3.09 Forbidden Fruit

 Azami and I left the Balinese restaurant and headed for a Thai restaurant called Jammin Kah, where a Thai man and his wife, both bubblier than cheap spumante, ran the kitchen. Whenever the two of us were feeling low or fighting, all we needed to do was pop into the restaurant, sit down at the counter, and chat with Mr. Chan. Listening to him talk in his animated mix of broken Japanese, pidgin English, and Thai, it wasn’t long before we’d forget what we had been upset about. We would leave Jammin Kah with our bellies full and hearts warmed.

“Sawadi kah,” Mr. Chan beamed as we descended the steps into the restaurant. “Long time, no see! O-hisashi buri!”

We took our usual seats in the middle of the counter, before Mr. Chan’s work area.

“Mo kekkon shita?” he asked Azami.

My girlfriend shook her head. No, we hadn’t gotten married yet. She looked towards me and rolled her eyes.

“Sir, why you wait?” Mr. Chan said.

I shrugged.

“You should hurry up marry, have chil’ren. No spring chicken! Ha-ha!”

“I know. I know,” I said, pretending to wipe the sweat from my brow with an o-shibori hand towel.

“Ha-ha-ha. Sir, you want Singha?”

“Yes, please.”

His chubby wife waddled over to a beer cooler and brought me an ice-cold Singha beer. Mr. Chan served Azami a pot of hot jasmine tea. We then proceeded to order. “Mu satay, baikapao . . . “

Baikapao is a fiery hot dish made with stir-fried ground chicken and chopped vegetables, flavored with chili and basil, and served on a bed of jasmine rice. It’s out of this world and happens to be what I ate on my first night in Bangkok back in the spring of 2001. I was dining at a street stall--admittedly, not the most halal of places to eat, but damn good, nonetheless.

With Jean in China on business, I went ahead to Thailand, checking into the Baiyoke Sky Tower.

A few months before our trip, Time magazine happened to do an exposé on amphetamine abuse in Asia. Authorities in Thailand, in particular, were having a devil of a time trying to eradicate a potent form of speed, known locally as yaba, or mad medicine.

The article, which was written by the author of Speed Tribes, depicted the local drug in the most unflattering terms. As a former abuser, Greenfield knew what he was writing about. But, rather than persuade me of the dangers of yaba, the article had the perverse effect of wetting my appetite for this new, exotic high. And so, while I might have written “sightseeing” on the immigration card, the true purpose of my visit was to dig my teeth into the meat of another forbidden fruit.

After dinner, I took out the treasure map Jean had e-mailed me a week earlier from Guangdong and hailed a tuk-tuk.

“Sawadi krap,” the driver said.

“I want to go to . . . “ I said, checking Jean’s map. “Kao Sarn Road. Take me to Kao Sarn Road.”

“Kao Sarn. Ka poh,” the driver replied. “Okay, okay.”

As soon as I hopped on the three-wheeled taxi, the driver revved the small engine, kicking up a black cloud of exhaust, and proceeded to take me on a Mr. Toad's Wild Ride through town.

Kao Sarn was a broad road, a single block long, lined with restaurants teaming with drunk Brits and Krauts, dirt-cheap guesthouses, dubious bars, and street vendors selling the same kind of overpriced crap that could be found anywhere tourists congregated. The area was crawling with Europeans--hippies wigged out on who knows what, loud students, and the occasional disoriented family.

Map in hand, I managed to find the dark alley that Jean had described, and walking down it located a run-down guesthouse where “X” marked the spot.

It seemed an unlikely place to score drugs, but I sat down at a table all the same and ordered a Singha.

There was an elderly couple sitting behind a makeshift front desk. And in an open-air lobby of sort,s which was set up with three cheap plastic tables, three reasonably attractive, but rough-looking Thai women chewed the fat.

As I sipped my beer, one of the women called me over and asked what I wanted.

"Depends. What do you have?"

"What do you want," she repeated testily.

"I'm looking for yaba."

“We don’t have anything today,” she said. “Come back tomorrow at five.”

I finished my Singha, and returned to the Baiyoke.

© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

The complete version of No. 6 is now available for a variety of devices at Amazon's Kindle store.