter the building, have a look around, but never were we able to see the ghosts up close. The ghosts there seemed to prefer keeping their distance, only staying visible from afar…
The “Curve of 100 Corpses” yielded many sightings, ghosts on motorcycles, mostly, those lost in auto accidents. Somchai said they were also in a purgatory, riding around the same roads until they could pass. He said it was because their family members might not have performed the correct funerary rites, or that the ghosts were too angry to accept they’d died, refusing to believe it, continuing to ride back and forth along the same stretch of road, every day and night.
(I’d wondered, too, if some of the office workers I’d seen in subways, rush hour traffic, back in America were suffering the same fate…) ผีผีผีผี
Another famous ghost spot, the “Thawi Nakhon Deserted Mansion” was a point of contention between Somchai and me.
It was the only site he’d been genuinely afraid of, and he’d dissuaded me from adding it to our itinerary. His objections being that the site was haunted by a malicious ghost called “Dao.”
It’s common for ghosts of those who died in horrific, tragic manners to attempt to take vengeance on the living, particularly those similar to the people the ghosts are angry with; the ghosts doing this either out of sheer hatred, or so the living might take the ghost’s place in the afterlife.
“Dao” was one such malicious ghost, the ghost of a young woman with long black hair, who always wore a white dress that resembled a nightgown.
Somchai said it was her that’d possessed many tourists, foreign men, Westerners in Bangkok, and caused their deaths.
Somchai told me his sister, a medium, once spoke to Dao. That his sister was contacted by her, randomly, as she slept, and the two of them spoke in a lush green rice field near the outskirts of Bangkok…
Dao said she’d been jilted by a foreigner, a handsome young man, a US soldier, around the time of the Vietnam War. The man was in Bangkok on R&R before he was to return to America, after completing his tour, being discharged. He’d met and seduced Dao, who was a chaste young woman from an upper-class family, and a practicing Buddhist, and he’d taken her virginity, promising to return later to marry her.
But he never returned.
Dao, in a fit of grief, jumped from a building, plunging to her death in the Chao Phraya River.
Her family had moved, abandoned the mansion, on the edge of Bangkok. With its bad karma coming from the inauspicious end of the family’s daughter, it never found a buyer, and the mansion remains empty to this day. Dao’s ghost its only resident.
Though in life Dao was said to be reserved, after death, her demeanor changed, and her grief shifted to rage. Her ghost not only resides in her family’s abandoned mansion, but is said to be alive in Bangkok, floating from hotel to hotel, in search of vulnerable foreigners, those down on their luck, depressed, or with other issues. Dao enters their head, encourages them to commit suicide by jumping from a building or bridge.
Though she’s mainly preyed on foreigners, she’s also attacked Thais too, murdering 5 teens who’d disturbed her house, the teens belonging to a group that’d broken into the house late at night, to do drugs, drink and do whatever else teens do. Later, one by one, each died in various gruesome traffic accidents…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Not wishing to disturb such a spirit, we’d stayed away from the mansion. Until a wealthy Italian, with a large pile of cash, too much to refuse, demanded that we take him and his wife there. At night!
Which we did, armed with Somchai’s most powerful amulet, and a protective spell from his monk, bestowed on us after a generous donation to the temple…
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The mansion was situated on a large empty lot, flanked by endless green rice fields, a patch of jungle, and a highway to its far left. A fence around its perimeter precluded entrance.
On the back of twin motorcycles, one driven by me, one by Somchai, with the Italians riding on the motorcycle backseats, the wife on Somchai’s, and the man on mine, and damn, was the portly fellow weighing down my bike, draining the gas gauge as we rode slowly up to the mansion and parked for a peak at the house.
A chalky white, three-storey manor, with hulking Grecian columns in its front, it’d stood up to time, the elements rather well, I thought, showing only mild dilapidation, weather wear.
At first the manor was totally dark, but suddenly, a light went on in an upstairs room. The Italians shrieked in Italian. Somchai screamed something in Thai. And I followed his lead as he tore off back to the highway.
A week afterwards, the wife, holding large handfuls of shopping bags, was struck by a motorcycle taxi while crossing Sukhumvit Road and died on the scene.
Perhaps out of grief, or something else as well, the husband jumped to his death from the fifth floor of the Terminal 21 shopping mall, landing face first on the ground floor, horrifying the surrounding shoppers, staff alike… The mall was only a block from where his wife had died…
“Dao,” Somchai told me.
We both immediately went and received further blessings from the temple after learning of the suicide.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Somchai also had his sister, the medium, attempt to contact Dao, which she did, meeting Dao again in the rice field in a dream, though this time, the rice field was on fire. Dao appeared as a burn victim, horrific scars covering her body.
This time, Dao wouldn’t speak, and instead summoned a driverless motorcycle to ride off, disappear into the conflagration. Then she twisted her burnt lips into a grin and walked slowly into the fire.
Somchai reckoned that it was a sign, a warning to keep away from the house and that we were lucky to be alive. He told me he wouldn’t go there again, even for a million dollars…
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Mr. Jay Palmer and his girlfriend, the lovely Miss Amber Royal, reality TV star, Instagram influencer, model, socialite, etc., arrived in Bangkok with much fanfare.
Local paparazzi were there to snap pictures of their early afternoon arrival at Suvarnabhumi airport.
After passing by a contingent of Thai fans, signing a handful of autographs, they traveled via limo to the Mandarin Oriental, Bangkok’s premier luxury hotel, where I met them, for a pre-tour meeting.
When I rode my motorcycle into the hotel’s parking lot, I saw a throng of fans, paparazzi and press camped outside the hotel. Seeing the clumped masses, wide-eyed and wielding microphones, cameras, and phones, I wasn’t envious of the pair’s fame. Their money, yes, I did envy that, but being hounded by photographers, having people with their smartphones chasing after them anywhere they went, even in Thailand, that level of fame, nope, didn’t envy that at all…
We met in the hotel’s ritzy “Author’s Lounge” for late afternoon tea.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer I must admit I was a tad starstruck when they entered and sat down to our table.
Heads all around the wooden room were turning, everyone collectively marveling at the pair’s celebrity and perfect facial structures.
Aside from what appeared a very forced smile and perfunctory “hello”, Amber said nothing, ate nothing, only sipped sparingly on a glass of sparkling water, and stared and tapped at her phone unflinchingly.
Jay, on the other hand, was animated.
“Jeff, I can’t believe you make money doing this. People are idiots. It’s that they WANT to believe in ghosts. That’s why they see them.”
He continued, heatedly, between healthy bites from a splendid plate of assorted tropical fruits, “It’s hallucinations. Mind tricks.”
I opened my mouth to chime in and he seemed to notice that I was about to speak, so he, perhaps preemptively, continued his anti-superstition jeremiad.
“I see you’re about to show me something on your phone,” he said in a mocking tone, nodding his chin at the phone in my hand, “don’t bother, I’ve seen the bullshit footage you post online. I know it’s faked. All ‘ghost’ footage is faked,”
he’d thrown up air quotes around “ghost footage.”
“Amityville House, or should I say, Amityville Hoax, fake. All those paranormal shows, fake. Just doctored images, sounds, permutations of white noise, static. I mean, humans have existed for over 200,000 years, right? Why don’t we ever hear of caveman ghosts? A monkey man ghost outside your house, rubbing sticks together for a fire… Never hear of that. Nope, always some asshole in a top hat.
Only Slash gets to wear a top hat, okay?! Fucking ghost bullshit.
“And how come no animals are ghosts? They don’t get to be ghosts? The chicken you ate for lunch comes back to haunt you? Oh, hold up, it does, food poisoning!”
Jay broke into hearty laughter at his own joke, nudged Amber with his elbow, but she ignored him, scrolled on her phone.
“Have you read Richard Dawkins?” he asked, after catching his breath, his eyes flickering and his facial expression turning serious. Dead serious. Angry even.
“Yes, I know of…” I began to say when he interrupted again.
“There is no God. No ghosts, either. God is the biggest ghost. The best ghost story ever told if you ask me. Don’t tell anyone I said this, though. I can’t have the religious freaks after me. Baptists buy stocks, too, you know. I hope you read the waiver you signed.”
“Sure, I read it word for word, and don’t…” and he interrupted me once more after sinking another double shot of espresso in one swift gulp, sucking it down like it was a shot of whisky.
He smacked his lips loudly and continued, “You’re taking me out on your tour tonight. You meet me at the back entrance of the hotel so we can avoid the press.
I’m planning to only pay you for the tour, but if you really can show me a ghost, even just one, I pay you a million dollars. It’s in the contract.
“But you won’t show me anything. I know you won’t. And you know you won’t.
“You really sure you want to take this challenge? I’m going to post it on Instagram, tweet it, add you to my list of the vanquished. I’ve got like over 40 million followers. You want that heat?”
“I’ve already accepted your offer and am confident I can show you not only one, but multiple ghosts. And, at the risk of sounding cliché, and with all due respect, sir, I wouldn’t live in Bangkok if I couldn’t take the heat, or the ghosts,” I answered and took a sip of the extremely bitter and strong espresso. The stuff numbed my mouth. It was like liquid cocaine.
“I admire your confidence, Jeff. I’ll see you tonight.” Jay said as he reached over the table and gave me a fist bump.
He and Amber both rose, and she peered up for a second, waved a goodbye with another forced smile, then went immediately back to her phone, glued to it as she walked off, arm in arm with Jay, the couple ushered out of the lounge dotingly by hotel staff wearing bow ties and perfectly creased blazers.
I sat back in my chair, looked up at the stunning architecture of the building, the intricate transoms, glittering chandelier, and assorted black and white photographs hanging on the walls.
I glanced admiringly at a photograph of Somerset Maugham, the famous author who’d suffered through a bout of malaria at this hotel.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer I finished my plate of assorted pastries, finger cakes. They were delectable and immaculate. Rich people really eat well.
Gazing out towards the Chao Phraya River, I wondered where exactly Dao had jumped. Was it here? From the hotel? With the hotel’s long history, having been built in 1876, there must be many ghosts around. Maybe Mr. Maugham’s ghost drops by, from time to time…
Hopefully more than one or two ghosts were ready to show up later tonight… A million dollars was riding on it…
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When Somchai and I showed up that evening, around 10 p.m., I could tell Mr.
Palmer was slightly tipsy.
“Too many glasses of red wine at Le Normandie,” he grunted. His blond hair was combed and slicked back neatly, and he’d changed into blue jeans and a black Guns N’ Roses t-shirt.
(I was surprised he was into classic rock. I thought he’d be more into mumble rap, for whatever reason…)
I passed him a motorcycle helmet to wear. I’d picked a helmet for him that had a super dark visor, to help conceal his identity from the press, fans.
“And where is Miss Royal?” I asked Jay, who was struggling to figure out how to sit properly on the back of the motorcycle. Somchai rushed over, helped him up and on.
“Nah, no Amber, she’s going to a party, with a Thai princess she’s pals with. She doesn’t want to be outside much anyway, in this heat.
“And I don’t blame her. How could anyone live in a place this fucking hot?
Dammit, the whole place stinks like ass. And just look at that pole up there, the electric pole, all those twisted wires… What a shithole…
“And speaking of shit, Amber said she knows you’re full of shit, and you don’t need to prove it to her. Me, on the other hand, I like a good joke, shattering superstitions. Science is the only truth, Jeffyboy. Let’s do this, bro.”
And with that, we set off into the humid Bangkok night. We rode around the concrete jungle, and Jay scanned around quietly at its backdrop of neon lights and shimmering skyscrapers, bustling city streets.
Passing by a row of street food vendors, Jay yelled into my ear, “Smells great, those noodles. I’d almost eat them if they wouldn’t give me diarrhea. If it wasn’t probably rat meat in there…”
“Thais are a rather cleanly people. The street food here is quite safe, generally.
Even as safe as many upscale restaurants.” I screamed back to him over the din of the traffic…
We hit our top three spots in succession, the Sathorn Tower, the cemetery, the
“Curve of 100 Corpses.” But nothing. For the first time, ever, not a single ghost showed themselves.
We had to dig deeper, so we took him by the “Prostitute Graveyard,” an abandoned brothel where women were forced into sex slavery and many were killed and buried in the yard behind what was now an abandoned building, a rather shoddy structure, that looked more like an old empty factory.
It was usual to hear cries there at night. See the ghost of a crying woman pacing outside the building entrance. But, again, nothing.
I decided to go with the most reliable ghosts I know. Those living near my apartment.
My apartment is near the site of the infamous Santika Club fire, where 66 people burned to death. At night, it’s common to see ghosts of the club-goers, either on fire, or as charred corpses, running up and down the street where the club once stood, the ghosts probably seeking the exit doors they tragically couldn’t find that fateful night.
We pulled up to the site of the club. Waited.
No ghosts.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Then we drove to the front of my apartment building. My building is one of many on a side street, off Sukhumvit Road, in an alley. The Art Deco style, pastel pink building next to mine was the site of a shocking murder where a British man, angry over his money allegedly being stolen, threw his bargirl girlfriend off the balcony, and she fell to her death in front of my building.
The Brit is rotting in the Bangkok Hilton, but the girl lives on as a ghost, as a
“preta,” a hungry ghost.
Pretas are ghosts of those who were too materialistic or greedy and are doomed to wander as ghosts with small mouths, and elongated, super thin necks. They are always hungry or thirsty, but their mouths and necks are too tiny for them to eat or drink.
The girl thrown off the balcony was supposedly such a preta, and me, the neighbors, would see her wandering the alley both day and night. A tormented ghost, the sun would freeze her, and the moon would burn her. My landlady would regularly say prayers for the preta and hoped the ghost could one day pass on to a new life.
I’d taken a few pictures of the preta, video too, had seen her several times per week.
When we rode into the alley, sure enough, the preta was there, wandering around the spot on the pavement where she’d fallen to her death.
“There, there, look!” I hit the brakes, craned my neck and yelled to Jay. But when I looked back, the preta was gone.
“I didn’t see anything. This is getting boring,” said Jay, flipping up his helmet’s visor and snarling at me with an upturned lip.
Looking back at Jay, I was ready to reaffirm what I’d seen, when behind him, the preta had reappeared.
She’d grown too, was over 7 feet tall, and was cupping her palms to her face, like a scream mask. Her belly was growing as well, was terribly distended and her skin was pale as bone and mummified.
Somchai jumped off his bike, took several steps back, held up his amulet.
“She’s… Behind you…” I whispered and pointed in the direction of the ghost.
“No, no, she’s not,” Jay shot back, with a tone of exasperation.
“I swear. She is.” I affirmed, “seriously.”
Jay shook his head derisively, sighed and shifted around in his seat, looked back.
As soon as his gaze turned in her direction, the preta vanished into thin air.
Jay let loose a shrill burst of sardonic laughter, shifted back and checked his phone to take a look at a stock ticker, then switched to YouTube, showed me a clip of Bill Maher.
“This guy is such an asshole, Bill Maher, but he gets it. He gets the human condition, the stupidity of human beings, people like you. He gets it probably better than anyone, except Bill Hicks, or George Carlin.”
“You’re oh for six, Jeffyboy. It’s a double strikeout. Oh wait, maybe you can show me a snake that crawls up from a toilet! I hear that happens in Bangkok, like you’ll be on the toilet, and a cobra pops up, bites you in the ass! I’d say that’s probably more likely than a ghost… Can you show me that?”
Something like that had happened once or twice since I’d been in Bangkok, though fortunately not to me. I was about to reply to Jay, along those lines, and opened my mouth to speak when he beat me to the punch…
“Nah, forget about it,” he sneered, his New Yawk accent really coming out, “you can take me back now. I knew this was fake. Hold on, I’m gonna call Amber before we go, I’ll have you drop me off at the party. You’re basically my chauffeur at this point. I fucking OWNED you, bro…”
He brought his phone up to his face, tapped on it and the image of the heavily made-up starlet appeared on the device’s screen.
“Hey, Amber, what’s shaking, sugar tits…”
His voice trailed off a bit as he walked down the alley, yapping to his girl on his Bluetooth headset. I could see her at a party, in a glitzy club somewhere, next to her was an impossibly gorgeous Asian girl I recognized, who I think was Lisa from the K-Pop girl group BLACKPINK…
Somchai told me that there was nothing we could do to prove ghosts to Jay.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Not because ghosts didn’t exist, but that Jay didn’t believe in them, and not just didn’t believe, but didn’t want to believe. As long as he held such a determination to not believe, his energy, his cynicism would force away ghosts, especially the non-malicious spirits.
Fear attracts ghosts. Disbelief, and cynicism, pessimism, especially, repels them.
This is what Somchai had always told me. It was seeming to be right.
I checked my phone and noticed that I had thousands of messages on Twitter. Our company was being bombarded by trolls mocking us. Jay had been tweeting his experience the whole night, ruthlessly roasting us.
At first, I felt a spear of pain, was hurt to see hundreds of tweets full of invective, belligerence, stuff like “fuck u” “scamers”. Worse was the racist language against Asian people. But when I noticed our company’s follower count had gone from around 5,000 to 90,000, in the span of a couple hours, I felt better.
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Jay ended his facetime call with an air kiss, sauntered back over to us. I thought we’d take him to wherever this party was, but with an annoyed expression, he made one final request.
“Okay, so one of Amber’s Thai friends, some model floozy, actually believes in this bullshit. She was all worried that we might have gone to this abandoned mansion.
We didn’t, though, and she’s like saying something in Thai, which was translated as warning me ‘never to go there’…
“So, of course we have to go there. Then after that, you take me to the party.”
“Was it the Thawi Nakhon Mansion?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.
Jay peered down at his phone, scrolled through a Google map, looked back up at me.
“Yup, that’s the one. Let’s go,” said Jay, strapping his helmet back on.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Somchai was staring at me intently. I stared back. It was our last chance for one million dollars, Somchai, come on!
But Somchai wanted no part of it. He shook his head, got on his bike, and zipped off.
Jay held up his phone, shoved it at my face, on it was the 1980s music video for the song “Ghostbusters,” and he jokingly shimmied and sang along to it.
“I ain’t afraid of no…”
One million dollars was on the line. Although Dao might not show herself, given the fate that’d befallen everyone who’d disturbed her, I had to make it clear to Jay what he was getting into. And I did. I explained Dao’s story and clearly told Jay what happened to the teenagers, to the Italians, and about the medium’s dreams and warnings.
Jay laughed through the whole thing and snapped back at me, “Look, I don’t believe a word of that. With the way I’ve seen the Thais driving, anyone anytime could be killed in a traffic accident. And I know, for sure, and more so than ever, after tonight, that ghosts are BULL FUCKING SHIT.
“But, you know, I admire your patience, persistence. I can’t tell you how many arguments I’ve been in with people over this subject, fucking whiny little bitches.
And here you are, a gentleman the entire time, even looking out for my well-being after I shit on you all night, destroyed you on Twitter, got millions of people laughing at you right this second, on their phones…
“So, here’s what we’ll do. We’re going to that house, and get this, if I die, within the next month, in a ‘tragic’ accident, you get one million dollars. Hold up, I’ll have a lawyer put that in writing right now.”
Jay made a quick facetime call to his lawyer, who was eating breakfast, and had the old guy draw him up a contract. Then we sat for a few minutes watching Anthony Jeselnik’s comedy special “Caligula.”
“Ah shit, that holocaust joke is gold. A Nike factory,” Jay guffawed, and then showed me the contract stipulating that if he died in the next month, in an accident, I’d get the one million dollars.
“You sign it AFTER we see the mansion. AFTER you drop me off,” Jay said, slipping his phone into a front pocket of his jeans…
We drove out there, and as with the other sites, nothing happened. No light went on in the house. It was just an old mansion to Jay, who quipped that maybe he’d buy the house, turn it into a museum about ghosts, and that probably lots of people would be stupid enough to pay to visit it.
“Hey, what’s with the little temple type house over there? I’ve seen a buncha those…” asked Jay, pointing over at the spirit house on the side of the road.
“That’s a spirit house. It’s common here in Southeast Asia. The locals set them outside their houses, businesses, to honor and shelter whatever spirits might be in the surrounding area. They figure it’s better to have them in the spirit house than have the ghost coming into their house or apartment. You’ll see people go out there in the morning, bringing gifts of juice or fruit for the sp…”
“You believe that shit, Jeff?” Jay asked, cutting me off, walking up to the small brown wooden spirit house that sat atop a dais. He stuck his face up close to it, had a long look around its inside.
I was about to answer when he yelled out, “I don’t see any ghosts in it! Hey, ghosts? You there? You there?”
Then he grabbed the spirit house, shook it.
“Maybe I can shake the spirits out! Come out, come out, wherever you are!”
“Jay, please, stop, if a local drives by and sees you doing that, he might…” I pleaded.
“IT’S BULLSHIT!” he screamed and shoved the spirit house down. It, along with the offerings of fruit and plastic bottles of juice, crashed to the ground.
“See, no ghosts! If they existed, wouldn’t they show themselves after I trashed their house?”
“Jay, no, you can’t…” I begged him, stepped towards him, about to yank him away, when he unzipped his pants, and screamed out, “Fuck your ghosts! I’m Jay FUCKING Palmer, bitch! RAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!”
Then he flung out his cock and began to piss on the spirit house.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer I stood frozen in disbelief, grimaced, shut my eyes and hung my head in shame. I couldn’t even comprehend how many visits I’d need to make to the temple to atone for this…
He finished his business, zipped up his fly and proclaimed, “Now, take me to the fucking party. I’m sick of this charade…”
I clutched my protective amulet tightly, hurried over to my bike. Jay jogged over, jumped on the back and we rode off…
Riding to the nightclub in lower Sukhumvit where his party was, I rode the motorbike like a grandma, extra careful.
Normally I’d never been afraid of ghosts, but after what he’d done to that spirit house, I couldn’t shake the mental image of Dao, enraged, her hair on fire, the taste of blood in her mouth. I felt a change in the air, too; it’d gotten at least 5
degrees cooler once we’d left the site of the mansion; I was getting gooseflesh.
When I pulled up to the front of the club, the bouncers growled at us, their angry eyes like those of mad dogs. One promptly attempted to block us from pulling further towards the entrance.
“Excuse me, can I help you?” pointedly inquired the tallest of the lot, a lanky bouncer with a long scar on his right cheek. He appeared to be French by the sound of his accent.
Not too many of this nightclub’s patrons arrived via motorcycle. Dude probably thought we were deliverymen or in the wrong place.
“I hope you can help me, or else you’d be pretty shitty at your job,” said Jay, flipping up his visor.
“Mr. Palmer, I apologize, sir, I did not…” the Frenchie bouncer started to stammer and stepped back.
Jay hopped off the bike, passed me the helmet, gave me a fist bump.
“As much as I shit on you tonight, this was fun, I must say, riding around, seeing the city. I don’t get out like this too often… Here, sign this…”
He handed me the phone, and I read over and then signed the new contract on his iPhone’s touchscreen, using my finger.
“You been a sport, Jeffyboy. I don’t know how good your reading comprehension is, but hopefully you saw in there that I’m giving you an extra 20k. You probably won’t have many clients after this, so you’ll need the cash. Take care, bro.”
And with that, Jay looked over and nodded to the bouncer who ushered him into the club.
Before riding off, I checked my phone again. It was burning up with tweets, none of them nice either and an online brawl between the comedians Steven Crowder and Nick Di Paolo versus the actress Alyssa Milano had broken out in the thread of comments. The rapper Tekashi69 had even trolled me.
But on the bright side, my followers had grown to over 140,000, and a rep from the Discovery Channel had sent me a DM, asking about appearing on a ghost-themed reality show.
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Two days later, as Jay and Amber were outside the Mandarin Oriental, waiting for a private boat to take them on a tour of the Chao Phraya River, a young Thai girl, of university age, plunged from the roof of the building, landed on top of Jay, crushing him and killing him instantly.
The girl had worked at the hotel and had recently broken up with her boyfriend, so it was thought she’d committed suicide. But she’d left no note, not spoken or told anyone of suicidal thoughts and was known as a gregarious, friendly, and optimistic girl.
She’d also been a fan of Amber and had been taking photos of her before she fell, leading some to believe maybe she’d tried to snap a selfie with Amber in the background and wound up falling.
The subsequent police investigation was inconclusive…
Amber’s fame only rocketed after the event, the tragic tale. Her follower count soaring to over 75 million on Instagram, and she did a series of tell-all interviews, launched a new product line of clothing in the months after…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer As for me, my business had grown exponentially from the publicity of Jay’s tweets and then even more so after the media firestorm surrounding his untimely death.
We had more clients and deals than we could handle and had to hire additional staff. What’s more, we signed a deal for a series of episodes on the Discovery Channel, about ghosts in Bangkok.
And about 5 months later, I was shocked when I went to the ATM to withdraw some cash and found there was over $1,000,000 that had appeared in the account, sent to me by the late Mr. Palmer’s estate.
With business being as good as it was, and with the TV deal we’d inked, I knew what to do with the cash.
I tracked down the family of the girl who’d died at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, the one who’d fallen to her death. Her family turned out to be destitute, living in a shack alongside the Chao Phraya River, in a slum, on the outskirts of Bangkok.
When I spoke with the girl’s mother, I learned she was a single mom struggling to put her 15-year-old boy through school.
Somchai and I took the lady and her son to Bangkok Bank and transferred them $1,000,000.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer
JOB AT NANA PLAZA
1
Watching a livestream of Sukhumvit Road, Na knew she’d feel like a fish out of water…
Bangkok… The lights, the traffic, the faces, streets brimming, floods of activity…
One single city block had more people in its radius than Na had ever seen in her entire life, coming from a small rice farming village in Nowhere, Nakhon Phanom…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Bangkok, Krung Thep, the metropolis, had so many foreigners, too, or, as the Thais called them: “farangs.”
Not that she’d never seen foreigners, in person; she’d seen a few farangs, sure, but only a handful, usually graying, overweight, with far younger Thai wives, often Thai wives who’d been single mothers.
Such as one of her neighbors, Bu…
Bu had found and hooked a German online, a man missing an arm, and eventually disappeared to Berlin to join him, with her child in tow.
Ecstatic, Bu had gushed and told anyone who’d listen that she’d finally see snow…
Another young single mother, Mod, in a nearby village, had met a vacationing Norwegian, and the 60ish, tall, leathery-skinned, lanky, mustached chap had married her, stayed in the village, and built Mod and her family a sizable 4-bedroom baby blue house; the house rising above all others; its portico, stucco roof and small swimming pool out back the aspiration and envy of the entire block…
To top it off, the Scandinavian had also bought a black Hilux pickup truck that Mod hosed down, meticulously, every day, in their Bougainvillea-lined asphalt driveway…
Na envied Bu and Mod’s good fortune, particularly since her luck had always been so horrible…
It was only last year that her deadbeat father, rarely seen, returned home one rainy night, crashing in, on an angry motorbike with the tail of a comet.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Her wild-eyed father, in a cataleptic fit of meth-induced rage, had robbed, beaten, chased and slashed her mother’s legs with a kitchen knife, and then disappeared, probably back to his hometown, on the jungle border with Laos…
Na’s elder brother, had bullied, molested, and raped her, pimped her out to his friends, and later, after drinking and smoking ganja and falling off a buffalo he and his friends were attempting to joyride, her brother, the bucktoothed sadist, declared he’d found redemption in a pile of buffalo dung and thus had had a religious awakening and left home, became a monk, hitchhiking to a monastery near Chiang Mai.
Worse yet, at 18, Na had fallen pregnant. With whom, she didn’t know. Possibly her brother, one of his friends, or the older boy in school who’d forced his way up her dress behind a storage shed.
Her baby was healthy, chubby, and beautiful, though; the only perfect thing in her life.
And her mother, aunts, and female cousins, neighbors took turns, breaks from rice farming, animal husbandry, and all chipped in to care for the infant, the round little giggle-machine, while Na returned to finish high school.
Na’s options after graduation were limited.
Her grades were satisfactory for university applications, but not for full scholarships, and she lacked the necessary funds for tuition.
(Perhaps if she’d studied more sedulously, spent less time on her phone, she lamented!)
She could take out student loans and be burdened with debt for years, but she didn’t want that, not for her, her mother, or her baby, and, really, she didn’t enjoy school that much anyway…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Her only other options were to work at 7-Eleven as a cashier, toil in the scalding tropical sun as a farmer, for even less money, or work at a bar, karaoke joint or massage parlor in Phuket, Pattaya, or Bangkok…
One of her former high school classmates, Pear, a light-skinned, doe-eyed lovely, a year older than Na, had been working in Bangkok and was making $2000 or more per month, sending most of it home to her family, who’d been able to buy a Hilux truck and whose father could be seen flashing a shiny new gold necklace with a glittery malachite Buddha pendant.
Pear and Na were friends on LINE and Pear inveigled Na to join her at Pear’s bar in Nana Plaza, promising that it was easy work, far more lucrative than rice farming or 7-Eleven…
Na, being an observant Buddhist, had her reservations, but decided the remuneration was too good to pass up, and, now being 19, her window of time was limited, so, she took the job offer…
Although upon arrival in Bangkok, she’d need to pass an interview first…
Officially no one under 20 is allowed in Thai bars, but fake IDs are easy to get, and Na purchased one online and it arrived the next day.
(Many of the bars in Bangkok, Pattaya, Phuket had 18, 19-year-olds in them, but not too many, as there’d been more and more crackdowns on underagers, anyone under 20 in recent times, often undertaken in cooperation with international NGOs…)
((Pear said that, like herself, Na would have an edge with her youth, because most of the girls at the bar were early to late 20s.))
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer (((About 28 or 29, ID age, was the general “retirement” age for bargirls. At that point most of the ladies who wished to remain in the skin trade, offering certain special services, would switch to massage parlors or freelance.))) Na rode a red-eye, all-night bus to Bangkok, arriving at the Ekkamai bus terminal in the late morning, waking up to Bangkok’s smoggy downtown skyline, in awe of her surroundings.
She’d never seen such colossal buildings, so many cars on the streets, so many people, so many different types of people everywhere.
Sundries of Thais in business suits and surgical masks. Farangs in cargo shorts.
Arab women in abayas, dark facial veils.
And oh, the traffic, never had she seen so many cars, motorbikes, buses, such big buses, windowless buses farting tornado clouds of black smoke, and there was every type of truck imaginable, all packed, bumper to bumper, flooding and jamming the narrow roads!
Stepping out of the bus, gazing upwards at the concrete jungle, the thicket of skyscrapers, she marveled at the ivory white, sleek skytrain as it snaked by, like something from a futuristic sci-fi film.
She’d wanted to spend the day seeing the sights of Bangkok, most of all to visit the Royal Palace and pray at the many sacred temples.
But there was to be none of that. Not on this day.
In the antechamber of the bus station waited her receiver, her recruiter/interviewer who Pear had only referred to as “H”. He held up a white A4
paper with Na’s full name scrawled on it in neat Thai handwriting.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Surprisingly, the man turned out to be a middle-aged Japanese (!), a rather odd looking fellow, a short (155 cm) man with a scorpion’s face and unsightly sloped head pleated with a shock of thinning coal black hair combed to the left, clumped in a heavily gelled, greasy quincuncial grid…
Despite his unpleasant physical appearance, the man wore expensive, designer clothes- a pink button-down shirt and perfectly creased, tailored black slacks, brown leather wingtips.
Na waied respectfully, and the man, in fluent but broken English, asked her for a quick self-introduction, in English, which Na rattled off with ease and alacrity…
(Na spoke quite fluent, albeit grammatically imprecise English, having taken a liking to American movies, TV shows, and it being her favorite subject in school, since they’d often been able to watch American TV, usually episodes of “Friends”, during lessons. She’d also played mobile phone games popular with foreigners and used her English online to chat with gamers from around the globe.) ((Her English proficiency a big reason why Pear recruited her. For Nana bargirls, English ability, at least an intermediate level is a must, a prerequisite for employment. Very few foreigners, especially tourists, speak Thai.)) The Japanese man listened attentively and provided no flummery, just nodded, grunted, and whisked her into his black Mercedes S-Class, onward into Khlong Toei…
Na figured she’d passed the first round of the interview…
2
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer They arrived at a tall, glitzy, cobalt-blue glass condo tower, and a pair of valets in brown liveries, golden epaulets, received them, opened the car doors, waied and ferried the car off to the building’s underground garage.
Na had never been in a building this luxurious; its massive lobby with a lotus pond, sky high ceilings, ornate crystal chandeliers, Carrara marble floors, and jade chimera sculpture near the elevators.
They ascended in the silver elevator up to his suite, and entered the 200 square meter condo, Na stunned by its panorama windows, 180-degree, vista views of the metropolis.
Na wasn’t quite sure what she was doing there. Her Japanese receiver, hadn’t spoken to her during the ride, instead listening to loud 80s hair metal throughout the journey.
Once the door closed behind them, he finally spoke.
“My name Haruki…”
“Ka...”
“You must provide demonstration.”
“Demonstration?”
“Erm…” Haruki grunted, and unhooked his Gucci black leather belt and dropped trou.
His naked lower body was covered in tattoos, and his smallish uncircumcised penis hung limp in the chilly air-conditioning…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Na understood what he meant, grinned and gamboled over, knelt in obeyance before him, and took his flaccid penis in her mouth. It grew, rapidly, becoming far larger than she anticipated.
Haruki held her by the temples as she suckled him, for a minute or two, and pushed her head away, sat down on the chamois U-shaped sectional sofa and pointed to his erect member.
Na slid down her white cotton panties, peeled off her tight gray Tiger beer t-shirt, and undid, flung off her red Lycra, padded bra, letting Haruki see her small, A-Cup tits, her quarter sized nipples stiff in the condo’s chilly air-conditioned breeze.
She twisted off her Thai college girl style, knee length, solid black skirt, and approached Haruki, who inspected her body, from chest to stomach, peering in between her satiny legs, at her shaven cunt, tracing his index finger along her soft, dark pink pussy slit, slipping his finger inside, in and out, two or three times, and turning her around, squeezing and patting her firm little ass.
Then he twisted her back around, facing him again, and with his right hand, motioned her to mount him.
Suddenly Na remembered something imperative that Pear had told her.
Something she wished she’d understood better earlier in life.
“Condom?” Na asked, grabbing ahold of Haruki’s cock, stroking it gently…
Haruki smiled, pointed to a nearby coffee table with a drawer underneath it.
Na reached into the drawer and saw it filled to the brim with Japanese brand condoms.
Taking one out, she ripped open the wrapper, dropped to her knees, and, with her mouth, sucked it onto Haruki.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Na sprung up, took hold of his cock, straddled him, and pointed his phallus at her vaginal opening, slipped his dick inside her.
Her eyes shut, and she rode him, as she’d done with her brother, his friends, when ordered, and as she’d seen in the porn her brother had forced her to view...
She gyrated, moaned loudly, ground her bare muff into him, and bounced up and down on his cock, vigorously, for a good few minutes until he tapped her on the butt, indicating apotheosis; his toothy smile and enthusiastic nod a confirmation she passed the second stage of the interview.
She then passed the third stage, coming up clean for STDs at a nearby clinic Haruki brought her to afterwards…
3
Haruki booked Na a Grab taxi to the apartment where she’d live for the time being.
During the taxi ride over, in the plodding Bangkok traffic, the midday sky opened, and thunder roared; the busy city streets awash in a torrent of neon green rain…
Everything she saw was glowing uranium-like, bright green, terrifying Na, and she asked the surgical mask wearing, shiny bald-headed driver if this was normal, to which he ignored her by turning up his radio, blasting and humming along to the thumping Thai pop…
Arriving at the apartment, the neon rain slowly shifted to seafoam and suddenly ceased, all color vanishing, and the midday sun returned to its corona…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Na got out of the car, gathered her belongings, and made her way towards the screenshot address copied in her phone.
The apartment was in a run-down, brutalist style, pastel pink building, with an A-shaped corrugated brown roof, on the far end of a soi not too far from Nana Plaza.
A homeless man, with a scabrous face and no legs, slept rough in the adjacent alley…
In the building’s vestibule was a corpulent old man, his aura phosphorous. The old man was watching a soccer match on his phone, and he sneered at Na, with bloodshot, concave eyes, and she hurriedly climbed the stairs, to the apartment, a 4th floor walk-up in a 6 storey building...
The place was to be shared with two other bargirls, who Pear said were nice, one named Karen from Chiang Mai, and the other Jem, a Khmer from Loei…
The girls, both dark-skinned, slightly older, shorter than Na, and heavily tattooed, were asleep, on bamboo mats on the floor, and a vacant mat, with a fluffy heart-shaped pillow and folded white sheets, waited for Na; the vacant mat nearest to the apartment’s tiny bathroom, which consisted of a squat toilet, toilet hose, small washbasin and showerhead…
(The floor drain in the bathroom with a most malodorous, fecal, sewer stench that even potpourri couldn’t mask, so the door was kept closed at all times, a handwritten sign on the door commanding it so...) The apartment was a most humble, cold-water, studio flat with no window, no fridge or TV or stove, and no furnishings aside from 3 plastic stools, and a faux wood folding table.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer While neither girl appeared happy to be awoken by Na knocking on the door, they treated her kindly, but shrugged off her questions, panic about the neon green rain, man in the vestibule, and, to Na’s shock, both girls said they didn’t know Pear or that any girl called “Pear” (or her Thai name) worked at the bar.
The girls yawned, stretched, washed up, dressed and welcomed Na to join them for an afternoon breakfast of shrimp noodles at a roadside restaurant occupying a stretch of sidewalk nearby…
As the girls slid on their clothes, both in matching, mint green t-shirts, Na texted Pear and scoured through her LINE timeline.
Pear’s last two posts were from yesterday, one a selfie from Terminal 21 in Bangkok, with a live parakeet on her finger, and another a link to an article by a famous (but controversial) monk, warning of the doomsday asteroid “Apophis.”
Together the girls descended the stairwell, and, exiting the building, the phosphorous man was nowhere to be seen in the vestibule, and Na calmed down a bit…
Sitting on pink plastic stools, twirling the piping hot noodles with wooden chopsticks, sipping silver metal mugs of ice water, the girls gave Na the lowdown, a catechism, really, on the job, the essentials, how they got paid, how to act with the customers, etcetera...
Always laugh at their jokes, they told her, and always smile… If he’s shy, take the lead. If he’s talkative, let him blabber on, nod and pretend to care…
Nice about the job, they said, was that they didn’t have to be with, even talk to, any man they didn’t like.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Karen said she preferred older guys because they paid better and didn’t last as long in bed. The shorter they lasted in the sack, the quicker she could be back in the bar to find her next customer…
Jem was the same but would go with younger guys if they looked rich.
Neither generally, ultimately cared much about the customers’ appearances.
Karen said they “all look handsome with your eyes closed…”
Jem said she’d pretend they were K-Pop boyband stars or famous actors…
Karen said she’d think of the money and that often made her cum, and all three had a hearty chuckle.
They advised Na to trust her instinct and not go with anyone she got the creeps from.
And always have your phone nearby, text the mamasan the address if you go outside or which room you’re in if you use one of the hourly “short time” hotels upstairs, near the bar.
The girls told Na there were a few bargirls who didn’t even sleep with customers, at least not often, just danced, made money off the inflated price “lady” drinks the customers could buy the girls…
A bargirl got a commission from each lady drink the customer bought her…
Always make the customer buy you one or two drinks. You’ll make friends with the other girls quicker if you invite the customer to also buy them drinks, too, but careful the customer doesn’t pay for that girl, pay that girl’s “bar fine” (the fee to take her out) and not yours…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Most girls were respectful of each other’s customers, though, and rarely, at their bar, would a girl try to steal your customer. First come, first serve, territory marked.
Some girls had regulars. Guys sending them money from abroad. Some girls had local foreigners who’d traipse in once or twice a month, for drinks and/or fun.
Then there were regulars, bargirl addicts, who’d bar fine every single bargirl who’d let him, and then move on to the next bar.
Often those were local expats, semi-fluent, fully fluent in Thai, English teachers, retirees, or those flush with cash, possibly ill-gotten gains like the Israeli gunrunner, a burly fellow with a mohawk, a frequenter of Karen’s, who’d been arrested and jailed recently.
Karen, tittering and blushing, passed her phone to Na. On it was a screenshot of the gunrunner, from a news article, the gunrunner seated, handcuffed, his head bowed, face redacted, and a cache of guns, ammunition stacked on the table in front of him; cops in bulletproof vests, holding shotguns, pointing, posing, preening for the cameras…
The girls told Na to avoid drugs, drinking too much. Your lady drinks can be soda or even water, seltzer, just tell the mamasan.
Bangkok is expensive, so eat at the bar when possible; they’d get free food there, and they told Na the best local food vendors, restaurants, cheap local markets.
Neither girl did much shopping, saved most everything, sent the funds home, invested, and lived a most abstemious lifestyle, were monomaniacal about putting away cash…
Both had plans to open small businesses. Both were already married. One had a 2-year-old son.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Karen had plans to retire in the next year, and guffawing, with her big crescent-shaped gummy smile, she told how she’d gotten this divorced, hugely fat Swiss guy to propose to her, send her money to buy a house in Chiang Mai.
After the transfer went through, and he was unable to send any more money, she’d ghosted him, and figured she’d have enough money soon to quit this line of work…
Jem had 3 former customers sending her bits of money, but no proposals or houses. Yet.
Make sure to get their Facebook, keep in touch with the customers, the best you can, they told her. Tell them things like “I love you. I miss you.” Farangs like hearing that, they said…
It was inevitable there’d be lonely farangs falling in love with her, they told Na, and the girls gave her suggestions, sample pleas for succor, such as moving to a new apartment that’s unfurnished and needing to buy furniture, a broken motorbike, a sudden illness or a sick relative…
Those were their personal favorites, and they forwarded her a website for more ideas…
Na wondered about some of the farangs she’d seen in her village, those with Thai wives. Did they meet in bars? She’d recalled the couples never looking happy, sitting wordlessly quiet at restaurants, the women only happy or smiling while staring at their phones, or when the farang pulled out his wallet to pay for things.
Jem said she pitied the farangs. She’d always see them alone. In the bars, drinking alone. At restaurants, eating alone. Even at movies, sitting alone.
And she’d always see in the news how they wind up dead in Thailand, all the time.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Every day, another dead farang, usually found dead in a hotel room or dead by committing suicide, jumping off buildings, balconies of tall buildings, sometimes farangs doing swan dives in shopping malls, one Finnish farang the other day jumping from the sixth floor in Suvarnabhumi Airport…
“The ones who come here to visit, I can understand; maybe they have an unhappy marriage, can’t find a girlfriend, just want the excitement. Men are men. Men everywhere are pretty much the same.”
“But the farangs who live here, die here, I don’t understand… Why leave a rich country? In movies, TV I see them in big beautiful farang houses, big fancy cars…
Why leave that? Why live here? Bangkok is so hot, polluted, dirty, traffic so terrible. The farangs living here must be criminals, or running from something, or crazy…”
“They must have demons… Ghosts…”
“I think most of the farangs are just buffalos…” Karen said. (“Buffalo” being a derogatory Thai slang word for stupid person.)
“They’re big, with big buffalo penises, and usually fat and stupid like a buffalo.”
“They’re walking ATM machines…”
“They’re butterflies, flying from girl to girl, bar to bar, massage parlor to massage parlor...”
“Flying buffalos…”
“The good farangs, mostly, like from movies, TV, they don’t come here… The farangs here are so old and fat, missing teeth…”
“And now the heaps of Chinese coming. They’re always spitting and chain-smoking. Can’t speak English or Thai, never tipping...”
“The Arabs and Indians can be trouble too. They grab your pussy. That’s why I wear two pairs of panties…”
“Only go with the rich Arabs and Indians. And rich Chinese. The Chinese from Shanghai are the best…”
“I had a customer from Shanghai. He was young, tall, handsome and nice.”
“Japanese are my favorite customers... So polite and well-mannered. And they tip if you ask them…”
“Koreans, too, I like; dicks not too big, sometimes give generous tips...”
“Koreans? They’re doing the plastic surgery, penis extensions, silicone dicks, one last month, as big as a buffalo! I had to leave work early that night. My pussy was sore for days!”
“The Africans usually have the biggest dicks, and they fuck you sadistically. I charge them 10,000 baht for the ‘boom boom’...” Jem winced, as if having PTSD.
“But I like the black Americans. The rapper guys, with the jewels, diamonds.
They’re sexy and rich…”
“I like the handsome young Korean boys who come to the bar… They’re so pretty!”
“Occasionally a young, handsome farang, too, comes, but not many.”
“And the handsome farangs these days are coming with their farang girlfriends…”
“Farang girlfriends?” Na asked, perplexed there’d be farang females anywhere near Nana Plaza.
“Many young couples, coming to the bars as tourists, just to watch us, drink. Post about it online. One took a girl for a 3-some, but that’s not too common.”
“Most are backpackers, young, not much money. They have a drink or two and leave. Every now and then the girls will stuff good tips down our bras, though.
One pretty blond girl, hammered, French-kissed me and gave me 6000 baht.”
The girls told Na that the bar would pay them extra to do dance performances, often involving kissing or simulated lesbian sex.
Most bars aren’t allowed to have actual live, full nude, girl on girl, oral sex shows anymore. Most don’t have the infamous “ping pong” ball shows, either, anymore, where they’d have girls shoot ping pong balls out of their snatches (and sometimes into another girl’s or customers’ mouths!).
Typically it’s pretty boring, they told her.
“Our bar doesn’t make us be nude, won’t let us, on stage, take off our panties...
You can be topless, but it’s optional. So generally you’re just standing there, topless, or in your underwear, trying to make eye contact with a customer who looks to have cash and might like you.”
“It’s boring, mostly. Lots of nights, no customers buy you drinks or bar fine you.
Sometimes you’ll have 3 or 4 customers a night bar fine you. It can be tedious or exhausting. It varies wildly… High tourist season is better, for sure, but even then, you never know…”
“But it sure beats the rice fields.”
“And 7-Eleven…”
“Ka…”
Na didn’t wish to waste time, especially after paying the majority of her life’s savings on her bus ticket and first month’s rent, so her very first night in Bangkok, she accompanied her roommates to work at the bar…
Entering Nana Plaza’s vicinity, Na was on tenterhooks, experiencing sensory overload…
Despite seeing pictures, video, actually being at Nana, in person, whiffing its miasma, she felt not only queasy but also had a presentiment of disaster…
Bangkok smelled different at night. Sour, acrid. And Bangkok looked different at night. The ribs, lights of the skyscrapers seemed malevolent, phallic. The skyscrapers evil, imposing penises sprouting, ripping from the city streets…
The whole place was ugly, like a festering ulcer; a prodrome; the pavement to Nana a promontory into an ocean of decadence, an abyss of the absurd…
The din of roaring engines, music and language beat at her eardrums, giving Na tinnitus; the streets a chaotic séance, an orgy of light and movements making her feel as if she were a ghost at a banquet…
In front of the plaza she saw scores of pretty young ladies, a platoon of them, in tight-fitting attire, lining the sidewalk outside…
“Who are they?” Na whispered to Karen, as they lifted up from the backseat of their motorcycle taxi, and Na gave a 10-baht coin to a humpback old lady beggar, who had the gait of a crab…
“Those,” Karen contorted her face and grimaced, “the streetwalkers?”
“Streetwalkers?”
Karen shook her head at Na’s echolalia and naivety…
“The streetwalkers there… See the ones nearest to the front? Those are mostly former bargirls; maybe they stole from the bar, a customer, or are too old to work; a lot of them have STDs.”
“The ones there,” she nodded towards the further end of the block, “are crooks, gangs, many ladyboys. They go after drunk farangs stumbling out of the bars.
They’ll offer super-low prices, drug and rob the farangs, steal what they can from his hotel room… Some ladyboys gang up and beat the farangs, too, mug them…
Phi Song Nang…”
Na’s expression was discomfited, and she looked at the streetwalkers with a mix of pity and shame. To Na they were a cortege, a lane of bones. Walking dead…
“Pay no mind to it, Na. It’s karma, both for them and the farang… Perhaps the next life will treat them better…”
Behind the streetwalkers, Na noticed a pale young farang in camouflage army fatigues.
The farang appeared to be crying tears of blood. Na gasped, spun away and grabbed Karen’s arm, followed her roommates into the complex…
The 3 went through the police-manned security checkpoint and weren’t searched, as the patrons were. To the bargirls the policemen were like scarecrows…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer At the front of the “World’s Largest Adult Playground” were several open-air bars, filled with a rowdy mix of regulars and tourists, motley crews of Koreans, Japanese, Chinese, Malay, a few Arabs, upper-caste Indians, but mostly the clientele was white- Europeans, Brits, Americans, Australians… Farangs.
The first bar on the right had a Filipino band singing classic rock songs, currently a brutal rendition of “Hotel California”, and they were a couple pool tables in there, with a group of bald, overweight 50ish farangs in tank tops, rugby jerseys, camo shorts, and flip flops.
The farangs were guzzling beers, laughing, yelling and cursing at each other playfully as they bent and angled, caromed their pool cues…
Na felt dizzy, seeing the endless open bowl of bars on each level of the 3 storey plaza.
There were gaggles of scantily clad young Thai girls and gorgeous, leggy ladyboys everywhere, holding up signs for beer specials, cajoling, cooing, and caterwauling at the passing bar-goers roaming the quadrangle.
Every customer she saw was male. They ranged in age from 20ish to 60ish; most of the farangs in tank tops and cargo shorts, the Asians generally slightly better dressed, in slacks, golf shirts, dress shirts.
Every one of Nana Plaza’s visitors, the men, to Na were monolith, the same creatures, atavistic votaries of genitourinary vice, divided and united in their hunt for pleasure, tits, ass, and cunt…
But to Na none of the men seemed real, none seemed human, exactly. They were more akin to cartoons, effigies…
At the far end of the U-shaped plaza, when walking up the back stairs to the bar, Na noticed Nana Plaza followed traditional Thai customs and had its own Spirit
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer House and a couple bargirls were praying, making offerings of fruits and juice to it.
Buddha could only imagine the ghosts that dwelt in there…
It was still early, so the bar wasn’t very crowded, at all, as they entered... Only a few scattered spectators and three somnolent girls on the dais, standing around, bored, as the DJ blasted Van Halen’s “Jump”.
They went to the dressing room, in the back-left area of the bar, where Na met and received her locker key and timecard from the mamasan, and her roommates showed her how to punch in.
The mamasan was a whale of a woman (who the girls called “Seaweed”, behind her back) and wore a long loose hot pink frilly dress, snakeskin sandals and had possibly the most bleached white face Na had ever seen (the rest of her body being way browner).
The mamasan had a quick chat with Na, explaining the rules: NO drugs, NO
stealing other girls’ customers, and NO phones, pictures outside of the dressing room…
Na gave the mamasan a respectful wai and thanked her. The mamasan, indifferent, went back to watching a Thai soap opera on her phone.
After snacking on mangoes and pickles, the girls changed into black thongs and demibras.
They assisted one another, spraying perfume, applying heavy loads of make-up, dotting on body glitter, and each stepped into, fastened the ankle straps of their bar-supplied silver, 10cm high heels that clacked noisily as they walked towards the exit.
Na, heart racing, followed her strutting, smiling roommates, and marched out of the dressing room, climbed up and hit the stage.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The night’s fangs were growing longer, and business, traffic in the bar was picking up…
5
The girls worked in shifts, one rotation, a phalanx of ladies stood atop the stage, some pole-dancing, twirling and twerking.
But most just stood and shifted halfheartedly, doing the so-called “Bangkok Shuffle”, the bored bargirl semi-dance; the girls more interested in scanning around the bar, flashing glassy smiles, batting eyelids, attempting to attract interest, affection...
Another phalanx worked the room, stalking the floor, hoping to strike up conversations, coax customers to buy them drinks.
There was also a crew of waitresses, plump and on the older side (former bargirls, Karen said) who served drinks.
A DJ in the lower right corner of the bar, a tall, skinny, ponytailed, energetic Thai in his 30s, occasionally yelled “come on” or Thai curse words into a handheld mic as he danced and played music from a laptop, mostly classic rock, generated by a YouTube playlist.
The lighting was dim, walls paneled in mirrors.
The room was filled with cigarette smoke, zephyrs of booze and a murmuring, collective hum of the patron satyrs, esthetes; the bar’s music so deafening that
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer fluent conversation was rendered fatuous. Sign language and shouting matches prevailed…
Na wore a button with the number “44” on it, and, not long after she first took the stage, a waitress patted her on the butt and pointed over to a man in the far left corner, who was staring nervously at her, his convex cheeks red as a beet.
Na stepped down from the stage, sauntered over, smiling, waied to the man, scooted in and sat next to him, closely; their bodies pressed together, sutured at the sides...
The man smelled heavily of liquor and struggled to make eye contact…
A 40ish Brit, in Celtic football colors, he had a receding hairline, turnip face, and massive beer gut.
The red face spoke in sputters, with an accent Na had trouble understanding.
He had a terrible stutter.
“Tttttttt… Wwwww… wooould, you llllike tttttttto…”
Na couldn’t make out what he meant but got the point when the waitress brought her a lady drink, soda water on ice...
Surprising Na, the man clumsily pawed at her thigh and soon enough, was rubbing on her panty-clad pussy. Although awkward, he was gentle in the manner he caressed her cunt, unlike so many of the Thai boys who’d roughhouse her…
“Hhhheehhhh hhhhow mmmmm mmmmmmuch?”
Na told him the bar fine, and her pay for play price, which she, on advice from her roommates, inflated a bit, given the drunken state this punter was in.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The Brit agreed, his eyes swimming in sperm, and Na waved the mamasan over...
Na waied him, went back to the dressing room, changed into her street clothes, and afterwards rejoined him, and they left the bar, and she held his clammy, bear paw of a hand and led him upstairs, to a short-time hotel…
As soon as they entered the stuffy, windowless, parking space-sized room, the man instantly tore off all his clothes, and Na chortled at the faded shamrock crudely tattooed on his flabby left man boob…
It wasn’t until he was naked that she realized how much more massive, how much taller he was than her, particularly without her high heels…
Na had been instructed by her roommates to shower, and especially have the punter shower, but this man wasted no time with such formalities and peeled off Na’s short cut-off jeanskirt and halter top in mere seconds and nearly ripped her bra and panties as he yanked them down and off.
The punter was hard, rock hard, his cock larger than Na had seen in person. She’d only seen such big dicks in porn films. It was curved and thick as a banana and sprung out even beyond his distended gut.
Its heft and shape reminded Na of a snake, a white-lipped pit viper, she’d once seen slithering into a mangrove…
He tore open the condom he’d bought at the hourly hotel’s desk and rolled it on and, still standing, roughly turned Na and pressed her, face first to the wall, towered over her.
Then he spit in his hand, and Na screamed when she felt him insert his dick, quickly and violently, straight into her asshole.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The man clasped his hand over her mouth, muffling her cries, and Na shuddered in pain as he reamed her hard. Staring at the wall, it turned from puke pink to an effervescent neon green, the shade she’d seen before in the cab; the wall appearing like an infinite alien ocean…
Na had never been fucked in the ass before and didn’t care for it. The pain was unbearable, especially with his dick being so big.
Fortunately, he came after only a minute or two, pulled out, and let Na loose. The wall morphing back into its previous pink hue as he freed her...
Na spun around, with a venomous expression, and wanted to smack him.
The punter, trying to apologize, his stuttering now imputing guilt, reached into his shorts, which were lying on the floor, fished out his wallet, and paid her 2000
baht extra, on top of the 3000 baht she’d asked. Being handed the 5000 baht made Na feel slightly better.
The punter dressed as fast as he undressed, not even pausing to unsheathe the browned condom from his still hardened cock, and practically ran out the room without attempting another word.
Na limped to the shower for ablution, and washed out her asshole, which throbbed and stung with a burning pain and bled slightly.
Her anal ache increased, and she lumbered out of the shower, toweled off.
She reached over to her purse, where she kept a blister of pain pills, tramadol, which Karen had given her (warning her that some of the farangs had cocks bigger than she’d probably had before and that she might need time to adjust and should take a pill or two if she hurt).
She certainly hadn’t expected that, to be sodomized without warning, so viciously.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Her roommate had also told her to charge extra for… that service…
After popping the pill, she placed a cold can of soda to her ass, and the pain eased.
She played on her phone, texted Pear again, and watched a singing show, “The Masked Singer”, on the tiny TV in the hotel room, and left when the hour was up, returned to the bar, and chugged a Red Bull to offset the drowsiness, torpor she began to experience from the tramadol.
Altogether she’d already earned 5000 baht, plus 100 baht from the lady drink, plus the 500 baht she’d make tonight as her nightly salary. It was more money than she’d made in her entire life…
6
Na was turning out to be quite the attraction.
She was indeed drop dead gorgeous. A knockout, with her fair skin, shiny, flowing mane of blood red hair; her big round brown eyes, and her slim, geometrically perfect figure, especially her shapely ass and legs longer than the average Thai girl…
But it was likely her youthful, innocent schoolgirl appearance and manner which won over most of her admirers.
She had more customers buy her drinks, starting with a grizzled Aussie who kept winking at her, then a pair of boisterous, high-fiving Colombian identical twins, and later a 60ish Serbian who spoke like Dracula and tried to get Na to give him a blowjob in the bathroom but declined to pay her bar fine…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Dracula may not have bar fined her, but 3 other customers did…
The first bar fine (well, technically the second after the sodomizing Celtic supporter), was a 20ish Frenchman in a purple Adidas tracksuit who had the biggest hook nose ever, and she wondered if he could smell from a kilometer away with that thing!
The Frenchie was also well-endowed between his legs, and fucked her for a good, hard 20 minutes or so, changing positions frequently.
Na was quite grateful she’d taken the tramadol and couldn’t feel much of it.
As advised, she kept her eyes closed the entire time and thought about her favorite member of BTS, Jungkook.
Though he’d banged her aggressively, the Frenchie was polite, a gentleman. They kissed, with their tongues, and Na, for a split second had an amorous shiver, a spark she’d not felt before.
The Frenchie tipped afterward, generously, too. His expensive watch implied he had the means…
The second was a drunken, balding, 50ish Korean businessman, who spoke in mumbles, Google Translate; his face pockmarked, his limbs blotched with eczema…
He had trouble achieving an erection, so Na sucked him off, and the Korean moved her hand underneath him, had her slip a finger up his ass, which finally got him up.
The man’s cock was rather small, perhaps 3 inches, and it was a nice change from the last two.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The Korean snail-fucked her missionary style, for only about 30 seconds, and Na hoped she could find more customers like him, but the little limp dick didn’t tip her until prompted and was stingy when he did… Only giving her 20 baht! The parsimonious scum!
It didn’t bother her too much, though, because in all, she’d made around 15,000
baht that night.
Her last bar fine was… peculiar…
It was a diminutive but handsome, physically fit young farang, with a crew cut, sharp emerald eyes.
Although handsome, he wore a dirty pair of blue and white elephant pants and a hideous shirt, a dark green t-shirt that had a picture of the ugliest beast, a frightening, extraterrestrial monster, “Cult of Cthulhu” printed in bold black lettering above…
In a most sonorous voice, the handsome farang said he was from Toronto. Na had never heard of it, Toronto, and, when about to ask him to buy a lady drink, he offered to pay her bar fine immediately and did…
In the hotel room, Na began to undress, leaned in to peck him on the lips, but the farang pulled back, wagged a finger and shook his head.
He ordered her to only take off her shoes, and he took of his shoes.
He held her hand, led her to the bed, asked her how long they had.
She said, “one hour”.
“Okay,” he replied quietly, his voice quivering…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Toronto set the timer on his phone to one hour, lay at her side, and cuddled up next to her, hugged her, buried his face into her shoulder and began to cry, a slow, lugubrious whimper, soon turning into a bleating wail.
He sniffled and his tears ceased, but still he trembled, clutched onto her, and they lay like that, in repose, for the full hour. Na not knowing what to do, never having seen a man cry.
She simply held him, patted his head, and thought of her baby, saw him in a similar light, like a polar bear cub, an outré infant, and she comforted, hugged, stroked and petted him and said a silent Buddhist prayer, hoping to exorcize whatever demon haunted him.
When his phone’s timer rang, to the song from Green Day, “Wake Me Up When September Ends”, he arose, embarrassed and shy. He collected himself and paid her asking price, plus a small tip, hugged her again, put on his shoes, thanked her and left.
Na waied him, gathered her things and returned to the bar, baffled by the whole encounter, feeling bittersweet her first night was drawing to a close.
She’d accumulated 19,000 baht. In one night. It was more than many office workers in Bangkok were paid- in a month.
Returning to the bar, her roommates were happy for her and hoped her auspicious, lucky forces would rub off on them.
But they also warned her that not every night would be so lucrative and to be careful with the cash, to send it home or deposit it in an interest-bearing account immediately…
The bar closed around 2 am, and Na and her roommates clocked out, dressed and went for a late-night snack of papaya salad, “som tam”, at the street side restaurant near their apartment.
Her roomies told her other girls were envious of her looks and luck with customers.
Most of the girls were from Isan and liked each other, but there were a few cliques of local Bangkok area girls, Chiang Rai girls, and Southern girls, and they didn’t always get along, sometimes got catty.
Na told her roommates about the Brit who’d done surprise anal on her and said that the other girls shouldn’t be too jealous of that.
Both her roommates confided they’d had similar experiences. Jem almost choked to death by a Brazilian guy who was into erotic asphyxiation.
“These men, many are married, and want to do things with us that their wives won’t do,” said Jem, with a scowl, afterward pursing her lips.
“I charge 6000 baht for anal,” Karen blurted out, her mouth full of papaya salad,
“but they better tell me ahead of time, and they better lube properly, or else they get a face, and crotch, full of THIS!”
Karen dug out a bottle of pepper spray from her handbag, and the girls shared a laugh.
Her roommates were impressed by Na for being so stoic.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer They said a lot of girls quit, ran away after their first night or two, unable to handle the farangs, the farangs’ smells and voyeuristic stares, the farangs’ eyes like tigers; many girls couldn’t cope with being topless, semi-nude on the stage in front of so many people.
They said lots of the less money-driven girls who stayed became putrescent, zombies, heavily drinking, doing hard drugs to divagate…
Na, having never told anyone, blurted out something alluding to what her brother and his friends did to her. What the older boy at school, behind that accursed charnel shed, did...
Sex, Na professed, was salutary, and she’d never enjoyed it, but averred that hopefully, one day, maybe she would.
Her roommates nodded, in tacit agreement, it seemed, and they spent the remainder of their repast quietly staring at their phones.
8
The whir of the ceiling fan was the last thing Na heard as she drifted off to sleep, shortly after 4:30 am.
That night she had a vivid, prismatic dream. A terrifying nightmare…
She was dancing in the bar, holding her breasts in her hands when a cavalcade of Malaysian terrorists entered, shot up the place, wantonly, with automatic rifles, gunning down customers, bargirls, staff…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Na escaped, after hiding in a pile of dead bodies, and ran out the bar to see Nana Plaza in flames; bars, one after another, blowing up, balls of orange and red flames, showers of sparks lighting up the crepuscular sky…
Her head uplifted to the heavens, Na saw zigzagging, phantasmal green, flashing UFOs, firing blurs of laser beams, destroying, incinerating the malignant skyscrapers, those penis-shaped superstructures, all over Bangkok…
Gargantuan, gelatinous, slimy 50 feet high turquoise color cockroach-like alien creatures dropped from mushroom clouds, stomping on vehicles, shooting bolts of fire from their antennae, blasting and burning everyone, everything in the vicinity, and she felt like a prisoner of planet Earth…
Then she awoke in a silhouette of cold sweat. There’d been no attack. All was fine, quiet, save for the occasional roar of a motorcycle engine, barking soi dogs outside.
She figured her dream probably arose from the news she’d read online about the asteroid, and of the backpack nail bomb detonating near Siam Square BTS station, and the city being on edge for more attacks since a major ASEAN conference was being held next week…
Na lay awake for a half an hour, unable to sleep, and her genitals, especially her anus began to throb with pain.
The disgusting, buggering Brit, she thought, wanting to gas him down with Karen’s pepper spray.
Na ate another tramadol and slipped back to sleep, this time a deep, dreamless slumber…
Na woke up around 11 am, sluiced her face with lukewarm water in the tiny bathroom sink.
During her morning movements, her asshole still hurt a bit, so she swallowed another tramadol after brushing her teeth.
She and her roommates had a noodle breakfast at the same street restaurant as yesterday.
Sitting outside, Na, for a minute or so, shivered and saw everyone around as walking cellphones, squares with limbs, stomach screens displaying battery bars indicating how many years, months, weeks, days, minutes and seconds they had left to live…
Na rubbed her eyes and the phone people disappeared, and the midday heat became more palpable. The thick heat, coupled with the heavy volume of cars, motorbikes, tuk tuks and trucks, caused her to sweat profusely, and she dotted her forehead with a napkin.
“Wait until summer,” warned Karen, “I go home from March to April…”
The girls spent the afternoon and early evening in the apartment, playing on their phones, taking selfies, chatting with friends/family on social media, reading up on celebrity gossip, playing online games and watching Thai soap operas and YouTube music videos.
While Na was watching a clip of BLACKPINK performing their song “Forever Young”, an ad interrupted the video.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer It was a grainy film of a young soldier, a farang, his face obfuscated neon green, walking in the jungle, and suddenly being impaled by a bamboo pike trap that sprang up from the ground underneath him, stabbing through his ass, and out of his stomach.
Then a group of camouflaged yellow-skinned soldiers, far shorter than the farang, encircled the farang, taking his gun, rummaging through his pockets and backpack, as his green face coughed up dark blood…
She’d not been able to skip over or even stop the video, her phone turning cold in her hands, but fortunately the video ended after 15 seconds, and the music resumed, her phone back to normal…
Jem went out, for a quick tryst with a local customer who lived nearby, and came back shortly, 3000 baht richer, wearing a new gold bracelet.
“I’ll sell it later… I’m pretty sure it’s real gold. It better be after what I let him do…”
Na didn’t need to know the details and hoped, too, for her roommate, that the bracelet was real…
That evening, before work, they again ate papaya salad at the same restaurant, and one of the two cooks, the owner of the restaurant, a 70ish lady, happened to be from a village near Na’s.
They chatted in their local dialect, and the owner gave Na a small green amulet etched with a laughing, golden Buddha figure and wished her luck in Bangkok…
10
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The bar that night was far less packed.
Sundays aren’t as busy, Na’s roommate told her.
Around the start of her shift, Na had a near dwarf, a pudgy little Irish man, in a stylish 3-piece suit, buy her a lady drink and request a lap dance.
He must have been about 75 and had a toupee and the breath of a corpse…
The Leprechaun groped her tits and ass but didn’t want to bar fine her. She estimated that, at his age, he’d be quick work and was disappointed when he refused.
The penurious bastard left the bar quickly and barely gave her anything of a tip, actually tipping the chunky waitress more! The animal!
The rest of the night was pretty dreary, not much foot traffic at Nana, not many patrons in the bar, though Na noticed more Malays around and Arabs than she’d seen last night…
Na was bored and wishing she could at least play on her phone to pass the time.
She’d probably only make 600 baht, a far drop from the 19000 she’d made the previous night.
What was a dud of an evening took an unexpected swing, however, when he appeared…
11
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Na didn’t see him walk in. Her peripheral vision was good, and she’d been keeping an eye on the door, especially since so few people were there that night, and so she wasn’t sure how she’d missed that... Him!
He was a barrel-chested, bear of a young man, a farang, with a pale white, clean shaven face, boxy jaw, and cleft chin.
The farang, his head a mess of unruly ruby red hair, wore mirrored aviator shades and was shirtless, wearing just camo shorts and flip flops and covered in red body hair, practically an orangutan…
Normally one needed to be fully clothed to enter Nana Plaza, let alone a bar.
She’d never seen any farang shirtless before in there.
What was weirder, though, was that wrapped around his neck and shoulders was a long snake, a king cobra.
The snake appeared happy, comfortable, slithering around in the farang’s copse of red body hair as the farang stroked it, and the snake wagged its forked tongue, stared directly at Na…
Na, on the dais, gasped, nudged Karen, nodded over in the bare-chested, bizarre farang’s direction, but when Karen craned her neck to see, the farang was gone.
Na scanned the bar. Didn’t see him anywhere.
Then she found him.
This time, though, he was without the snake, and was sipping on a glass of absinthe, had a “Jesus Saves” black t-shirt on, and sat on a barstool directly below the stage, a meter or so away from Na.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer His Jesus shirt took Na aback. It featured an emaciated Jesus on the crucifix, dripping with blood from his nailed limbs, a crown of thorns on his head, expression of anguish on his face.
What a curious symbol for a religion, she cogitated. Buddhist imagery being so serene. The Christian imagery always so bloody, dire…
But, although a devout, practicing Theravada Buddhist, she greatly respected Jesus Himself, how He had given His life for others. She had a Christian classmate in high school and found the stories inspiring…
“Hey there, darling,” the Jesus shirt farang grinned and waved to Na.
“Sawadee Ka!” Na waied and ambled over, her 10cm heels clicking as she crept in his direction.
“Where you come from?” she asked, bending down to speak with the strange stranger.
“Buffalo.”
“Buffalo?”
Na couldn’t help but snicker.
“Buffalo is animal!”
“Sure is. A place too. On the East Coast, upstate New York…”
“USA?”
“United States, YOO ESS AY, babydoll.”
“You on holiday? How long you here?”
“I’m here until I’m not... Staying in …. “
Na couldn’t hear his response and didn’t care too much, but the hotel a farang stayed, the better the hotel, was an effective barometer of how much cash he had. And how much to charge. So she asked again.
Once more, she couldn’t understand his garbled response. Perhaps the music, AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck”, was too loud.
“Why you have snake? It real? Where it go?”
“All men have snakes, sweetie. Figured you’d know that by now. How far did you get in school?”
Na pursed her lips at his rejoinder, put her hands on her hips, tilted her head and grumbled “mansai!”
“Not you down there snake, sillyboy. Snake you have earlier.”
“Oh, that snake, my friend, Satan. He’s over there…”
Na looked over to where the farang gestured, the back row of seats in the bar, and saw the snake had grown, exponentially, and curled into a coil, a lit cigarette dangling from the corner of its mouth.
Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle” blasted out of the bar’s sound system, and Satan bobbed its head to the opening riff…
“Ah!” Na screamed and took a step back, seeing the snake.
She closed her eyes, rubbed them, drew a deep breath and opened her eyes again.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer When her eyes opened, the snake was gone, but the farang remained. Na figured maybe the tramadol she’d been taking was messing with her head…
The farang now wore a snakeskin cowboy hat and a plain green shirt, and cut off camo shorts, combat boots.
“I’m looking for Bee. You seen her?”
“Bee? I no know her. I start here only yesterday. She work here? How you change clothes so fast? You play joke?”
“Oh, I am a joker, darling. My favorite playing card and Batman villain…”
“Ow, I see new Joker movie, have on my phone, so crazy!”
“On your phone? You must be playing jokes on ME, darling… So you don’t know Bee? You look kinda like her. Thought you might be her sister.”
“I no have sister. You want buy me drink?”
“That’d be groovy. Slide on down here, Bee.”
“My name no Bee! My name Na!”
“Bee. I’m going to call you Bee. Until I find Bee. You’re Bee.”
“Okay, mister. What you name?”
“They used to call me Joker, but then another guy had the same nickname, so they called me Joker of Buffalo, but that was shortened to Job, pronounced like Joeb…”
“Joker. Hahaha, you funny man. You handsome man too, ka. You pay my bar fine?”
“What do I get if I pay your bar fine?”
“Everything you want, I do.”
“Everything?”
“Everything.”
“Can you become Bee? I’m looking for Bee…”
“I you Bee. I anything. I everything. You pay bar fine, no need buy drink.”
Na didn’t want the weird farang to slip away or change his mind over drinks. That happened sometimes, her roommates said.
The farang had started to grow on her a bit. There was something gentle in his voice. Soothing. She felt safe with him, and figured the snake, his change of clothes was just her imagination coupled with the bar’s dim lighting, or perhaps side effects from the tramadol, or maybe a ridiculous gag… He was a joker, after all…
However, she worried she might be stealing another bargirl’s customer, a big no-no, but since she was new, and had met pretty much all the other girls, not one called Bee, she figured she was safe, and could plead ignorance.
The crazy buffalo probably had his bars confused, anyway, and Bee was somewhere in Patpong. She decided to silence her mental palaver, her chattering monkey mind, and get down to business. Maybe the joker buffalo, Job could salvage this rotten night…
“How much is your bar fine, babydoll?”
“Bar fine 700 baht. 2500 baht give me after…”
“3200 baht? Prices really shot up, eh?”
“You handsome. I make you happy. Make you never forget. You pay bar fine and we go upstair or to hotel you.”
“Hmmm, alright, you drive a hard bargain there, darling. Let’s go upstairs. To the sky...”
“Okay, you pay boss bar fine.” Na motioned to where the mamasan sat. “I go change.”
Na leaned in, to kiss Job on the cheek, but he ducked away coyly and playfully pointed upwards.
Na stood up, stomped her foot and scowled, sarcastically, and stormed off to the dressing room.
In her street clothes, she returned to the bar area and didn’t see the farang anywhere and approached the mamasan, who sat with her head glued to her phone.
Walking over, Na nearly stepped on a giant cockroach that was scurrying across the floor.
She purposely dodged it, wondered who it was in a past life and felt bad for it, knowing if a farang found it, or even a less pious Thai, the cockroach would be trampled to death or sprayed with a noxious chemical or fall into a painful trap.
The cockroach ran underneath the stage, safely, passing by an unwitting Korean contingent of middle age males who’d just entered the bar…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Na told the mamasan she’d go with the farang in the cowboy hat who’d just paid her bar fine.
The mamasan, the indolent bitch, looked up from her phone with a discomfited gaze.
“There was no farang here with a cowboy hat. I’d have remembered him. And no one paid your bar fine. You okay? You taking drugs? Smoking the ganja? Don’t do that here, on the clock, ka!”
Na’s heart palpitated, and she shot back: “No! He was here! He must have left.
Maybe he didn’t understand. I’ll look for him outside and bring him back. Hold on…”
The mamasan growled, not appreciating any bit of their exchange, and went back to thumbing her phone, which morphed into a dead, mango-sized, hairy gray rat…
Na retched and hurried outside, exiting through the black curtain hanging in the doorway, and stepped from the cool air-conditioned bar into a face-slap of steamy night air.
Looking around, she didn’t see him anywhere in the plaza, but finally saw him.
He’d climbed up a utility pole on the block parallel to Nana Plaza, Sukhumvit Soi 4, and had lost his shades, his face now painted like a clown, and he pointed, waved, and hooted at her…
At this point, Na’s mood shifted gears. From confused to just plain pissed off.
Then to enraged.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer How dare the farang play his jokes, dirty tricks on her! How dare he mulct her time and make her lose face!!! She would catch up with him, make him pay, sick the bar’s security staff to rough him up.
The bar’s security didn’t take kindly to such shenanigans. The other night a farang trying to skip out on his bar tab got a hard punch in the jaw, his pockets emptied as he lay limp on the ground. Unable to pay his tab in full, security confiscated his watch and phone.
Na wished the same fate on Job, but she’d have to catch him first.
The crazy buffalo, still waving at her, jumped down from the pole, landing smoothly, on both feet, like a gymnast, surprisingly agile for his bulky size. Then he turned and pulled down his camo shorts, mooned Na…
Na seethed, trembled with rage, and ran down the stairs, pushing aside a ladyboy who cursed at her, and flung off her heels (they were cheap fake Chanel anyway) and ran barefoot after the buffalo joker, who’d commandeered a pogo stick- an EXTREME pogo stick…
The farang hopping at a torrid pace, in super-high frog leaps, ten feet in the air, down Soi 4, the kangaroo clown crisscrossing, jumping his way through the idle Bangkok traffic.
Nearly getting run over by a motorcycle taxi or two, Na flagged one down, mounted the back seat, and commanded the driver to follow the high-hopping farang.
The driver shrugged his shoulders, and Na simply pointed him in the bouncing pogo stick’s direction and they took off into the night, weaving through traffic, finally stopping only 10 mins or so down the road, in front of Na and her roommates’ favorite roadside restaurant, where the pogo stick lay, abandoned…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Na quickly paid the driver the 15 baht he requested, dismounted and chased towards the pogo stick, huffing and puffing, searching around, but the flying buffalo was nowhere in sight.
Na saw the restaurant owner, the lady from nearby her hometown, and told her all about the incident, how the crazy farang had ducked out, tricked her, not paid…
While Na was describing the farang, the snake, the restaurant owner’s jaw dropped.
She asked what the farang’s name was.
“Job, Joker of Buffalo… I’m not sure. He was nuts…”
The restaurant owner took a step back, held her heart and caught her breath.
She told Na that many years ago, in the late 60s, she’d worked at Nana, at a bar, and one of her most loyal customers was a red-haired farang, with a pet snake he’d bought at a market.
She said the farang had proposed marriage to her and that he’d wanted to move with her, to her village, start a farm, raise snakes, but he’d disappeared, never returned.
“What was his name?”
“Jake… But his nickname was Joker… He was from Buffalo. It’s a real city in America, Buffalo…”
“Was… Your nickname… Bee?”
“Yes.”
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Na’s phone, in her front pocket, turned cold and buzzed.
She thought it might be the bar, but instead it was a video, taking up the full screen of her phone.
She and the restaurant owner watched as Jake, in fuzzy footage, walked through a jungle, in fatigues, holding a machine gun… A palm tree in the background ablaze…
Jake stepped into a trap of some sort, and a sharpened bamboo stick sprung up from the jungle floor, driving straight up his ass, impaling him through the stomach.
Blood curdled in his mouth and he writhed in pain and a small group of camouflaged, tiny yellow men, homunculi, painted in mud and leaves encircled him, grabbed his gun, went through his pockets.
Then an explosion.
A sage colored hand grenade had landed nearby, and everyone, including Jake, were blown into bloody pieces.
The video instantly rewound to the beginning, where Jake was walking in the jungle and was impaled and continued playing on the same loop.
Na tried turning it off, but it wouldn’t stop, the video, so she opened the phone, which got increasingly frigid, and she yanked out the battery.
Still, the video played, and the phone went cold as ice. Its rectangular edges lit up in neon green lining.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Mortified, Na threw the cheap, olive Oppo phone down into a nearby sewer, which was purling in a lime subterranean liquid, and the screen of the phone went dead…
Then there was a loud bang in the distance, and audible firecracker-like, popping sounds…
The racket emanating from down the road…
STRANGER IN BANGKOK
I was sitting in the upstairs food court of the __________ shopping mall, twirling my fork into a sizzling plate of spicy noodles. With the skyline of Bangkok hanging in front of me, I cast my eyes over at a row of floor to wall windows and soaked in the sweeping city views.
It was dusk in Krung Thep. And the city sat in its usual outline, its usual patina of haze. The city’s glass-plated skyscrapers pumping their usual neon blasts. Then the sky began dimming, as if a knob were turning, and I glared in open-mouth silence as a mass of dark clouds crept forth, threatening a torrential downpour.
I returned my focus to my food, and while chomping on big bites of noodles, I noticed a stranger’s silhouette sitting down to a seat nearby.
Weirdly, he wasn’t eating, and his body was shifted toward mine. Suddenly I had that feeling one gets when they know they’re being watched. And I could sense the stranger looking over toward me. I could feel his eyes.
But I minded my business. Didn’t meet his gaze. I’m not usually one to start random conversations with strangers. Especially in Bangkok. Bangkok (and Thailand) is sometimes referred to as the “Land of Scams,” due to its preponderance of dodgy characters and wily strangers who’ll try to cajole you into a vast array of confidence tricks, so it’s best to be cautious who you talk to.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer It’s worth mentioning, too, that the Thais are generally an inherently shy, reserved people, and not apt to speak randomly with strangers. So if a person approaches me, unsolicited, especially in a public place, in Bangkok, I’m highly skeptical of their intentions…
(It could be reasoned, too, that anyone, anywhere talking to random strangers, unsolicited, on the street, is likely NEVER anything good…) A perfect defense for unwanted, unsolicited salutations, I’ve found, is wearing earphones and pretending as though I can’t hear anything, even if I can, and to smile, shake my head, politely, avert gazes, walk briskly, and continue on my way.
That’s not to say anyone speaking to strangers in Bangkok is a scammer. There are some expats who like talking to strangers, usually other expats, and I understand that, have nothing against it; possibly they’re just friendly, outgoing folks.
Then there are also some expats who’ve lived for years in non-English speaking countries, and when presented with the chance to speak with someone of similar origin, they’ll jump at it, start talking like they’d just snorted a line of cocaine.
And hey, I can understand that too. They might see another expat as someone they might finally be able to have an intelligent conversation with, someone they can talk football or politics or visa issues, 90-day reports, or someone just to grumble to.
Or maybe they’re just lonely.
Being an expat can often mean much time spent in solitude. And there are some who like it that way… And others who struggle with it…
A spiral of noodles I bit into were spicier than I anticipated, exploding in my mouth with searing heat. The noodles must have been packed with additional hidden clumps of chili peppers, and the intensity of the taste caused me to tense up and sneeze, clearing out my sinuses. As I was blowing my nose into a wad of napkins, I heard a European accent cut through the collective hum of the food court. It sounded German, the accent, and it was asking, “Is it spicy?”
“Sure is, but it’s tasty. I love Thai food,” I replied, shifting my eyes and laying them on the stranger who’d been sitting next to me, wordlessly, for the last few minutes.
“Are you American?” the stranger asked, and I estimated his age at 60 something.
The stranger had a somewhat stereotypical, stout, Germanic look to him, with a bit of a beer belly, and a bushy white mustache spreading over his upper lip like a bad rash.
“That’s right. I’m from Buffalo,” I replied, averting prolonged eye contact. Then I wiped beads of perspiration from my brows and returned to my noodles.
There was a certain fire in the stranger’s glare that was unsettling. Of course, this being Thailand, it would have been easy to label him as a child molester of some sort, as Elon Musk did to that diver, and yes, the stranger had that tree jumper, kiddy fiddler type look to him, like a guy you’d see on To Catch a Predator, that kind of creepy old guy gestalt.
But I tried not to rush to judgment. Look, despite widespread perceptions and beliefs, and despite that I even recently heard the comedian Andrew Schulz, on Theo Von’s podcast, shitting on Thailand for its pedophile problems, despite that, the truth is, after several years in Thailand, I’ve not heard or seen much about pedos. Allegedly they’re in Africa, South America nowadays. Pedos are like a species of parasite that flock to wherever they can feed, satiate their sickness, and most recently, at least according to an article I saw on Vice, that’s in places like Madagascar.
So yeah, maybe the guy was just starved for conversation. And I obliged him.
Started spitting small talk. ----
The stranger went on to tell me he’s from Berlin, Germany, and had worked for Puma for 25 years, all here at a factory in Thailand. His English was perfect, only slightly accented, and not in a cartoonish Nazi way, but more in a sophisticated slow drawl.
For the first couple of minutes, we were having the typical expat conversation, about travel, nice places to see in Thailand, the best islands, all that.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer But then the dialogue turned dark. No, he wasn’t a pedo, thankfully, or not that he disclosed. But he’d obviously gotten himself into an unfortunate situation.
He mentioned something about trying to get his pension, that he was relying on it, and that the German Embassy in Bangkok refused to help him receive it. And that now he had no money. And that he’d gotten into an argument with the staff at the embassy and they’d asked him to leave the premises. And that he was thinking of going back there tomorrow. To kill someone.
Laughing it off, figuring (and hoping) that it was the sarcastic, black humor of the northern European variety, I chuckled and spat back, “nah, definitely don’t do that,” and kept at my noodles, trying to plow through them quicker so I could get away from this situation, before the German divulged anything incriminating.
I started worrying a bit, too, thinking, like, shit, what if he really does walk into the German Embassy tomorrow and stabs someone… What if I read about that in the Bangkok Post… Should I call the cops? Would the cops in Bangkok even do anything about such rantings, possible threats? The “Boys in Brown,” the coppers here, aside from collecting “tea money,” aren’t known as the most proactive of police forces…
Of course, too, I was thinking the German might be one of those deranged foreigners in Thailand I hear about jumping off a balcony, another farang joining the Pattaya Flyers Club… He definitely looked the type. There was a discomfiting, quiet rage to him, and he reminded me of the old flick, Falling Down, that variety of older white guy fed up with the world and ready to kill.
I’d read on the CIA World Factbook that more Americans die in Thailand, per year, than anywhere else in the world. But I’m not sure about the Germans, where they die the most.
Normally, though, in Thailand, random violence is rare, and violent crime committed by foreigners is even rarer. Normally, from what I’ve seen, in Thailand, foreigners are more of a threat to themselves than anyone else.
In fact, at this very shopping center, there was an Italian, an older fellow, too, who, not far from where we sat, had done a swan dive from a fifth-floor ledge, landing splat, face down in a mess of bone and blood, on the ground floor, giving that day’s shoppers a most unforgettably gruesome spectacle.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Oh, and this stranger definitely had that look; the German looked like a future suicide case. And speaking of his look, he had a certain shiftiness to him, a really dishonest face, with a jawline that was almost too squarish. It was almost like his chin and his jaw were too small for his skull, giving him a certain unnerving, creepy appearance, almost like a bottom-feeding fish, like a fish you’d see only at the deepest depths of the ocean.
Although he wore brown-tinted eyeglasses, I could see that his blue eyes were bright and small, small and beady, like two blue dots punched into his skull, which rendered his countenance even more sinister, and his skin was bad too, reddish and leathery, speckled in uneven clots of scraggly white body hair, and he had wrinkles in his forehead that ran deep, like cracks in stone, and they were loud wrinkles, too, wrinkles that told stories, stories of woe, stories of sleepless nights, stories of too much booze.
Again, I tried to put aside my prejudices. Look, I’m also a guy who escaped the clusterfuck of my home country to travel, roam, explore, have fun. I’m also a guy who found a job in this crazy beautiful tropical land. And I really don’t care about what others do in their personal lives. As long as they aren’t pedos, as long as they aren’t violent pricks, as long as they aren’t hurting anyone, who am I to judge.
Right?
A red flash from the corner of my eye caught my attention, and I craned my neck, saw a muted flatscreen TV hanging from a wall nearby. It was showing a news story about a Czech billionaire who’d died in a helicopter crash, during a ski trip in Alaska.
The German joined me, glaring and gasping at the ghastly images of smoky black and gray ‘copter wreckage strewn over a jagged white hilltop.
The German sighed and then commented on the horror of being in a helicopter crash. What it’d be like, as a passenger, inside a helicopter going down. The claustrophobia and fear the passengers felt in that helicopter cabin. The passengers, confined in that metal box, plummeting from the sky, their weight heavy with gravity, their screams, and what must have been going through their minds in those final minutes as their bodies rocked and swayed and shook and the emergency lights flashed and beeped. He wondered if the doomed
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer passengers had resigned themselves to death, if they were saying final prayers, or if they were thinking they’d survive the impact…
After taking a deep breath and exhaling loudly, he exclaimed, “Then whack! Lights out. His money meant nothing,” and the German clapped on the table to punctuate.
A moment of silence followed, and we both turned our attention away from the TV. The profundity, enormity of his words sank in, and I wondered if the isolation of the pandemic, the lockdowns, if that’d made me even more socially retarded, made me into a total jerk, made me figure this guy all wrong, guessing him a chomo or boozer. What if he was alright after all? ----
But then the stranger started getting weirder. Going on and on about his money problems, how he couldn’t eat, how he had absolutely nothing, and I suspected that this was likely a hustle. He probably made a habit of this, hitting up other foreigners for cash, likely because he’d dropped all his monthly pension bucks, as some expats do, on booze, or gambling, or maybe hookers and booze.
Or perhaps he was one of those unlucky souls who’d fallen in love with a bargirl from Nana or Soi Cowboy, only to discover she was already engaged, or even already married… Perhaps he was one of those unlucky souls to discover this AFTER he’d already paid for the marriage ceremony, bought her a house, forked over a hefty sin sot...
Of course he could just be poor. Maybe Puma didn’t pay well. Many Thais often think that any foreigner in Bangkok is rich, but that’s not always true. There are those with limited means who live in or venture to foreign countries. Then there are even some who venture to faraway lands and turn to begging or busking, playing guitar on the street for cash; “beg-packing” as it’s sometimes called.
But this guy, he looked too old for beg-packing. I couldn’t see him staying in a hostel, singing or dancing or begging on the street. Or maybe he just couldn’t carry a tune, or didn’t play guitar, I don’t know.
Really, I’m guessing he pissed away his cash and then guilted others, in food courts, to fund his meals, so he could splurge on more important things to him, like hookers and booze. I concluded this summation, too, while glancing at his neatly cut helmet of gray hair, and, most notably, his clothes.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer His clothes were too clean. Observing his pair of blue jeans, marshmallow white sneakers, and plaid polo shirt, it struck me that his duds were stainless and wrinkle-free. This being such, obviously he wasn’t sleeping rough, camping in the park, eating lizards, like some of the “beg-packer” hippy types I’d heard of, seen online, those hippies with their dreadlocks and pungent potpourri stinks of body odor and patchouli oil.
It was close to Easter, and I noticed that the German wore a crucifix. So I asked him if he went to church and if he could talk to a priest, get help. I’m sure there are plenty of priests who’d help a person in his self-described dire straits.
(Although a cynical side of me suspected that possibly he’d already been using the priests too, had probably eaten breakfast at the church.) He vaguely brushed the church suggestion off, saying the church nearby was
“closed,” which I’m sure was a lie.
(When he said the church was closed, I couldn’t help but be reminded of certain shady locals, usually short fellows with smiles too big for their faces, the bloodsuckers who approach tourists outside the King’s Palace in Bangkok, telling tourists the “temple was closed today,” in order to set the tourists up for whatever scam…)
Then I suggested the German talk to his family, to which he replied that he had no family left. They were all dead or estranged. “25 years in Thailand, hard to keep in touch,” he bemoaned.
It most certainly is. That was no lie. And herein sits a cruel example of expat life.
The loss of ties with one’s homeland and all in it and the reality that one is in a country, like Thailand, an ethno-state, where an expatriate will always be a foreigner, a guest, and can almost never achieve citizenship, or even permanent residency. Especially a person like this German guy. A guy with limited means. A guy with few to no Thai connections. A guy so broke and down on his luck he must rely on the pity of others.
Seeing where all this was going, I knew it was time to split, and I swallowed down the last savory bite of my spicy noodles and rose to leave. But before I did, I
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer decided to make merit and plucked out 50 baht from my pocket, and handed him the folded purple bill, patted him on the back and wished him the best…
My encounter with the German made me think of how lonely the escapist dream can end. The dream of spending one’s final days in a tropical paradise. Then that dream turns into an old man dying by himself in a crappy apartment or guesthouse. An old man slumped atop a toilet, like a Far East, far-less fortunate version of Elvis… Or an old man supine in a messy bed, beside a bunch of empty booze bottles, his bloated corpse discovered by a cleaner or a landlord because of a neighbor complaining of a rotten stench…
And I wondered about my own 40-square-foot furnished apartment... Had anyone died there? Had anyone died in the bed I sleep in? How would I know, either way, and what would it really matter… Anywhere one goes, someone probably died, in that place, sometime throughout the course of human history…
(I don’t believe in ghosts, anyway, but at least my apartment has a nice spirit house outside, so if anyone did die in my apartment, before, maybe they’re living happily in the spirit house, with the other ghosts, just in case any of that is actually real…)
Pondering the long-term expat plight further, like, maybe, though, for some expats, I guess it’s not always a terrible, lonely ending, dying in Thailand.
Perhaps, for some, it’s a perfect way to retire, to end things, enjoying their golden years, in golden sunshine, in a warm exotic place. Heck, maybe they find a cute local lady, make buddies at the bar, and have heaps of fun times to close out their spins around the sun. There’s a beauty to that, for sure, and I respect that. I’ve seen several older retired fellows in Thailand, often appearing to be ex-military, and they look happy as can be. And good for them.
But then there’s the German guy. The cautionary tale. The way not to do Thailand.
The way not to do life.
Honestly, however, most of what I got from this encounter was a potent reminder of why it’s better to wear earphones and avoid talking to random strangers in Bangkok.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer VAMPIRE DYNASTY
They’re everywhere. On billboards atop highways. On humungous portraits adorning the facades of every public building.
They’re ubiquitous as the heat and sun. They appear sometimes as young, virile.
Other times with a touch of gray. But They are always beatific and bathed in favorable hues. Often They are with small cute canines perched on Their laps.
Despite attempts to frame Them as benevolent, They are concealing fangs. They are drinkers of blood.
Who are They?
They are the Vampires.
The Vampire Dynasty.
Their origins are typical. They arose through ancient violence and powered into alpha parasites.
The Vampires grow exponentially. Like nests of cockroaches. Or swarms of mosquitoes. The Vampires are a species between cockroach and mosquito. And anyone with the right tint can fuck into Them.
The Vampires dwell in palatial palaces, while Their hosts are sardined in tin shacks, riverside hovels, and stacked boxes of tiny apartments. The Vampires’ hosts walk on dirt floors and trade time for food and plastic while the Vampires’ toes touch cold to marble floors. The hosts snap selfies while the Vampires are always sitting at graceful angles.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The Vampires are sentient as snake gods…
The Vampires’ servants must crawl in Their presence; literally, servants on their bellies, like obsequious, circus-trained amphibians, slithering and sniveling. Their hosts, as well, must bow to the Vampires’ feet, crawl before them, prostrate in obeisance.
The Vampires maintain Their stranglehold through landownership. Through ancient violence, plunder, rape and conquest, They’ve cut open and seized possession of the expanse. But were They Vampires before the blood? History is subjective. And Their history is a painting of a painting. A picture of a picture.
The Vampires collect blood through taxes. The Vampires’ faces occlude deeds and They collect blood through stakes in State enterprises. They maintain Their blood supply through fear, subjugation, and silence. Through laws governing remarks and criticism. It’s not just how They feed. It’s how They thrive.
The Vampires’ land is a golden nation, a nation of the sun. But it is a hobbled nation. A nation so destitute its police must live on bribes. The Vampires’ is a sick nation. A nation in hospital gowns. A nation stuck with syringes and tubes. The nation’s blood sucked daily through the Vampires’ network of darkened temples.
One might think the Vampires live in a bubble. That They only know luxury. And of course They do and They do. However, the Vampires also live in a perpetual state of fear. They live with gooseflesh. Their dreams are recurring nightmares. The Vampires’ fear hangs heavily over Their heads, hangs low like black clouds fat with rain. Theirs is a necrotic fear, a fear that Their hosts, the masses, the blood supply, will shake Them off, flip over the Vampires’ silver chariots and diamond-plated palanquins and drive jade stakes through the Vampires’ darkly plump hearts.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The Vampires know this. The Vampires are educated in a way the masses are not.
The Vampires read books when the masses do not. The Vampires are aware of history. The Vampires know of the guillotine. They know of exile. So They guard Their blood like a grizzly bear guards its cubs.
For years, the Vampires have drunk blood, unimpeded, with little to no dissent.
However, Their hosts, the masses are awakening. The masses are discovering hematology. The masses are becoming phlebotomists. The masses have interconnected microscopes, are counting cells, and are looking for transfusions.
The Vampires know Their time is limited. So They have begun escape plans. They have begun offshore blood banks. They are shipping the masses’ blood off under thick inky skies, in clandestine, cloak and dagger transfer operations. The Vampires have conspirators. The Vampires have disguises, passports, golden parachutes, machine guns, tanks, trampolines, helicopters, pogo sticks, submarines and emergency call options at the ready.
As of now, it’s unclear what the Vampire Dynasty’s future will hold. But whatever it is, it will involve blood.
BIG WAVE
The fishermen had set out early, right before the sun rose from the bottom of the sea… The ship’s ragtag crew in sun-bleached clothes already showing blotches, big beads of sweat dripping down their necks…
Reeling in net after net of fish, the men threw and poured bucketloads of the slippery creatures into an assortment of containers lining the longtail boat’s deck…
The oldest of the fishermen, Uncle Yai, swung his gaze toward the sea. Sniffing at the sea air’s salty breezes, he had a premonition. He’d noticed a certain ripple in
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer the water. The seawater getting murky, foaming like saliva… Then he threw back his head to inspect flecks of glue-colored clouds congealing, darkening to a purpose. The clouds fat, fast, and forming into an inky being, a mass of black vapors and thunderheads beginning to eat away at the big blue box of sky above…
Age was respected on the boats, so the crew heeded Uncle Yai’s warning.
Gathered speed. Their task taking hold of the men like a fever. The fishermen picking up the pace as it was becoming clear today’s fish flow would be fantastic thanks to the impending burst to come from the collecting skies. The men grunting, wiping sweat from their creased brows, hanging over the edge of the wooden longtail boat, twisting at ropes stirring the sea. The wiry men, with skin worn as an old couch, jerking out net after net stuffed thick with trembling, dripping wet clumps of fish.
Thankfully, the fishermen beat the rain. Beat the storm. Or so they thought.
They’d docked their boat and had been unloading their booty when the rain announced its arrival with a thunderclap. Then the fat black clouds opened, unleashing a shower of rain that swept over the beach like a long mop and was soon rattling over the village’s tin roof shacks.
Sheets of rain washed over the men in waves, and Uncle Yai dropped his greasy fishnet, ran right through the downpour, dashing down the dock. Then he mounted his motorcycle and peeled out, rode furiously, riding through rising puddles and liquefied roads up toward a semicircle cluster of green hills dense and dark with vegetation. He wished to be as far from the sea as possible. Just in case the sea wished to again push forward its fists of water…
It’d been 16 years since the big wave. That Wile E. Coyote moment. When the Earth below him disappeared. Just as he’d been atop a palm tree, picking coconuts. He’d latched onto a piece of debris, kicked and maneuvered over to a rooftop. There he spent the worst day of his life watching that angry arm of ocean, that wreck, that wretched wall of water and all the awful chunks of concrete, bodies, livestock, cars, buses and boats forced forward… Uncle Yai hearing the wails, cries for help… That horror show… The worst day…
And now the rain was roaring. Mere wrinkles in the sea’s surface turning to tall waves… Waves slapping further ashore… Waters rising from the ground while also
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer falling from the sky… The high winds whipping, ripping palm fronds, flying branches, tattered leaves… The dark skies and raging sea howling back and forth at one another in grim harmony, a horrible duet…
There hadn’t been any rain, for months, on the island so its parched ground was like an empty bathtub, collecting the rainwater, seawater, letting it pool and rise.
Quickly, arms of water were reaching onto the shore, forming flash floods, and breaking through the island’s sunbaked crust, funneling through the village square, rejoining the island to sea.
The townsfolk, fishermen had run for shelter once the heavy rain hit. But the fishermen hadn’t time to collect their spoils. The ship’s crew had huddled atop a shophouse roof and were watching haplessly as their catch, their fish, still thrashing in buckets, floated up and spilled into the storm surge’s flow… The fish sucked back to the sea’s circulation… The fish seeming to smile as they swam off…
Uncle Yai brushed back a tuft of wet black hair from his forehead. Watched warily from the jungle hills as the storm surge pulled back like a wet carpet. Then the canopy of black clouds covering the sky receded. The sky shifting fast from darkness, to milky, to crystal clear. Then Uncle Yai sighed, shading his eyes with his right hand as he inspected the farthest reaches of the sea, that wilderness of water. But he found no trace of a massive wave.
FANG FANG’S FRIEND
Ghosts had always been a part of Fang Fang’s life. Her grandmother was a medium, and villagers would flock to their family’s countryside home, prostrate and beg for news from the spirit world. As a small girl, Fang Fang would watch the ceremonies and animal sacrifices, live chickens’ throats slit open, and she served as a flower girl for ghost weddings.
It was a gift that ran in the family. The ability to see, hear, and even smell ghosts.
It’d only passed through the maternal side, yet her mother had escaped it.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Probably for the better. While some might find it a blessing, to be able to communicate with the beyond, for Fang Fang, as she began encountering spirits, it felt like more of a curse.
The spirits she saw were never happy. They were angry ghosts, hungry ghosts.
Ghosts of those who’d died in accidents. Panicked souls who didn’t even know they were dead and were lost in the purgatory realm of the spirit world, the coffin-wide space between life and death.
At around three or four years of age she’d started seeing faraway figures, bodies missing arms, shadowy creatures limping, circling the rice fields, flickering in corners… The phantom forms soon finding her night and day, to the extent she couldn’t tell nightmares from reality.
Fortunately, Fang Fang’s grandmother knew exactly what was going on…
As a child, Grandma found the same frightening faces. Had also seen forms in the darkness. Had often awoken to a freezing cold room, seen ghastly figures with bloody, beaten faces pointed at her… Her nostrils flaring with the heavy scent of fear swirling in the icy air…
On a foggy winter morning, Grandma took a five-year-old Fang Fang into the courtyard behind their house. As the two sat on a stone bench, in that cold patina of smoke-colored fog, Grandma perched little Fang Fang atop her lap and explained the “gift,” the ability to see spirits.
The precocious Fang Fang listened carefully, hanging on every word leaving her grandma’s lips, each word exploding into a tiny white cloud that melted into the cold mist.
Then her grandma fished something clanky from out of her coat pocket. An amulet. A gold necklace, with a thin, egg-shaped pendant. On the pendant was an engraved image of a chubby, happy Buddha.
“This will keep you safe from the spirits,” her grandmother whispered into Fang Fang’s ear and carefully pulled the necklace over the child’s tiny neck, hooked the clasp.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Fang Fang had been born into an impoverished family residing in the countryside of Zhengzhou.
She was one of the “left behind” children. Both her parents had left their village to seek work in the city, and she’d been raised by her grandmother, the medium, plus a network of village aunties and uncles.
From a young age, in addition to helping with ghost weddings, receiving guests, she’d also assisted her grandmother in the fields, digging, planting crops. Dirt was always under the child’s fingernails.
Out in the rice fields she’d be accompanied by ghosts. But after receiving the protective amulet from her grandmother, the worst of the ghosts, the hungry ghosts, angry ghosts, began to fade further into their distance… Though she could still sense the glares…
It was shortly after receiving the amulet that she had a welcome visitor. Xiao Mei.
A young girl around her age. The two had met in the rice fields and immediately hit it off, talking about their favorite salty snacks.
Xiao Mei seemed so optimistic about the future, spoke of moving to the city, and she’d talk at length about the requirements she had for the boy she’d marry.
For several months, Fang Fang saw the girl, every day, in the rice fields. But after the harvest, Fang Fang’s friend disappeared, and Fang Fang heard gossip about a neighbor, a farmer who’d just been executed for strangling his wife and daughter to death, nearly four years prior. Then she saw an old school picture of Xiao Mei in the local newspaper…
By the time Fang Fang reached puberty, she’d blossomed into a beautiful young girl. It’d surprised everyone in the village, too, since neither her mother, nor grandmother, nor any other relatives had cover girl looks.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer But Fang Fang was a beauty. Frequently she was compared to one of the Four Beauties of Ancient China, Xi Shi, a girl so beautiful that fish would sink in the water after being so overwhelmed by her beauty that they’d forget to swim.
Fang Fang’s beauty was also made starker due to the gender imbalance in her village. This was during China’s “One Child Policy” and no one in the village wanted their only child to be a girl. Some girl babies were having their necks snapped at birth, their tiny corpses thrown in the garbage. Eventually, in her village, boys came to outnumber girls by three to one.
By high school, virtually every boy in her village, her school, had fallen head over heels in love with her, and she’d soon found herself inundated with suitors.
One of her uncles had taken a shine to her too. That uncle was a short, skinny man in his early 30s, and he’d been fast rising through the ranks of the local chapter of the Communist Party.
One ugly, rainy afternoon, he’d come by the house, when she was doing housework and her grandparents were working the fields. What he did to her, she didn’t understand, though it’d hurt, tremendously, and in a way she’d never experienced.
Later that evening, when she told her grandmother, her grandmother flew into a rage, her cheeks flushing blood red, a venomous glare steeled in her gaze.
Her grandmother then pulled Fang Fang from bed, and the two stormed into the living room, sat before their family altar.
In the bowl before the altar, her grandmother mixed water, a fragrant herb, and then reached a tissue into Fang Fang’s underwear, swiped between her legs, and dunked the tissue into the bowl.
Her grandmother rose, and Fang Fang instinctively joined, the two of them standing before the altar, the bowl and its contents before them. Then her grandmother cusped her hands, pressing the palms together in the position of a budding lotus, and held her hands high above her head, whispered a prayer.
A couple of days later, the uncle had been found dead, floating in a nearby lake.
He’d been riding his motorbike by the lake, when, according to police reports,
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer he’d lost control of the vehicle, driven straight into the body of water and drowned.
However, a villager, riding a donkey, witnessed the incident, and rumors of his account swirled furiously through the village. The villager said a water ghost, a silhouette of swirling water, had appeared, manifested itself on the bike’s pillion.
Then the ghost had wrapped its watery arms around the uncle’s neck, and the two took a sharp turn, rode right into the lake.
Another week later, Fang Fang was visited by her uncle’s ghost. Right outside her bedroom window. The ghost walking up and down invisible stairs, in the night sky.
The ghost glowing under the moonlight, looking like a rotten fish… dripping wet, skin slipping off bone… The ghost shrieking and retching, pausing every step or two to vomit big blasts of filthy water.
The ghost swung his horrid face at her, shivering and shaking, a look of pain, guilt and fear in its wild, ghastly eyes. Emitting a wheeze, then a terrible cough, the spirit then faded into the night.
However, this time the ghost didn’t scare Fang Fang, and it wasn’t long before she was fast asleep.
THE HAZE
It wasn’t since 2014 that Shanghai had seen such haze.
In recent years, Emperor Poo had enacted several measures to clean up the air.
Factories were held to higher emission standards. Illegal factories shuttered.
Vehicles, too, were held to stricter emission standards, and altogether, there’d been far more days with blue skies.
Until the winter of 2025.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer No one knew why exactly. It’d been unexplainable. Just one day the skies turned thunderstorm gray, yet no rain came. And the skies remained overcast, which wasn’t unusual at that time of year. But then the haze came. And it came on strong.
It was originally thought to be fog, and it’d appeared to be fog. It was a thick mist that curdled in over the Bund, soon wrapping itself over Shanghai like a shroud.
The haze reaching out endlessly over swaths of city blocks, fogging in a milky white miasma that remained parked over whole neighborhoods, reduced visibility to mere meters.
Meteorologists were unable to identify the causes of the mist, the fog, the smog, the haze, or whatever it was. Originally, it was believed that it’d pass after a few days. Perhaps it was a weather pattern. That was at least the official line from the local weather bureau. But after a week, the haze remained idle over the entirety of the city.
And it wouldn’t budge. Normally such masses of air would pass. But not this one.
It remained and remained snarling traffic, cancelling flights, bringing bustling Shanghai to a standstill.
Locals began to grow restless. The public demanded answers. But none, at least from the government, were forthcoming. The haze started to then grow, coalesce, enveloping the city so thickly that the mere meters of visibility shrank to centimeters.
Vehicular traffic ground to a halt after a series of gruesome accidents. Rescue crews unable to retrieve bodies, wreckage, due to the haze. Flights, trains had to be suspended indefinitely, entire highways shut down.
Emperor Poo kept silent, but his deputies and orderlies attempted to assuage concerns, stating that it was a rare weather event. And this was originally bought by the populous. And the government had been successful in maintaining the food supply to the city. However, the people’s patience began to run thin, when, two weeks after the haze had started, the mysterious choking deaths began.
The deaths were reminiscent of the black plague. Random city dwellers started coughing up blood, asphyxiating on what appeared to be a mixture of bile and blood…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Bodies could be seen in the city streets. Dead bodies, with skin pale as frozen ice, lay in front of public buildings, or were slumped over, sprawled out on sidewalks, all in pools of bloody black puke. The expired urbanites’ faces stamped with startled, perplexed expressions…
Once the choking deaths began, the government cut off internet access to the city.
Then ceased broadcasting local or national news about the haze and about anything to do with Shanghai. The army was called in, in hazmat suits, to seal off the area.
But still, the haze remained parked over Shanghai. Didn’t move eastward, southward, northward, or westward. It remained trapped, affixed over the metropolis, as if kept in place by a roof of some sort.
However, as much as Emperor Poo’s government attempted to keep the extraordinary situation under wraps, there were those in Shanghai with satellite internet connections, those with software allowing them to bypass censorship controls, and news of the choking deaths, images of dead bodies piled in public streets, corpses curled and ghastly, bloody vomit dripping from their mouths…
these and other unsettling images circulated outside the Middle Kingdom, throughout the free world, via internet, social media and traditional international media outlets...
Blame for the haze, choking deaths was tossed around, like a political hot potato, and the usual finger-pointing and screaming matches ensued.
Several prominent voices in science, the media, and even celebrities weighed in, with various conflicting takes. Meanwhile, the city of Shanghai started sinking, its districts detaching, submerging lower, the land masses eventually breaking off and spilling, crumbling into the Bund and the East China sea.
And after a few more weeks the news cycle just moved on.
HOSTAGE SITUATION (RED RAIN 1)
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The mirrored walls and ceiling went pink. And in the ceiling a high-definition image formed… It was Stephen Hawking, the scientist, at a strip club… A Lil Jon rap song blared as a young Black exotic dancer, in a thong, was twerking her sizable buttocks only inches from Doctor Hawking’s face…
Then the ceiling, then the room went dark.
It was as if the power had cut out, but the air conditioner droned on. The neon lights from the bar across the street still danced in my window, and I could hear stray cats screeching and yelping. I think one was in heat.
My phone buzzed. I reached for it but found myself stuck to the bed, as if my body were made of Velcro.
“It’s a hostage situation,” called out a computerized, Stephen Hawking-sounding voice from the city street, “he’s up there with a fucking machine gun.”
Then there were sirens and vehicles with loud revving engines. It was a calamitous commotion… a cacophony.
“Call it off. Call it off,” the computer voice commanded, and it sounded now like the voice was blasting from a speaker phone.
A spotlight shot into my room, tracked my pet scorpions. They were out of the dollhouse again and crawling around the foot of my bed. Then I saw Shitbear was jumping up and down on the bed, had my elderly woman sexdoll in a headlock.
Shitbear, in the space of three days, had already grown to the size of an Oompa Loompa and was wearing a RUN-DMC, all-black Adidas tracksuit and heavy gold chains... And a scary grin.
“In dark times, will the children sing?” Shitbear cried out. Then he stopped bed-jumping. Stood in place and snapped my sexdoll’s silicone neck. Then he tossed the floppy sexdoll to the floor.
“Yes, yes they will! The children will sing about the dark times!” Shitbear exclaimed.
Shitbear then raised his arms, outstretched them, knocked on Heaven’s Door, and with that, my pet scorpions came crawling over him. The scorpions multiplying into a festering swarm. Shitbear soon engulfed in the scorpions, wearing them in
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer a live-action suit. Then Shitbear dove from my bed, as if at a rock concert, stagediving…
I found myself unattached, able to stagger up from the bed. I was naked and found my body covered in tattoos. Tattoos of numbers and equations.
The lights clicked back on and buzzed like a cloud of flies. And I saw that the silver walls of my room were melting into pink wainscoting that became strawberry milk. Then the hardwood floor slicked over in a slippery substance that smelled of coconuts. Perhaps it was coconut oil.
I slipped and slid, like a novice ice skater, to the window, to meet the commotion.
The scorpions paid me no mind, were too busy gnawing at the carcass of Shitbear.
Stepping over my busted elderly woman sexdoll, I opened the blackout curtains, scanned the shitty street and spotted an old bag lady naked and crucified to the front door of an abandoned McDonald’s.
Stepping away from the window, I flicked on my phone and was greeted with an ad for a work-from-home job. The ad featured a smiling young lady, in a hot pink bikini, working on her laptop while sitting alone on an empty white sand beach, crystal-clear water lapping at her bare feet.
The smiley girl in the WFH ad looked nothing like my sexdoll, the Stephen Hawking stripper, or the naked homeless lady crucified to the abandoned McDonald’s.
JUST AS YOU FALL ASLEEP (RED RAIN 2)
The room was spinning. I’d had a few too many shots of whiskey and lay back into the king-sized bed in my hotel room. I’ve heard hotels called depressing and impersonal, especially generic, chain hotels like this one, but I must admit to finding a comfort in the anonymity, a soothing nature to the familiarity.
Anywhere I go in the world, the Marriott is the same…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer I’d really had too many shots, I pondered, and the blackout curtains were open, the balcony’s glass doors drinking in neon lights. Ambient street sounds reverberating along the walls. Outside, at a bar across the busy street, a Filipino band was playing a tortured acoustic folk version of “Shape of You.”
Despite the hotel’s generic comfort, I could start to see mind rot, wolf eyes and a cosmic glare tangling in the half-mirror over the TV. The whiz of the AC was hypnotizing. Then the lingering scent of the room service tray wafted and tingled my nose. Spicy noodles…
This wasn’t my first rodeo. Sudden somnolence followed. A salesman’s smile and an invisible chloroform rag to the mouth. A push to the gate. And I alighted to an entrance…
Then I was on a busy city street. I was in a spacesuit, skateboarding by Madonna and a college-aged blond girl, a sorority type, and the two were doing vocal warmup exercises in front of an overturned Tesla. The overturned Tesla was on fire, in bright blue flames. Madonna had a pit bull on a leash and was naked, covered in peanut butter. The young girl was stripping naked and was putting on a nun’s outfit, started singing something about how she “wanted boobs like Katy Perry’s.”
Skating on, I ollied over a curb, stole onto a sidewalk and saw a subway stop filled with a clumped mass of headless businesspeople. The headless mass in pantsuits, smart casual, and tight-fitting three-piece suits. The headless mass a paralyzed stampede, unable to step down the stairs leading to an underground subway station…
Suddenly I was in a red mist. A dragon drone lifted me into the air, via a hook and chain, like a live milk cow dangling from a crane.
With the dragon drone puffing, pushing me forth, I flapped my arms and watched from above like God. I witnessed schools of weathered, shirtless, mud-caked men, blunts dangling from their chapped lips. The men were growling. Carrying axes and shovels. The men were exiting a clown car and marching in a single-file line.
They were trudging toward a dumpster fire. The dumpster in the middle of an empty city street… The dumpster fire encircled by obese high school cheerleaders practicing Tai-Chi...
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Shimmery white vapors of steam curled up from the dumpster’s conflagration as the dirty shirtless men brushed past the obese cheerleaders. The men, stepping forward, formed human pyramids and then bellyflopped, dove into the dumpster, disappeared into its flames.
The dragon drone honked, sputtered, lowered me like an anchor and dropped me onto a moving skateboard that was riding down the sidewalk on its own.
Just in time for the black flies…
Waves, funnels of black flies emerged from open sewers, poured out of skyscrapers’ windows and doorways. The flies on a kamikaze mission, flying straight into the dumpster fire, zapping into orange explosions, popping like popcorn…
A bare-chested, emaciated man cut a figure through the black mass of flies, stood alone on a street corner. The man had a head so big he looked alien. The man started thrumming his harp-like, skeletal ribs, sang “Like a Virgin.” As I skated past him, swatting away flies, with my hands, he handed me a phone, an early telephone, with a cup-receiver attached to a string. A phone from the 1940s.
“Ring ring!” he called out, and I noticed several gaps between his upper teeth.
Then his big head began to shrink, like a balloon slowly losing its air.
Reaching through a swarm of black flies to receive the phone, I heard a loud gong, and then another, and another, the gongs louder and louder until I was jolted awake, and when I awoke, I lifted my head, widened my eyes and turned my gaze to see the hotel room’s landline ringing off the hook.
Wiping the sleep from the corners of my eyes, I struggled, swam through the bed and bellycrawled and dragged myself to the phone. I reached for, scooped up the receiver, which, in that moment, looked like a pair of stumpy legs on a stick. Then I pressed the cold cups to my right ear and cheek, heard a computerized, Stephen Hawking voice. The voice had a tunnel echo to it, as if sounding from a bullhorn:
“There’s been a shooting. Remain inside your room and bolt and lock your door.”
Before I could react, the line went dead. Then I rolled out of bed, looked out the window, saw the Filipino band, all four of them, gunned down, lying in puddles of
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer blood. The one with the man-bun was still clutching his acoustic guitar, the guitar with a bullet hole in its pickguard…
Then my cell phone rang. The adrenaline had woken me up and I rushed over to my phone, picked it up, and clicked the green button to receive the call. The call was from an unknown number. And when it connected, I heard the same Stephen Hawking tunnel voice saying: “You’ve reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service. Please check the number and try again.”
BANGKOK SLEEP (RED RAIN 3)
Bangkok was in a slumber, a gloomy silence.
A trickle of sweat slid down my spine, and I panned my gaze out around the empty street, below my building, gave it a searching look.
Nothing. Only a scrawny gray stray cat creeping down the alley. Hopefully it’d catch some of the rats that’d been running around, though I wasn’t sure the stray cat, as skinny as it was, could take any, much less many, of those rats, in a fight.
The rats seemed to be growing larger, day by day. Must be the takeout food place, an Indian curry ghost kitchen, always chucking out its leftovers. That must be providing their sustenance.
I’d been standing on my balcony, watching the rats, having a break from reading.
It’d been my solace, my sanctuary, reading, sticking my nose into books.
Disappearing into authors’ worlds, studying fascinating subjects, a wonderful refuge from the apocalyptic scene the world had become.
However, despite reading several books, long-neglected classics included, the solitude was eating at me. The solitude, like a creature, inside me, shed its mass, was spreading over me…
It was in these days that I began seeing things, hearing voices. Before now, I’d never hallucinated. But now, hallucinations had become a daily occurrence.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer At first, I’d been seeing floaters. Then the floaters transformed into larger shapes, distinct outlines, what initially began as possibly being animals grew into human forms. Something living in the corner of my eye… As if a person were there, in my apartment, with me.
Not only was I sensing the presence, but I was also feeling the presence. It felt like that noticeable, uncomfortable feeling of gaze detection, when you know a person is looking at you. And they are. You see them, their eyes fixed upon you.
That was the feeling I was having, being in my apartment, I was feeling as if I had someone staring at me. All the time.
It was especially strong, the feeling, in the shower.
Standing in the shower, water rushing over me, I’d sense, something, there. After washing my hair, one morning, I opened my eyes and was finally confronted by…
A man, with abnormally stumpy legs, arms that were long, hanging below his kneecaps. He was portly and short, bald, and appeared to be in his 50s or 60s. His skin smooth as porcelain. He wore a beer shirt and a kilt. Then he sneered, lifted his kilt, and a fierce, hissing nest of neon green snakes was nuzzling in and around his pelvis. Then he slowly disappeared into the steam of the running shower.
At first sight, I’d been mortified, but as he melted into the mist of the shower, a towering wave of relaxation, chillaxed me into an almost Zen, preternatural state…
The next morning, I awoke, slid my eyes open, and it felt to me as if my eyeholes were peepholes, two peepholes in a clandestine hotel, somewhere near a train station. Somewhere where it’s still black and white and where people still use payphones.
But then I noticed I remained in Bangkok. And a blood sun had risen. A stray mosquito retreated to the base of my television, and I squinted at the slants of light trickling in from between the blinds, dust mites dancing in the air.
Then I saw that the man in the kilt had returned. But this time he was shirtless.
His stomach cut wide open, his entrails were spilling from his stomach, in a wet-hot, gooey, red and black mess.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The entrails shifted into snakes; the same bright green reptiles I’d seen before on his pelvis. The snakes slithering up quickly, from the floor, beginning to wrap themselves, coil around the kilt-wearing intruder, and within seconds, he’d again vanished into the air.
Once more, the Zen rush washed over me, and remained with me, even when I went out to the balcony and noticed that I was wearing a kilt.
ACCIDENT ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF SHANGHAI
It was a usually hectic day, on a heavily trafficked road, outskirts of Shanghai…
The sky was smog grey. The December air damp, 6 Celsius and bitter with diesel and PM2.
A fast-food deliveryman on an e-bike, coffin nail dangling from his mouth, was racing a yellow light and hooked a left at the front gate of an adjacent apartment compound.
From his blind side, an 18-wheeler, burgundy semi-truck, hauling gravel…
The trucker, a buzzcut shushu, blasting love ballads, singing to distorted speakers…
… a sudden 90+ decibel horn…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The deliveryman met the semi’s grill and pancaked beneath rubber and steel.
The deliveryman's bones and bike pulverized; his body split in two; his torso, limbs, wholly severed; machinery and mangled orange jumpsuit, dark blood, innards, appendages carpeting the asphalt…
The truck driver bumping, thumping over the body, tried in vain to brake but skidded out, and struck a pedestrian, a schoolgirl, crushing her foot, before he twisted the steering wheel, jackknifed and collided into an apartment block’s withered facade.
Passersby froze and stared at the fallen young girl as she writhed, wept and wheezed, clutched what was left of her foot and screamed for her mother.
Passersby pointed phones and photos, panoramically live-streamed the scene, and texted texts.
The trucker, in shock, sat hugging the wheel, twitching, tears streaming down his red, cherubic cheeks... Lachrymose love ballads still playing… “我想你 “…
A circle of onlookers formed around the girl. Another formed around the truck.
Locals looked over the idling vehicle while its driver remained still in the cab.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The girl’s red grandparents arrived. Her grandpa slapping on the hood of the semi, on the door, finally hurling a silver baijiu bottle that blistered into pieces, denting the windshield.
The police arrived. Cordoned off the area. Two ambulances and purple paramedics collecting body parts, carrying away the shrieking schoolgirl on a gurney.
Blue policemen restrained the girl’s relatives and were finally able to coax the trucker out...
Social media lit up with different factions assigning the blame to various parties.
Some censured the deliveryman for running a yellow light. Many faulted the trucker for driving too fast. A few placed the responsibility solely on the Japanese manufacturer of the truck.
The girl’s foot had to be amputated, and her family sued the trucking company.
The trucker sued the delivery company.
The delivery company blamed the deliveryman and refused to pay compensation to his family...
A couple weeks later, the deliveryman’s family held a protest at the intersection, hoisting enlarged shenfenzheng portrait photos of the young deliveryman, unfurling long red banners that blocked and snarled morning traffic.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer They held hand-written signs, calligraphic claims the apartment complex had an unsafe parking lot and front gate area; demands for indemnification. A female monk in white robes burned sheets of paper, knelt and said prayers in the middle of the street.
The deliveryman’s mother shrieked and prostrated in the road and had to be carried away by policemen. The protesters were arrested and held in administrative detention for five days.
About a month after the protest, the municipality installed a flashing amber
“caution” road sign at the intersection.
Then the whole incident was scrubbed from social media and news outlets at the special request of a local land development company…
I HAS A BUCKET
I was dirty as a begpacker. Stinking of liquor and ganja, I was limping down Sukhumvit Road.
Then I was hopping on a penis-shaped pogo stick, up to a flyover, and I bounced up each stair like it was a rectangular trampoline, the stack of mouse-gray concrete stairs moving like an escalator or a Stairmaster machine from the gym.
Each stair growing more foreboding as it slid down. I was really riding an electric moving monster!
My balance was off. I couldn’t surmount the stairs. Instead, I allowed the penis pogo stick to dissolve and let the current carry me back to the pavement. Then I spotted a flickering figure in a most curious mask.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The figure cut in and out, like it was attempting to buffer, or beam up ala Star Trek. And it wore a 1910s gas mask, something from WW1. A blob of pink fluffy feathers protruded from the mask’s mouth, as if the figure had slapped a feather duster to his face.
The flickering figure quickly faded, yielded to a burning vehicle, a tuk-tuk…
The tuk-tuk was aflame, driving recklessly down the sidewalk, backward.
Pedestrians, hawkers, and police dodging, yelling, jumping out of the honking vehicle’s awful path… Shadowy figures in hazmat-like, fire retardant suits stood inside the carriage of the 3-wheeled vehicle, randomly lighting and tossing coconut bombs…
A giant man chasing after the tuk-tuk tore by. He clenched an empty blue wastebin to his chest and was in a bright golden shawl and had a body shaped like a walrus. But he also had an unusually small head, a head the size of an ice cream scoop.
As the ice cream head barreled by, I could hear him chattering, through his worm-sized lips, “I HAS A BUCKET! I HAAAAS A BUUUUUUUUCKEEEEEEET!”
THE KAREN AND AXL ROSE
AN ACT OF FICTION AND IDIOCY
