sex industry – Pickpocket Bob Arno

Pattaya’s sex tourism

Pattaya, Thailand’s got to be the seediest, one-track party-town in the world. It doesn’t pretend to be anything else. Huge signs advertising the Fcuk Inn Bar and Kiss Food and Drink make the theme obvious. Couples like this one are ubiquitous.

Hot, sweaty days are for advertising the possibilities of hot, sweaty nights. Bored “massage” girls pose on plastic chairs in front of their shops, long bare legs ending in spike-heeled evening shoes dangling in the trash-filled gutters.

Just across the narrow lanes, clusters of old, fat, ugly, white men slouch and slump over beers, gathering confidence from one another. They all look the same. They all wear floppy shorts and t-shirts and sandals. Some wear socks with their sandals. These are the tunnel-vision men those pretty Thai girls are dreaming of.

The local specialty, called ladyboys, also ogle these men. Look at the 23-year-old ladyboy pictured at left, who just had her bag snatched while riding on the back of her Italian boyfriend’s motorcycle. (A reversal of the classic Italian scippatori theft, in which the thief—not the victim—is the backseat rider.) The Italian “boyfriend” may or may not have known what was under the coy ladyboy’s skirt.

After dark the lanes explode with open-air billiards bars, tiny beer bars, bars named for your country, pole-dancing bars, and enormous “pussy bars” offering “pussy menus” and buckets of ping pong balls. Establishments large and small feature alluring girls.

The city’s other passion is food. I love the street food culture in Pattaya. Entire restaurants zip through the streets on the backs of tricycles and on motorcycle sidecars, their sauce buckets sloshing and condiments precarious. In grubby plastic baskets they carry the myriad fresh and fermented ingredients that their specialties comprise. Seductive food is cooked to order on smoky charcoal grills or stirred over car-battery-operated stoves.

Hot, ready-to-eat curries are peddled from wooden trays on the backs of bikes, single servings tied up in clear plastic baggies. Mysterious delicacies are baked in bamboo canes—the ultimate environmentally-friendly fast-food container. Longons, lychees, mangosteens, jackfruit, dragonfruit, durian—the tropical fruit displays are mouthwatering.

Whatever your pleasure, Pattaya is to drool for. Western men tend to visit for three week stays. Many or most have met their exotic girls online and come specifically to see them. They pay the girls about US$100 a night to stay with them in their hotels. They might visit their girls two or three times a year. Sometimes the couples marry and the men take the girls away to live in their Western countries.

For a beach resort town, Pattaya’s remarkably unattractive. Where trees should be, tangled electrical wires form a shadeless canopy over streets, the thick cords nearly obscuring the mosaic of signs for Cialis, Viagra, pharmacy, clinic, laundry, and rooms-for-rent. There’s nothing for the eye here—just hard-driven business: that is, the business of the sexual drive. It’s a lewd town, but an honest one, advertising what it’s about in every way it can.

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Amsterdam: bridges and bikes in the red light district.

Walking through Amsterdam’s red light district, we reminisced about the three months we lived at the Krasnapolsky, around the corner. As we wandered, Bob wondered if some of the prostitutes on display behind windows and glass doors actually liked their work. Maybe they felt desired and good about themselves.

I said that that was a totally male fantasy view, and that the women must feel demoralized and dehumanized, having to be intimate with drunken, stinky strangers for pittance, and worse. And on top of that, most of them were slaves to pimps and could barely pay off their “expenses.”

We were both surprised at how great looking some of the girls were. I decided to try to talk to one, a perfect Barbie doll in a white micro-bikini with long blonde hair, freckles, and a friendly smile. When I approached her glass door, she opened it and said sure, we could talk. She invited me in, but I just stayed in the doorway. She was Dutch, 28ish, and spoke perfect and smart English, like most Dutch. She said she did this work because she liked it, and the others who didn’t like it were just stupid. She said there’s always a way out, people to help, safe places to go.

So Bob was right. At least one of these women liked her job.

After I left, Barbie stuck her head out of her door to call to a good looking man in a group: “I want you, pretty boy.” The man went to her door and talked for a while, then left. We meandered. A block away, Bob stopped the man and asked (in German) why he didn’t go in. He said she was too expensive. It was 50 euros ($65) to go in, then extra. I imagine that means a 50-euro cover charge, then a menu depending on what you want, which could get expensive. But as I was completely wrong about the woman’s attitude about her job, I’m probably just as wrong about the pricing.

During dinner (Malaysian) Bob wondered if Barbie would allow him to take a picture of me next to her. I didn’t want a picture like that, but finally agreed to do it if she’d allow it. I felt safe in that, thinking that she wouldn’t. After dinner, we went back to her doorway but her curtain was closed. We waited for a while, then I finally went up to the dark-haired girl behind the next glass door of the same house. I asked if the thin blonde was still around or if she’d left. Sure, the other one said, and called “Sabrina, a frau for you!”

A man left through the Barbie doll’s door and the doll herself appeared in her white micro-bikini with a spray bottle of disinfectant in her hand. I beckoned Bob over to make the request for his photo, because I didn’t really want it. He started to introduce himself when she suddenly lit up and said she’s seen him on television. “You’re great!” she said. But no! No photos. She had allowed a woman to film her once from the neck down, but the woman filmed her face and it was shown on ABC. Her American regulars told her about it. Bob asked, isn’t that good for business? No, she said, she has family. She doesn’t want to be filmed.

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Las Vegas people

There’s no question that Las Vegas attracts an upside-down bell curve of residents, no matter what scale one uses for measurement. We have a lot of gamblers, drunks, deadbeats, quick-buck-artists (or wannabes), fraudsters, greedsters, and lowlifes. We have transients, dreamers, and losers. We have a high ratio of service personnel to professionals, making our population quite unlike other cities. Not too many intellectuals choose to live in Las Vegas.

So I wasn’t surprised to see a billboard showing a naked hunk (strategically held box in hand), offering $500 to “show us your package.” Another billboard shows a sexy-chick, not unlike the “gentlemen’s club” billboards all over town, but its headline is “Co-Stars Needed. Earn $500 tonight.” Another says “Get Tugged. Get $1000. The Las Vegas Review Journal published a lengthy article about this public pitch for future porn stars, complete with video.

Such a Vegas story. No wonder most people don’t want to raise their families here. Children grow up with billboards and taxi ads showing suggestive near-nudity, Cirque du Soleil is the dominant cultural activity, and the phonebook has color pages of “entertainers.”

I’ve known my fair share of people in alt jobs here in Vegas. I used to have a friend in the 900-number business. On a tour of his phone-sex factory floor, he explained that he liked to hire the handicapped, the overweight, and the ugly. He was no altruistic hero; he simply found that these employees made him more money in the phone-sex business. After all, he told us, most of the men calling in wanted compassion more than passion, and empathy above eroticism. To maximize minutes on the line, the callers had to feel heard and understood.

This fascinating, off-the-charts man, this friend we long-ago lost touch with, had let me read a book he’d written. I don’t recall its title, or know if it was ever published. The book was an argument against marriage and a lesson in how to find, and write a “modular contract” for, a mistress. His experience had taught him, he told us, that a man is better off defining his expectations and paying a woman to fulfill them, than living locked in blind hope of compatibility and paying after the fact in support and settlement. His modular contract was meant to be renegotiated once or twice a year to both parties’ satisfaction, pay adjusted.

Over the years of our friendship, we met a series of his mistresses. I particularly remember “Miss Kitty” and “Peaches.” Our friend advertised for his women in the jobs sections of newspaper classifieds. High pay, odd work hours, no skills or experience necessary. And no baggage. He wanted women who’d hit bottom, had no place to go. No kids. No family. He interviewed the applicants with brutal honesty. His demands included renaming the woman, choosing her clothing (sleazy—which he bought for her), and her undivided attention to him during her working hours. During the years that we knew him, and now, after hearing an update from a mutual friend, I don’t think that he found any more happiness than ordinary married folks (divorced or not).

I used to live in a townhouse in Las Vegas, where my next door neighbor was a prostitute. Uh… entertainer. When she went out she’d turn on her answering machine, but she must not have realized how loud it’s volume was. We heard all her messages. “Hey baby, I’m coming into town tonight…” etc. I wouldn’t say we were friends, but enough that she gave me a key to go in and feed her cat when she went away for a few weeks. One time, her brother, a stranger to me, showed up at my door, begging for cash. I gave him $20, out of fear. A few months later, when my neighbor was out of town again, she called me and asked me to go in and see what was missing. She’d just been tipped off that her brother had burglarized her house. He had.

I have other interesting Vegas friends with odd jobs. One runs a porn site. One started AmericanLowlife.com, a swingers social networking site. If you live in Vegas, you meet these sorts. I like odd people.

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