millenium eve
On a bamboo bar pressed across the man’s shoulders dangle tiny replicas of the ball that will descend on Times Square in New York City, on the other side of the globe from where I sit, in 18 hours and 11 minutes. This will be the end of the 20th century, for whatever that marker is worth.
I sit at a sidewalk table at Prakorp’s Guesthouse on Thanon Khao San in Bangkok. The 21st century will come sooner for me, in 6 hours and 9 minutes. The shabby four story buildings on the street stand still, decorated with neon signs tacked onto walls and awnings. Accents and languages from all over the world rise in the steaming air, tenuously leading bodies that pour thickly and slowly down the narrow street, pooling and eddying alongside stalls jammed with watches, sunglasses, tapes, buddhas, bags, shoes, dresses, shorts, pants, and t-shirts that say Che Guevara, Eat More Pussy, Adidas, I’m Shy But I’ve Got A Big Dick, Mao Zedong and Dolce and Gabbana.
The peddlars stand watch, casually alert, with calculators, their children idling over a bowl of fried rice. The huge performance quality amps up and down the street pump out dance and pop music like mating calls, throbbing a relentless beat. German, British, Australian, Dutch, American, Hebrew, Italian, French. But English – especially American – is the name of the game.
The little boys come skipping up the steps to the café. Thonged feet at the end of stick brown legs slide easily along the tile floor to the first table, looking around with curiosity or shame, anywhere but at you as they thrust a laminated, handwritten sign into the gaze of the tourists enjoying a coffee. “Hello, my name is. . .” I don’t know what else is written on the sign because I’ve never read the whole sign before shaking my head with an uneasy smile at the lad’s cuteness. I don’t need to read to know he wants a few baht, and I don’t want to read and feel the growing pull of the tiny human being holding up the sign asking for what I’ve forgotten I have lost between the seats of my car.
As I write, the baht is valued at about thirty-eight to the US dollar. I don’t know what the kid wants, probably ten baht, maybe twenty; a quarter, or fifty cents. Why don’t I give it? Or why don’t I give it every time? Why didn’t I drop something in the coca-cola cup of the toddler, dirty, no more than three years old sitting and playing with his change cup, all alone, on the pedestrian overpass near Siam Square? Not because I’m attached to the baht I could have thrown into his cup.
Later I’m almost nauseous at the throng of frenzied consumption in the MBK Mall. Thousands and thousands shuffling impatiently through a maze of shops and stalls so big you can’t see the end of them, so thick you can hardly move. This so slippery flow of desire and money and shit and need unmoors me, rattles me. I keep trying to skate across its surface, but it won’t hold. I fall through, pained and overwhelmed and numbed and confused, reeling and paralyzed somehow all at once.
I recall some of the categories for thinking through this that were available in Julio’s time, the Marxist ones especially, that would drop heavily and quickly and cut this mess into neat, manageable, if demanding, pieces: “We know who’s getting rich here, or rather, precisely, elsewhere. Let me tell you who is suffering. Let me tell you how it works. Let me tell you what to do.”
That knowledge, for whatever it is worth, isn’t much good for what I’m feeling. Now ordinarily an involuntary perception of the dense fullness of each individual human, of each encounter around me complicates those clean old pictures and at the same time clarifies my course of action.
But here I feel overwhelmed by the battering intensity and complexity and opacity of what is in front of me. Monica is right as she tells me this is everywhere: sick, hungry, dirty, lame children begging crumbs from the wealthy parents of children safely laughing elsewhere; drunk old men drinking more, rotted-out teeth dropping like flies; women who endure and scheme to hold it all together. Monica’s view seems right. But here I still feel as though all of that has been crammed into the narrow space of this street, Thanon Khao San in Bangkok. The density crushes through my skin, like garlic through a press and blows me out from the inside. I can’t perceive. I am lost.
In the last twenty minutes, a boy and girl both approached me with their cards. The boy’s eyeballs stared wildly in opposite directions, seeing I don’t know what. One of his legs dragged a few steps behind him as he approached. His card told me his name was Daiya. I forced myself to read on, knowing what would come of it, knowing that just to take the step of reading his sign would involve me in a perception of him as simply a human being needing in front of me and of myself as simply a human being able to provide what he needs. He was disabled so he couldn’t work, he wanted to go to school, would I buy a package of Kleenex tissue from him. So I did. I gave him a 100 baht bill, and he held out the tiny package of Kleenex and 20 baht in change. I took the Kleenex and wished him luck and thanked him in Thai, about all I can say in his language. We made bow to each other.
The girl, maybe fifteen years old, came just now. Pretty and clean, but very thin, looking up over the railing and her card, with large brown eyes set in brilliant whites against her brown skin. I shook my head without reading and said, I’m sorry. And in my head I’m saying “I’m sorry, I can see you as well as I can see the wild-eyed boy that just left, but I also see, trailing along behind you, hundreds upon hundreds of kids like you and I don’t know what to do.” But only “I’m sorry” comes out of my head. She walked jauntily away, seemingly untouched by the encounter. I sat still, not quite sure who I was anymore.