Nightmarch

[PattayaPete 530]

Fresh is Best: The management of the Dollhouse ogling den (Walking Street) celebrated the first anniversary of their takeover from the original owners on 21 April. The area behind the bar has been turned into three showers, luckily with hot water so the water nymphs don’t catch pneumonia in the air-conditioned boozer. It’s been suggested that any chrome pole molesters who have snared a bar-fine will take their shower before departing the den with their victim. Since cleanliness is next to Godliness we can be assured the girls can at least say one out of two ain’t bad.

 

A Good Sunday Roast: Congratulations to Palmers noshery and boozer (Pattayaland Soi 2) who finished top of the recent Sunday night Quiz League. Maybe it has something to do with the Sunday roast dinners for which the place has been famous for some time; or is it the bromide in the tea, keeping the quizaholics at home studying English county towns instead of in the ogling dens studying cleavage and valleys?

 

A Long Way from the Top: It’s always difficult to write about a place of which you have fond memories when it has clearly slipped quite a few rungs down the pecking order of chrome poles. Such is the case with the Carousel ogling den (Soi Diamond). For many years this was one of my favourite dens but a recent brief excursion into the joint left me disappointed. The den offers a generous happy hour with all libations at just 65 baht between 8:00 and 10:00PM. The music -except when Dutch Claude was managing some years ago- has always been a bit hit and miss and this was the case the other night. Sadly, the damsels were a very average lot: not butt ugly, just average. In the time we were in not a single one smiled, although one did move her mouth in the manner of a smile, but I think she had just swallowed a fried insect and it had gone down the wrong way.

 

Since this was a Saturday night, when all the best dancers should be on deck, it was a motley collection. In fairness to Carousel, this was right at the start of Songkran and many of their best chrome pole cavorters may have gone home, so a second visit is probably in order sometime in the future.

 

What’s Really in a Name: While wandering the mean streets of Fun Town I have encountered a poster proclaiming something like ‘DJ Domination the Best in Asia now playing at Lucifer’s’. The late-night boogie barn in Walking Street is one of the most popular places in Fun Town, but I somehow doubt the reason for its people-drawing allure is related to the house DJ, no matter what his name. OK, I admit to knowing very little about the world of persons who play records. Many appear to have all the allure of rock stars without the concomitant talent. I happened to come across the following less-than-flattering comment about this sadistically-named person in the Bangkok Post’s Guru Magazine. Somebody with the equally strange moniker of ‘The Lost Boy’ wrote, ‘DJ Domination was never really ‘in’ to be out’… Shunned by genuine sxratch DJs, such as Craze and QBert [now there’s a couple of household names], Domination has always been the least humble performer to grace the planet. Party tricks and body tomfoolery have given him a reputation of being a DJ-clown…’

 

I’m no fan of the journalist who wrote this, but I suspect in this case he might well be ‘on the money’ as my first thought when I saw the poster, which sported a picture of a man in the traditional skewed baseball cap with his hands balled into fists and giving the usual ‘I’ve-just-had-a-baseball-bat-shoved-up-my-rectum’ look, was DJ Domination should, if the comments are indeed true, rename himself DJ Abomination. The day the girls stop going into Lucifer’s is the day the boys also stop, and no matter who the DJ may be, he’ll be looking for another gig.

 

Triumph of the Nomads: More than a few owners of ogling dens have noted that with the rapid increase in the numbers of chrome pole establishments the trend among the g-stringed damsels is to change places of employment far more regularly than was the case just a few years ago. The damsels are spoilt for choice and most are always thinking the other ogling den’s customer base is always larger. The consensus among owners is the average monthly attrition rate can be up to 20 to 25 percent of their dancers. Some bars have more, others less and sometimes a line-up will remain fairly stable for a few months.

 

With so many dens from which to choose the damsels are like itinerant rug salesmen. This Gypsy-like nomadic existence is just one more example of the freedom enjoyed by the dancing damsels of Fun Town. This complete freedom of movement must really piss off the God-bothering do-gooders and hand-wringers who claim the poor impoverished farm girls of Issan are compelled to work like drudges for slave wages for grasping foreign pimps. Their whole argument falls apart faster than a Thai-made video recorder when the realisation sets in that the girls basically use any and all nightlife places merely as their base of operations.

 

Any girl operating for longer than six consecutive months out of one den is almost eligible for long-service leave. It’s amazing just how many wallet emptiers couldn’t give a rat’s backside how much they make -if anything- as a salary. More than one bar owner has told me he’s had to nudge the odd high-earner to come and collect what little salary they might have earned the previous month. For the best lookers in town their only concern is to have a good time and snare as many punters as possible.

 

Blame it on the Bosanova: As each year closes out and bar owners scratch their collective heads and wonder where all the punters have gone, a veritable raft of possible causes in the downturn in tourist numbers is wheeled out like some time-machined crystal ball. We’ve had a neat collection of acronyms: from HIV/AIDS to SARS and H5N1 or whatever the official avian flu virus is called; then there’s been the Asian Economic crisis of late 1997; the 2004 tsunami (it may not have affected Fun Town but there was a belief people would just stop coming to Thailand anyway); the increasingly violent insurgency in the Deep South; the military coup in September 2006; changes to company formation regarding property ownership for foreigners; and changes to visa regulations.

 

All of these, and more, are cited as reasons why revelling numbers appear to be down, yet no one seems to be aware of the elephant in the room. In the space of less than half a decade the number of establishments catering to foreigners thirst for booze and females is not far away from double. I’ve noted previously how the number of chrome pole palaces on Walking Street has exploded from 15 or so in 2001 to just on 50 as this missive was being penned. That’s a whopping 233 percent as far as numbers are concerned. There’s no way tourist numbers to Pattaya have increased by anything like that number in the last five to six years.

 

The reality is Thailand is no longer the great bargain-hunters paradise it once was as far as ladies of easy virtue are concerned. It wasn’t so many years ago that a short-time was an experience many punters had in the boozers of Soi 6 and the like. Most beer boozer damsels and many of the ogling den shufflers were happy if they managed to snare an all-night bunk-up. Now, the dynamic has shifted and it seems most business in the mattress-dancing stakes is being conducted on a short-time basis: more business-like, but with that inscrutable Asian smile to make you think it’s all been such a great pleasure.

 

It also wasn’t so long ago that a female horizontal therapist would be happy to play hide-the-salami with a walking wallet for the price of a bar-fine and a purple note. From what I’m told, nowadays even the cleaner wants a grand for giving a tumescent customer the opportunity of exploring her most intimate regions. A recent email I received made mention of the rapid escalation in the price of female company in Fun Town and noted: “Last time I was in London walking around Soho the short time was 20GBP (1400B) Polish girls and local etc. A Soho short time is a quickee with the ‘have you come yet’ putting the damper on it for me but still Pattaya can no longer be considered cheap at todays prices.

 

Amsterdam is a similar 50 Euros. Only difference is no kissing.” In a similar blue vein another emailer said he had been in a den of the chrome pole “where a girl said ‘2500 Baht, that only 50 pounds your money’. I reminded her I lived in Pattaya and only thought in Thai Baht, to which her reply was to walk off without another word.” With the wonders of email and internet chat rooms and dating websites, the clued-up damsels are making a fistful of baht without doing much more than tapping a keyboard and sending a few ‘I miss you too much’ and ‘love you forever’ notes along with the odd risque happy snap. They are living proof that we men are completely dominated by that lump of meat residing in a dark place between our legs.

 

Piece of Pith: No one is listening until you fart.