Nightmarch

[PattayaPete 530]

Dancing for Dollars: The Dollhouse a gogo (Walking Street) is the place to be on Sunday night 8 October from about 9:00PM onwards when they hold their first dirty dancing contest since the place was taken over a few months ago. Long-timers will probably remember the early days of the den when a few similar contests were conducted, and they were well worth snaffling a seat for. Captain Picard, one of the organisers, tells me the contest will feature about 20 dancers, including chrome pole exponents from Living Dolls Showcase (Walking Street) and Club Boesche (Soi 16, Covent Garden complex) as well as a few freelancers.

 

More Urban Renewal: The demise of that ghastly long-running rip-off joint masquerading as an gogo called Marilyn's was about a decade too late. Now, in its place, an entirely new and renovated mini-complex of about eight bars has arisen atop the Siren beer boozer clutch at the Beach Road entrance to Walking Street.

 

The leader of the new set is the Highway Star gogo, which opened its rather large doors on 18 August. It's big, some 250 square metres so I was told by manager Khun Satit, one of Fun Town's best-known Thai gogo operators. The den is under the same ownership as its former namesake in Walking Street (now operating as The Roof late-night boogie barn) and boasts probably the biggest dancing stage in the city. There are between 11 and 12 dancing damsels hugging the chrome poles at any one time, but because of the size of the stage it looks like just six or so.

 

The music is standard car alarm, listenable if not exciting; there is bench seating as well as stools and libations run from the usual draught amber at 55 baht to house liver wasters at 95 baht. There is a wide selection of damsels from the young to the older warriors and they range in size from small and lean through to the well-fed variety; basically, someone to suit all tastes.

 

There are the usual raft of shows, many of which have been a feature of Thai-run dens since Eve first started demanding Adam pay bar fines in fruit. One of these is the dancer-as-chicken, or the lay-an-egg show. This involves a birthday-suited damsel placing a hard-boiled egg where the sun only shines if she's doing the front bits on a nude beach and then aiming it into a spirit tumbler. The shows don't do much for me, but the den itself is worth a look.

 

Up on The Roof: As regular readers of this missive will be well aware, I rarely write much about beer boozers. The main reason for this is the simple fact most joints are very much dependant on the personality of the owner/managers, rather than the ladies employed, to attract customers to the place. The Rooftop (right at the Bay end of the new clutch of joints above the Siren complex at the entrance to Walking Street) is not really a beer boozer in the strict sense of the word, it's more a place to shoot some pool (there are three small tables), throw a few darts (at a dartboard of course), relax on the settees and look out over Pattaya Bay, or play a few carnival-style games with the rather fetching brace of ladies employed to help empty your wallet.

 

One of these is the water dunking game whereby a girl, or two, sits on a metal seat above a small pool of water and a customer buys three balls (for 250 baht) and attempts to hit a target that will cause the seat to give way and the girl/s wind up getting wet, in the water sense, not the knee-trembling sense, although this might happen later. The owners formerly ran The Roof beer boozer upstairs in Soi Diamond, a place very popular with the US navy and marine personnel around the Cobra Gold military exercises each year, which might explain why part of their promotion involves music such as urban beatz and hip hop. This is a place I could imagine being great fun on the right sort of night.

 

Two Stars of Silver: The new holder of the ‘first gogo you come to in Walking Street' award is Silver Star, which opened its doors on 16 September. It's under the same ownership of the similarly named den of the chrome pole in Soi 8. The entrance is by way of a long, dark tunnel; there's some kind of Jungian maternal complex lurking in the psychosis of the people who put this together. Inside the place is divided into two floors, the downstairs fairly stock standard with a motley crew of chrome pole molesters while above is the almost de rigueur glass-bottomed stage where, surprise, surprise, there are young ladies of clearly impoverished circumstance cavorting about in a pair of shoes and a beckoning smile.

 

Come to Paradise: I mentioned it a short while ago but it seems I was a bit premature (something many a young lass has expressed to me in the past, although not quite using those words), but the Paradise gogo (Soi Buakhow) has finally opened its doors to offer dancing maidens cavorting around chrome poles. I had a brief look and the place sported about a dozen damsels of varying attraction, bedecked in the standard g-string format.

 

Piece of Pith: ‘Home has nothing to do with hearth, and everything to do with a state of mind;' (Pico Iyer, Video Night in Kathmandu; 1988)