RAWBangkok

In my last blog I wrote about the first Thai girl I ever met (sort of).  When I met her 4 years ago she was a drug-dropping, all-night party, sex-machine hooker who gave unbelievable blow jobs.

A couple of years ago she gave up the life, married and settled down in a respectable relationship with a good husband.

Last night I went to see her after work.  As it turned out, she and her mom met me for dinner at a restaurant near her home, then we went grocery shopping and went back to her house around 9 p.m., where we sat and talked about being pregnant for a couple of hours.

The stark contrast between the party-girl of four years ago, and the pregnant mom of today was startling.

First of all, she had led me to believe over the phone that she was gi-normous, a Goodyear Blimp of a woman who had gone beyond all previous records for weight gain during pregnancy.  The truth is, that she has plumped up a little more than average, so she is large-sized, but not quite the circus freak that causes people to stop and point in the middle of the street that she had indicated on the phone.

She was dressed in a brand new maternity top that she’d bought at Central World Shopping Center the previous day.  In her stretch pants & top, walking with her own mother, she looked like the very picture of domestication.

On the unfortunate side of things, with her hormones bouncing around all over the place, she has broken out in terrible acne on her skin.  Her face has the look of someone just entering the first stages of leprosy, and such is her commitment to her baby that she won’t take any kind of internal medication to control it.

In fact, she mentioned that even when she gets heavy duty headaches or muscle pains, she doesn’t take any pain releiver; she just tries to lay down in a dark, cool room and relax as much as she can.

She was very enthusiastic to have me feel the baby moving around.

As I said, the very picture of motherhood and domestic bliss.

We talked about her life.  She seems content with her husband and described him as a good man.  She is positively gushing when she describes the beautiful house they live in… a distant cousin to the small shop house she occupied with her family in Bangkok.

In describing the routines of her life, it was clear that it is a very settled existence in the suburbs of a small city.  A place where the shops close early, and there is no room for dancing or staying up late with friends.

She seems to be happy as a young bride and mother-to-be.

The funny thing was that for all the changes in her, I couldn’t see any differences.  When I looked at her face and her beautiful eyes I saw the same girl that walked into my living room four years ago with the grace and beauty of a movie star — the girl with eyes that melted me into a puddle with one look.  I didn’t see the extra 20 kilos or the acne or any of the other effects of her pregnancy — I just saw the same radiant face I’ve known for years.

At one point she walked to the other side of the room, and with her standing 6 meters away I tried to blank my mind and see her the way I would if I was seeing her for the first time.  I succeeded.  I could see her as she is today.  She was standing up and heavily pregnant.  With the ravages of acne combined with the puffiness of the weight gain, her face had none of the smooth beauty of the past.  I had to admit in my heart that if I was seeing her for the first time at that moment, I wouldn’t see her as beautiful.

But, strangely, I couldn’t hold on to the moment.  She turned, saw me looking at her and smiled.

As if a magic wand had been waved, the fairy dust fell back into my eyes and I saw the same smile, the same eyes and the same beauty that captivated me back in Sydney… I saw the girl I once discussed marriage with.  I didn’t fight it.  I was happy to have my beautiful friend back after a moment’s disappearance.

For the balance of the night, I saw only my beautiful friend, happy in her marriage and her motherhood.  Her face the face that I’d always known.

But before this sounds too sugar-and-spice (maybe too late?!) let me tell you about the event that I remember most clearly about this girl.  (I actually wrote this story once on Werewolf’s Lair, but I think it can stand repetition).

Noi was living with me in my Sydney apartment, but she had her own apartment available across the street.  We had been out enjoying dinner together in a nice restaurant on the northern end of Sussex Street when her mobile phone rang.  A brothel owner had received a call from some guys partying in town who wanted three girls to come work the party.  It was good money for  a three or four hour booking.

She had to go.  Our romantic dinner was over.

I have to say, I was very disappointed.  It was her night off, and I had expected to have her all to myself.  She had to go back to her apartment and change clothes.  She left from there in a taxi, telling me to wait for her there.

I did.  She was gone an hour or two longer than I expected, and I was beginning to get a bit worried, but she blew into the apartment with all the energy of a cyclone sometime around two or three in the morning.  She was high on something — the guys had supplied cocaine or some kind of party drug for the girls.  Apparently it had been a bit of an orgy… three girls and five guys with drugs, alcohol, music and a lot of sex.

She was talking a mile a minute telling me about it.  She walked over to the stereo and turned on some dance music, then pushed the volume way up.  She started dancing around, and in a minute or so it became clear that this was a striptease act.  Her clothes came off piece by piece in rapid succession, and soon she was dancing totally naked, hands above her head, wearing only a pair of sunglasses.

She came over to the bed where I was sitting, gave me a bit of a lap dance, then unfastened my belt buckle, pulled my pants down to my ankles, hit her knees and took my cock in her mouth.  With the drugs, the horniness she was feeling from the orgy she’d just left and the bundle of energy that she was unleashing, she was determined to give me the blow job of my life.

She succeeded.  It only took about ten minutes and I came in an explosion like a tank firing on an enemy position.

My memory is that she insisted that I recover quickly and fuck her.  She decided to help me along by using her oral skills to get me hard again.  I managed to satisty her, and we drifted off into an uneasy sleep that was interrupted by several more rounds of passion before we both collapsed sometime after sunrise.

And so I have these two images in my mind — the high energy, drugged up sex machine dancing naked before dropping between my knees and sucking me dry, and the domesticated, pregnant, happy housewife shopping for vitamins and refusing to take panadol for her headache while she’s pregnant.

It’s hard to reconcile one image with the other, yet they are both the same person.

It’s another reminder that individuals are not necessarily the simple image that I have of them.   They are complex human beings who I see in only one set of circumstances which I use to define their lives.

Last night we talked about her approach to raising her baby; what she’d like to do and how she’d like to do it.  I’m sure she’ll be a good mother, with a tendancy to spoil the kid a bit.

She seems very comfortable in the role of mother that has come to her, and when she talks she  sounds like every other upper-middle class mom I’ve ever met.  I can imagine that her child will grow up with an image of his mom being a prudish, old-fashioned transplanted foreigner, too attached to the traditional values of ‘her’ country, and a rather boring and doting parent.

I suspect that she and I will always be friends.  I look forward to the day when I am visiting with the family and her son is a rebellious and slightly obnoxious 17-year-old with a pierced nose and a tattoo who complains that his mom just doesn’t understand what it means to be young and to want to have fun.

I’ll wait until I can get him alone, then lean in to talk to him quietly.

Don’t judge you mom on what you see today.  She was quite the wild child when she was young.  She put your rebelliosness and attitude to shame.  You’re mom isn’t just the PTA parent you see today, and she wasn’t always boring.

I know, because I was a customer.  You see, your mom was a hooker… jing jing.