RAWBangkok

The nurse is on my mind because I just got off the phone with her.

The nurse is one of those bad ideas that sometimes overtake me and involve me against my better judgement.

The nurse isn’t just a “good” Thai girl… she’s a VERY good Thai girl.  Sweetness, innocence and purity of heart all rolled into one very adorable package.

Everything bad you could say about most Thai bar girls simply doesn’t apply to her.  She is well-educated, hard working and naive.  She doesn’t sleep all day — in fact she often works 16-hour shifts and has to catch naps where possible.  Money — or the grasping love of money — seems a foreign concept to her.  She lives simply and gently in the world.

At the same time she looks like a go go dancer.  Not tall, she has a beautiful Thai face with deep brown skin, heavy eyebrows, cat-like eyes and a radiant smile.  She looks like every Isaan princess I have ever known but she is not from Isaan.

And she does look sexy with that little white cap on.

I met her last year and managed to get two ‘dates’ (appointments really) with her in early January.  I wasn’t even sure at first if she understood that I meant this as a”boy-girl” thing.

The two meetings were innocent excursions — the first to the ice cream shop where we slowly devoured a couple of scoops and the second a relaxing couple of hours strolling and sitting in the park chatting.

And then nothing.

For about 4 weeks we traded SMS and emails, but I didn’t see her.  She was pleading a heavy work schedule.

A week ago I figured I’d had enough.  I was near her hospital, so I shot her an SMS (I usually don’t call for fear of waking her if she had a late shift or double shift) saying I was nearby and free if she had time.  I figured if she didn’t see me this time I’d delete her number from my phone and forget about her.  I was starting to wonder if I was simply bothering her.

Instead, she called me and offered to come outside and meet me since she was just finishing work.

We sat and talked for a while, but this time I was busy and had to run.  We made a date and got together later that night.  We simply went shopping at the mall, but the whole vibe was a lot more personal than it had been before.  I think that the fact that I stayed in touch for a month without seeing her made me seem genuinely interested in seeing her, but who knows what goes on in women’s minds.

She went to a family party out of town over the weekend, and I kind of hoped to see her on Monday night (last night) but it didn’t happen.

But this afternoon she called me.  We chatted for nearly thirty minutes — a real feat since her English and my Thai are both pretty weak.  Last week she had mentioned a movie that opens on the 5th of March that she wants to see.  I’m not sure of the exact name but the English is something along the lines of “Short Memory, Long Love”.  A Thai chick-flic for sure.

Anyway, I remembered, so I offered to take her to the movie on Friday night.  She has a pretty tough schedule over the next three days, but she works the day shift on Friday so she said that it sounds like a good idea.  The only reason she might bail is if she is exhausted and simply HAS to sleep.

So, I’ve got a date.  And this one is pretty clearly a date.  The old fashioned kind.  The kind you went on when you were 16 years old.  Maybe we’ll hold hands during the movie.

Why am I putting myself through the hard work of trying to court a good young Thai girl?  I dunno.

Why am I setting her up for the pain of the day when I will inevitably disapppoint her, as I have every other woman in my life?  I dunno that either.

It’s stupid.

I think the concepts of “relationship” and “commitment” are kind of like the concept of communism.  When you’re young and you first hear about it, it sounds perfect.  When you read about it, it sounds logical and desirable.  But when you try it out you realize that it doesn’t exactly work in real life.

At least it never did with me.

So I have no idea why I seem to be chasing after those ideas now.  I’m clearly losing the plot.

The entire beauty of Bangkok is that lengthy mating rituals are not a requirement.  Emotional pain and heartache don’t have to be the end result of short (very short) relationships.

I figure that God made marriage for most people, but he made bar girls for people like me who would otherwise just be inflicting pain on others.

But here I am chasing a young, innocent girl (who seems to think I’m a pretty good guy from all I can gather).

In the hopes of what?  Getting something I can’t get for 2,000 baht and a glass of cola at 200 locations within walking distance of my apartment?

I dunno.

The desire for genuine affection? The quest to obtain the normally unattainable?  The simple joy of conquest?  True love?

Again, I dunno.

Of late I’ve been pretty monastic.  I’ve only brought two bar girls home since Christmas.  For the four months before that I was almost exclusively banging my favorite go go dancer.

I have always enjoyed (relative) monogamy… I’ve never been interested in hitting a new girl every night.  Bangkok for me has been a long adventure of cheap and easy sex with the same small number of girls again and again.

I believe pretty strongly that if my favorite go go dancer was still in town that I wouldn’t be behaving this way.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I started hitting on the nurse almost immediately after my favorite go go dancer went off to Europe.  I had reached the point of monogamy with my favorite go go dancer and it was a shock when she was suddenly gone.

In short, I guess I don’t know what I’m doing at the moment.  I’m thinking about a hooker who is off in Europe with another punter, waiting to see if she comes back to town.  I’m playing schoolboy games with a young nurse in the meantime, with no plan about what I want from her.  I’ve been sleeping alone nearly every night for two and a half months while living in the world’s biggest brothel.

Clearly I’m fucked up right now.  I suspect I’ll stay that way for a while.

Meanwhile, it’s popcorn, soda and melodramathis Friday night.  Next thing you know my voice will be cracking and I’ll start getting pimples on my face.