Ping Pong

So there we were in Bangkok. For one night. Due to fly to Vietnam the next day at the ungodly hour of 06:55 (not in itself so bad, but we had to be at the airport two hours before that) we had an evening to kill. What do you do in Bangkok? The way I see it, you either go shopping or you pay for sex. I had shopped till N dropped in Chiang Mai (cheaper and nicer than Bangkok) and was already a bit nervous about overweight baggage at the airport. Shopping was vetoed. Neither of us favoured the option of paying for sex, even with the option of a free STD thrown in, so we took the toned down version. We decided to go and see a sex show. Even my parents have been to see a sex show in Bangkok – how could I not?

We hailed a tuk tuk and asked the driver to take us to Pat Phong road – tourist central for Bangkok’s sex industry. The driver giggled and said “Oh, the market!” We laughed and said “No, ping pong.”
“Ooooooooh!” shrilled the tuk tuk driver and giggled harder while a wide grin spread across his face. “Oh, ha ha ha!” we laughed in return, thrilled at the camaraderie and glad to be sharing a joke with our friendly tuk tuk driver. He sped off manically through the streets of Bangkok. Even through the excitement of our wild ride, N managed to follow our progress along the streets on the map application on his I-phone. We began to become mildly concerned about where we were going, as we seemed to be narrowly missing Pat Phong road. We pulled into a parking lot at a building about 3 streets away from where we wanted to be. Thank goodness for the I-phone and for N's obsession with using it to track where we are at every minute of the day. “No no!” we said to the driver, pointing on the map to Pat Phong road, “We want to go to Pat Phong road!”
“Ping pong!” exclaimed the driver and pointed at the building.
“No!” we insisted, jabbing at the map “Pat Phong!”
“Ping pong!” insisted the driver, pointing again.
“Take us to Pat Phong road” we insisted in turn. “This is the map. We are two streets away from where we want to go. Take us there.”
The driver developed a sudden and inexplicable inability to understand English. We were beginning to understand that the wide grin on his face was not camaraderie, but rather in anticipation of the fat commission he thought he was going to get from depositing these two cash laden Westerners on this particular doorstep.
The doorman from the building came up to the tuk tuk and tried to lure us out of the tuk tuk. “Sex show inside! Ping pong show inside!” he smiled. “Only eight hundred baht entrance each.”
“We told this guy to take us to Pat Phong road” we informed the doorman. “He’s brought us here. We don’t want to come in. We don’t have that much money with us. We want to go to Pat Phong road.”
“No understand!” wittered the tuk tuk driver pathetically, trying out a confused look. “No English…”
“That’s funny – you seemed to understand us just fine earlier” I retorted, glaring at him.
“Oh, for you special price” wheedled the doorman. “Only six hundred each.”
Now as it just so happened, we only had about a thousand baht left and we weren’t going to part with that cash to watch some ladies pull scarves out of their doodads. That money was going to get us back to our hotel and then later to the airport. Even if we had had oodles of money left we wouldn’t have paid it to these people. I glared at the tuk tuk driver and put the fifty baht taxi fare back into the pocket of my jeans. “Pat Phong road!” I hissed as N waved the map under his nose and pointed.
The driver’s wide smile had long since vanished. With a mouth like a cat’s bum he drove us the two streets we demanded and dropped us at Pat Phong road. We gave him the fare and disappeared into the bustle of the Pat Phong market with one final parting glare.

Pat Phong road was thronging. Neon lights and music laced the street. The place was bustling with tourists and touts. Every step we took someone waved a printed sheet at us and shouted “Ping pong! Sex show!” The printed sheet contained the details of the specific sex show that they were touting for. We asked one guy what the deal was. Free entry, he told us, and then your drinks are 100 baht each. “Fair enough,” we thought. A coke costs 20 baht at an expensive restaurant. A beer about 50 or 60. We didn’t mind having a drink or two at those prices if that is what it was going to take to see the ping pong. Off we went through the crowds, following our tout. He took us a flight of stairs to a place. For the life of me I cannot remember what it was called. Wish I could – I’d love to be able to publicize it.

Our tout found the Thai lady who ran the place and pointed us out to her. Clearly someone was going to get commission out of us tonight. Oh well. We were escorted to a table by another Thai lady – a fairly smartly dressed older woman. Perhaps a dancer past her prime? She sat us down and explained to us how it worked. Entrance into the club is free. Every drink, no matter what you have, is 100 baht. I surveyed the menu. Coke – 100 baht. Local Thai beer – 100 baht. Heineken – 100 baht. Local Thai whisky – 100 baht. Johnny Walker- hey, that’s a bit odd. Johnny Walker costing 100 baht? The same price as the local Thai stuff? It seemed a bit fishy to me. But what the hey – I had a Johnny. N had a Heineken. He doesn’t normally drink beer but paying 100 baht for a coke seemed a bit much. Off the lady went and our drinks arrived. We fixed our eyes on the stage.

Man. It was a dog show. By that I mean the “ladies” were dogs. They were all completely naked and god help us - a number of them should not have been. Skinny, they were not. Now I am not a fatist. Some years ago I too was not what you could call skinny. But I wasn’t up on a stage flaunting my stretch marks and flab in front of a traumatized audience, now was I? Oh no! I foolishly believed that you needed gazelle-like thighs for that. Perky breasts. A relatively flat tummy. Apparently you don’t. Had yourself a couple Maccie D’s a day for the past year or so – super-sized? Popped out seven kids? You too could be a stripper in Bangkok!
They were also clearly bored witless by what they were doing. Two hags circled their wrinkly hips listlessly to the music. They all but fell asleep as we watched. “Girl” number three (maybe about 40?) was busy blowing out a number of candles on a cake. Yes, with her cookie. And the help of a plastic tube. It was not exactly what I’d call erotic. I stifled a giggle. In the meanwhile, we could see the ping pong girl preparing. This involved coating a number of plastic balls with a vast quantity of lube. I guess they would need to be slippery in order to be rocket propelled out of that orifice without the help of gun powder. We perked up mildly. We had come here specifically for the ping pong. We were about to see the urban legend in action!

The ping pong girl was slim and well groomed. (Yes – down there.) While the ping pong girl was busy another pretty girl, clad in a bikini, walked up to our table. She smiled at us and said something. Neither of us could hear a single word of what she said over the very loud music. We looked at her enquiringly. She clinked her glass against each of ours and walked off, leaving her glass on the table. Suspicious. But now the ping pong girl was up! Onto the stage she pranced, and across to the far end with her bucket of balls. She squatted down in front of a Western couple at another table, popped two ping pong balls into the depths and then, with a jerk of her hips, flung the balls one by one straight at the tourists. The tourists looked alarmed and dodged the balls with a dexterity born of desperation. Next to the ping pong girl, a short, squat older lady was leaning on a pole and pulling a string of things out of her whatsit. I don’t know what was tied to the string. It could have been the fabled razor blades. It could have been bits of tinsel. Whatever – they glittered in the light as she trawled them endlessly from her nether region. We tried to look past her, as she was obscuring the ping pong girl with her sagging boobs and overly large hips.
I whispered to N “I’m a bit concerned that that bikini girl might have left her drink on our table and be preparing to do a dance for us, even though we didn’t agree to it. Then they will expect us to pay for it. I’ve heard about this.”
“Don’t look at her at all if she gets on stage!” N replied.
“I’ll see if I can find out what's up before it gets out of hand” I said.
Just then the ping pong girl sashayed over and stopped right in front of us on the stage. In went the ping pong balls. She squatted down and “Eeek!” we got a gynecological view. Jerk! A ping pong ball sailed towards us. Much to our relief it fell short. Jerk! The second one got closer but I moved my leg out of the way in the nick of time. I bit y tongue and just managed to resist shrieking “Missed!”

I could see the bikini girl angling nearer and nearer to the stage. “Oh enough of this” I thought and got up to find our waitress, who seemed to be avoiding us. I found her. “Excuse me” I said “But some girl put her drink on our table and left it there and we don’t know why and we’d like to know what is going on.”
“Oh, one minute” hedged the waitress and scuttled off.
I returned to my seat. The bikini clad girl, still clad in her bikini, was moving slowly about the stage in front of N. Oh yes, she was dancing for us. N and I ignored her completely and watched the ping pong girl, who actually managed to hit the girl at the table next to us on her calf. She tried to dodge but wasn’t quick enough. The poor girl looked horrified. This gives a new meaning to biological warfare – who knows what you might catch from a ping pong ball flung from such a spot.

Just then a forbidding looking Thai lady with a hatchet face sat down next to me and yelled something into my ear. I couldn’t hear much of it since she was yelling into my bad ear and the music was thumping. “What?” I howled back. She presented me with a piece of paper. A bill. For four thousand baht.
“WHAT?????” I said. “What is this for?”
“For watching show, for dance, for your drinks, and for lady drink.” Came the reply.
“Oh no! They said free entry! We’re not paying for watching shows.”
“Yes. Entry free. But you pay to watch show!”
“Oh no, I don’t think so. Free entry means free entry. And we didn’t ask for a dance. We’re not paying for a dance. Or for her drink.”
I looked closer at the bill. “And it says 300 baht each for our drinks! We were told 100 baht each. We’re not paying for this.”
Well, it descended into a bit of a heated fight. Eventually she moved on to N. He also refused to pay. When I tried to interject she turned fiercely on me and shouted in my face “I no talk to you! You keep quiet! I talk to him!”
I complied, smiling at her and thinking “Yeah, you stupid bitch. Try getting any money out of him. He doesn’t have a single baht on him. I’m the only one who is going to pay you a damned cent.”
N was holding his own with her and refusing to budge. He also told her that we would pay for nothing but our drinks. No shows, no dances and no lady drinks. She got even more aggressive with him than she did with me. She even shoved him, but it looked like more bark than bite – it wasn’t particularly hard. Still, she was extremely intimidating. And I bet it works on a lot of people. After all, you’re off the streets in a sex show bar on the back streets of Bangkok, where no one can see you. You don’t know if you’re dealing with the Thai mafia or if they’re likely to take you out the back way and beat you in an alley. If either of us were easily scared she would have got her money - she was a big lady and a scary looking one. Fortunately, neither N nor I scare very easily. We were categorically not going to give her our money. She switched back to shouting at me. I reiterated that we were not going to pay her. “We don’t even have four thousand baht” I said. When she realized that we weren’t going to cough up she changed tactics. “Fine. How much you can pay?” she bullied.
“Two hundred baht. One hundred for my drink. One hundred for his. That’s all.”
I counted the money out for her in 20 baht notes, which I keep at the front of my wallet in case I need to reach for small denominations when bargaining in the markets. And then we marched out, with her fuming on our heels.

We wandered the market for a short while. I was still hyped up from the experience. I felt like bouncing round like Tigger and doing shadow punches all down the street, growling out the responses I thought of too late to use during the actual fray. Fortunately I managed to resist the urge. I also took comfort in the fact that I underpaid for my shot of Johnny Walker. (I saw it for 120 baht in restaurants in Khao San road.) Ha! Take that you con artists! I also enjoyed wondering about what would happen when the tout tried to claim his commission. Someone was going to be unhappy tonight and I was glad it wasn't us.

We wandered up and down the street, checking out more bars and looking at the tourists, the touts and the girls working the streets to entice people into the bars. There were girls with stunning figures, dressed in tiny hot-pants, and girls in school uniforms. There were lady boys galore. And they were hot. Not like the trolls that we were subjected to in our seedy joint. Well I guess it just proves the old adage - you get what you pay for….