OVerINDuLGenCE

In eight or so years of English teaching, I have only missed work once because of overindulgence.

I agree with English Teacher K in his Case Studies interview; no matter what happens to you the night before, you have to show up for work the next day. It’s your job. In some cases, it’s virtually all your school will expect of you: being there.

It was a more or less normal evening in Bangkok, at the end of 1995. My colleagues and I had gathered in our drinking venue of choice: thesoi. Soi is Thai for alley. There was a nice one beside the shopping mall we worked in; full of little stands and carts where vendors sold chicken, fried rice, noodle soup, pineapples, satay (little shish kebabs) and other sizzling Thai delicacies like deep fried grasshoppers. There was also a little stand that sold knives and brass knuckles, too. Useful when the local industrial-school gang wars happened.

There were at that time two or three little “garage” bars – little concrete cubicles with metal doors along the front where upcountry Thais would set up plastic tables and sell beer and rice whiskey, at prices about as cheap as you could find in Bangkok. If it wasn’t rainy season, the tables were out in the soi itself, as they were on this evening.

Now I wouldn’t venture to say anything like “this was the REAL Thailand” because that’s just stupid, but it was about as far, geographically and atmospherically, as it was possible to get from the glossy touristy bars around Patpong. The clientele, apart from us, were rough Thais, mostly Isaan, from the northeastern areas near the border of Cambodia and Laos. They were often taxi and tuk-tuk drivers, if they had jobs at all. Not too many women, and when they did come around they were drunken slappers of the first order.

The team was all there; my lovably deranged bunch, all male, aged between 25 – 50, mostly English, except for one other American and a South African. On a typical evening there were about six to eight of us. I forget how many that night, but at least six. We were all well into our frosty liter-bottles of Singha beer, but English Teacher M and English Teacher T and I had a bit of a dilemma.

We didn’t have anyplace to get high.

One of English Teacher T’s friends had brought him a film canister of Nepalese hashish. We wanted to get into it tonight, but we had neither papers nor any place to go. The only guy whose apartment was within short walking distance, the oldest of the bunch, English Teacher P, didn’t want us to go there because he was afraid his landlady would smell it and toss him out. He’d just moved in.

“And to think you used to be a smack head!” fumed English Teacher T . English Teacher T was 32, a veteran teacher, two-fisted drinker, former biker and skinhead.

“Hey, that was the seventies, mate,” said English Teacher P.

We had a few more Singhas. Finally I said, “Can’t you just eat hashish?”

“Uh. Well, I know you can eat it in cakes and such,” said English Teacher M, the 25-year-old English sporty boy. A year younger than I was.

“Well, sure, so, really, we could just swallow it. I did it once in Amsterdam, I think it worked okay. Sort of a mellow high, as I recall.”

“How much should we eat?” asked English Teacher M.

“I don’t know. Start with little pieces, and we’ll see what happens,” I said.

English Teacher T broke off a few pea-sized chunks and we swallowed them. And continued hitting the Singha with a vengeance. We’d each gone through several liters by that point. We argued for a while about which were more dangerous, polar bears or alligators.

“Nothing’s happening!” said English Teacher T. He broke off some more hash, bigger pieces this time, and gave them too us. We washed them down with Singha.

“How can you possibly even COMPARE polar bears and alligators? It’s totally fucking apples and oranges!” I said.

“No, because they’re both active predators. Apples and oranges are just passive fruits!” I think he made a joke about one of our gay colleagues at that point.

The current acting manager of the school, 30-year-old English Teacher N, had gone over to Khao San Road, Bangkok’s backpacker ghetto, to meet with a visiting friend and drink. I was living in a cheap hotel there at that time, as was the older South African guy who’d just started teaching there, so we’d told him we’d meet him later. English Teacher T lived rather near that area, and even though he detested the “backpacking wanks” on Khao-San, was up for a change of scenery so we decided to hit a few bars over there. Must have been about eleven p.m. at that point.

In the taxi, English Teacher M slurredly insisted that the hash wasn’t working. “Okay, we’ll eat some more.” Somehow I’d ended up with the film canister. I broke off more chunks to hand out, and we gobbled them down.

Soon the canister was empty.

I felt okay though, just kind of drunk. Maybe it hadn’t been real hash. Plenty of dishonest people in the world.

From the dark, quiet and vaguely sinister little Soi we went to the bright, colorful, noisy and vaguely sinister Khao San Road. Backpackers from virtually every country you could imagine strolled around the streets, resplendent in their tattoos, goatees, dreadlocks, noserings, and every other sort of alternative lifestyle uniform they could think of. The cafes were packed with beer-swilling masses, pirated videocassettes of recent movies blasting at full volume from giant TV screens. The gutters, at that time anyway, were full of garbage and grease from the fried rice vendors, and giant rats occasionally darted across the street from garbage pile to garbage pile. (I once saw a rat so swollen and fat it could barely walk.) Thais hawked pirated cassette tapes, fake t-shirts, jewelry and used books in every free space.

We were all wearing shirts and ties. Somebody asked English Teacher P if we were religious missionaries. We had a laugh over that one.

We headed for a dank little alley and a dank little bar called the Hole In The Wall. Glowing black-lighted paint splashed all over the walls, blaring techno music. Crammed with backpacking wanks, but we got a table. We found the teacher we were supposed to meet, and the drinking and the bizarre conversation about polar bears started again. We eventually decided to resolve it through an arm wrestling competition.

Then we noticed that English Teacher T was slumped unconscious in the corner. He was the hardest drinker of all of us, and hadn’t been pacing himself, but we still castigated him as a lightweight. We continued drinking. English Teacher M and I made an incoherent and unsuccessful attempt to chat up some female backpackers from Australia.

The idea of a decent sit-down meal was mentioned again. We slapped English Teacher T awake and he came to with a start. “Okay chappies, how’s it.” His head darted around like a terrified parakeet. He rubbed his eyes. “WHERE AM I?” He staggered off in the direction of his hotel.

The rest of us hit the café and sat down to eat. We’d just ordered when English Teacher M began rubbing his eyes and breathing heavily.

“I’m not feeling so good,” he suddenly announced. “Gotta go, gotta go. . .”

“What about the damn roast chicken and fries you just ordered?” I said.

“You take it,” he said. He staggered off into the street and disappeared.

“What a bunch of lightweights!” I said. The rest of us got our food and dug in with hearty appetites.

Then I began to feel . . . funny.

My head started to swim, which wasn’t unusual given the amount I’d drunk, but I got a sort of hollow tickly feeling in my stomach that I knew was generally the sign of a lot of hallucinogens coursing through the old system.

I tried some deep breaths. I tried to focus on the TV in the corner – I seem to recall a very bad bootleg copy of “Waterworld” was playing – but it started to waver and melt.

I got up to use the toilet, but trying to walk told me I was badly fucked; not that I couldn’t stand, but I felt like I was walking on rubber. My legs seemed to be bending the wrong direction. I knew that to be a bad sign.

“Okay, guys, uh, maybe I better go,” I tossed some bills down to cover my meal, and walked out into a world that seemed to have transformed into a giant trampoline. Lucky it was just a short walk to my hotel.

The hotel was actually sort of behind Khao San road, on Ram-Buttri. It was $100 a month for a tiny room and a shower and toilet I shared with a whole floor. Generally I had the top floor to myself though, so that wasn’t a big deal. It was in a big concrete building of relatively classical design, with balconies and ventilation spaces in the walls that kept it somewhat cool in the summer. It was a considerably more spacious than most of the cramped little hostels and the rooms actually had walls instead of cardboard partitions. It was, however, generally empty in the off season (at that time) because it was off Khao San and it wasn’t mentioned in Lonely Planet.

It was dark and quiet, as usual, when I staggered in. I was breathing heavily and sweating profusely as I got up to my room. I got my shirt and tie off and lay down, but the room was spinning and my stomach and groin felt totally hollow.

I got up and dragged myself up the little ladder that led onto the roof. A light rain was falling. The night smog glowed orange with reflected light. I braced myself against the railing, looking down onto the street below. Images warped, moving objects left lengthy trails.

I took some deep breaths, holding on tight. I felt like my soul was in danger of flying right out the top of my body and disappearing into the cosmos. I breathed. I breathed.

Then I began to vomit.

I vomited, and vomited and vomited. Then I vomited some more. I vomited for America and for Thailand, and for mom and dad and the English language. First the chicken and fries I’d eaten at the café, barely digested, then the beer, then the fried rice I’d had for lunch. Even as fucked up as I was, I was mindful not to hurl over the railing onto any unfortunate passers-by below. Vomit roared out of me like a freight train, like an unstoppable juggernaught.

Then I collapsed onto the old mattress that had been abandoned up here on the roof. There was a lot of wood and junk, too. I lay on the mattress in the mist panting and shaking. The patterns in the wood and junk were infinite, terrifying, awesome. When I closed my eyes, however, even more horrific and bizarre images passed through my mind.

I don’t know how long I lay there like that; I managed to get back down into my room and get into bed before the sun came up though, thankfully. Having the sun rise on you in such a condition is a bad feeling.

I lay in bed drifting in and out of sleep and delirious visions. My first class was at 10:30; I kept looking at my watch thinking that hours had passed, to find that only a few minutes had gone by. I stumbled down into the lobby and tried to phone the office at 10:00; as usual the cheap ass Bangkok phone lines didn’t cooperate.

They’d figure it out. Surely English Teacher T and English Teacher M were in the same state. English Teacher N was the manager now, and he was the guy we’d been meeting at Khao San to drink with; wasn’t like I’d get fired. I’d been there nearly six months, hadn’t missed even one day.

I lay in bed all day, shaking and hallucinating under the covers, my time sense utterly gone. I think I made it out in the evening about five to get some noodle soup, but promptly scurried back to bed when I was finished.

I went in to work the next day, humble and apologetic. I saw English Teacher M and he and I excitedly exchanged notes about our vomiting and hallucinations, agreeing it had been quite an experience. We were exhilarated at having survived it. He’d missed his first class, but had managed to arrive for his 6:00pm class.

English Teacher T greeted me. “A bit of overindulgence there, eh X me boy?” He smiled. “Well, we expect a bit more mettle from our staff here, but I suppose we can forgive it just this once.”

“My God, you made it in for the full day yesterday?” I said, incredulously.

“That’s what separates the English Teaching pro from the novice, laddie.” He grinned through his tobacco-stained teeth, deftly flipped his teacher’s book into his hand and strolled off to class.

BACk to RamBlinGZ MenU