Mellow Bangkok

When we first arrived, January 4, Bangkok felt like a real Asian beast of a city. But after Saigon and Hanoi, it's a pleasantly sleepy burg. The air is foul and hot---a hundred degrees yesterday---but most places we might go are air-conditioned. Drivers obey the sensibly situated traffic signals and rarely honk their horns. Major arteries have pedestrian bridges, eliminating Buster-Keaton-like hairraising crossings; no need to risk your life for a pair of spring rolls. A sky train runs through the main hotel and shopping (and fuck show) district, and there's a new subway line, too. ("Hua Lamphong's up/Khlong Toei's down/The people ride in a hole in the ground.")

Apichai Chairoj, the surgeon who checked out my leg yesterday (it is mending nicely), was wearing a yellow shirt. This meant it was Monday. A few years ago, the since-toppled Thaksin government suggested that every Monday Thais wear canary yellow polo shirts to honor King Bhumibol. It's the same bright shade of yellow that's on the royal flag, and Thais look good in it---a caucasian tourist I saw in one of the shirts appeared bilious. There's a good chance that somebody in the government received a kickback from the yellow-dye cartel, but Thais still enjoy an opportunity to show their love for their king and about half the population wears yellow on Monday.

Dr. Apichai wore a yellow dress shirt with a natty tie. He was patient with my questions, ready with answers, and businesslike. I asked what bug might have bitten me. I was hoping it might have been one of the insects I ate in Chiang Mai, a nice bit of karmic turnaround. The doctor said, however, it could have been any insect, and a secondary infection developed when I scratched the bite. ("Nixon bugs self.")

Yesterday's visit to Bangkok Nursing Home Hospital, including the doctor's fee and replacement of my grandiose bandage with one more petite, cost $47.52. While this was little to me and my mighty MasterCard, Poe said BNHH's rates have gone up 15 percent in six months and middle-class Thais like him are getting squeezed. Sound familiar?

We have some good pictures of Poe, Joe and me outside BNHH in front of the hospital's spirit house. I had nothing with me to offer. But some rice and fruit had already been left, apparently placating for another 24 hours the natural spirits that had been displaced by the modern hospital building. (In Asia, Joe and I are enchanted by beliefs which when encountered at home have us looking for an exit. We know perfectly sane Americans who believe with all their hearts in astrology. I once took the opportunity to ask Bob and Barbara Wheaton's friend, the renowned Harvard astronomer Fred Franklin, what he thought of astrology. Fred chuckled.)

Adding to the pleasure of being back in Bangkok was dinner Sunday night with three enjoyable farangs, two of whom we were meeting for the first time. It's the Peace Corps mafia at work again. John Finn is a friend in San Francisco of Joe's and my friend Mike Learned. John (PC-Korea, late '60s or early '70s) works with Mike on LBGRPCVs, the ex-Peace Corps gay group that Mike helped found and now heads. (The group's lobbying efforts help keep the Bush-era Peace Corps enlightened and legal on gay policy. This is a long way from my Ethiopia training program in 1962 when a couple of trainees vanished overnight; we later learned that they had been discovered by the FBI to be "sexual deviants.")

John and his partner of 27 years Art Desuyo are visiting Bangkok, a city they love so much that they plan on retiring here as soon as the Dow Jones stars are auspiciously alligned. Now John does donor-development computer work for non-profit groups, and Art locates office space for companies around the world. They had been extremely helpful to Joe and me via e-mail as we were planning our Southeast Asia trip. With John and Art for their current visit was their old pal Marty Dishman, the gay-bar and one-room-luxury-hotel pioneer we met in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Over an assortment of Thai goodies in the Just One garden, this congenial group swapped tales, Peace Corps and otherwise. And Marty---with Joe and Art long ago having achieved such status---was inducted as an honorary Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, up to but not including the Sargent Shriver secret handshake. Just kidding about the handshake, though by now many partners, spouses and friends of RPCVs can, their looks often suggest, barely tell us from the Masons.