Yasothon, Thailand
No, Scooter was no winner. He was not a pretty man. Scooter was just this queen, singing out of
tune up on a stage, sometimes laughing, sometimes coughing, in a bar called The
Weeping Prairie, all rickety bamboo poles and thatch and rusted corrugated
steel, leaning sideways, in the middle of what had once been rice paddy,
somewhere just outside of a town, lost somewhere far in the remote Esan of
Thailand.
Scooter’s cheeks glowed with rouge. His eyes, wet, luscious and dark, shone from
behind the heavy mascara on his lashes.
His lips were full, pronounced, and his puppet’s grin showed a large gap
between his two front teeth. His bones
were heavy and square, but his flesh thin, stringy, gaunt, a body that might
have grown but lacked somewhere in time food, or love, or both. A dull white sports jacket cut for someone
much larger and dry cleaned too many times hung limply from his shoulders. The pants were the wrong brown. The shoes too sharp, too black, too shiny.
Scooter was not alone.
He had his dance troop joggling up there on stage. A haphazard line-up of chorus girls. A gaggle of electrons, orbiting around an
adopted nucleus. And beyond, offstage, rustling
in the darkness beyond weak stage lights, Scooter had the sombre eyes of a
shadowy clientele, the clink of bottles, grunts, sometimes a guffaw, a tongue
slid across dry lips, a cigarette glowing and going out. A tenuous universe
held together by song and the camaraderie of desperation.
One chorus girl, dressed in sparkling blue, had a thin
lipped smile and a head of curly hair. A
favoured attraction to drunken patrons. Garlands were bought and
sent her way.
Another girl, though pretty, had neutralized. She wore an ancient slip, repaired at the
shoulder straps, roses and daffodils now faded in lacklustre polyester cloth. A third generation hand-me-down that even a neatly
tied yellow ribbon, hung round her waist, failed to brighten. Her softly rounded face caught no one’s
attention and no garlands were bought and sent her way.
To her right was a girl who smiled, once, maybe twice,
all while she chattered over the music, dancing in up bounces with her
colleagues who in down bounces chattered back.
When she did look out on the crowd in the bar her smile dissolved in
confusion. She would hold up her hand to
guard her eyes from the lights, unable to see into the void. Once, from the darkness, someone passed a
garland into her hands. She stopped
bouncing and stared uncertainly at what she held in pinched fingers. A strange thing having materialized from an
even stranger beyond.
There was a girl up there that never ever smiled not
once. Her green plastic dress, with
yellow and red buttons sewn on, gave the impression of a Christmas tree bobbing
with manic anxiety. If she wasn't pumping a limp swing with her fists she adjusted
her ornaments or pulled up her shorts.
For the entire evening she pranced at the far end of the line. No garlands.
On the opposite end, swing right, a tall, shy girl,
shiggled her booty bottom, wearing a checked plaid skirt, a crisp white blouse,
shiny silver thin slip-on shoes. She
smiled. Though a painted smile, ignorant
of purpose. But smiled all the
same. Unsmiling eyes staring questions,
over tables so far, far away. She could
not have been fourteen.
One time the girls all tried to get together to kick
and turn in unison. Scooter joined
in. Before they got into a third round
of collective choreography the plastic pine tree on the end went back to
jabbing dully at an invisible and rather lifeless opponent. In moments they all broke off. The gang again a gaggle of odd electrons, of
jiggles thumpgles swiggles wumpgles.
For sure, Scooter and the girls had a backup
band. A whinny tinny, bam bam, dut dut
dut band that started and began. And
started and began. Started and began and
began again. There was a tall fellow who
played an electric bass. A stick in a
sea of dwarves. He plunked his four
strings. Plunk dum dum dawp, plunk dum
dum dawp. He talked while he plunked to
anyone up there on stage who might be next to him. The first of the percussion players was too
small to be seen. From somewhere behind
his sparkly silver super sale special rockin' and rollin' drum set a fist flicked up, a fist flicked down, a fist
flicked up, a fist flicked down. The
second percussion player had in his possession a pair of enormously huge bongo
drums. Between them he had draped a
large tarp splashed with orange and yellow and pale green paint. He was not a possessive bongo player. In fact, quite agreeable. Quite content to let the girls take a break
and come whomp in independent fashion on his skins. With one of the girls playing his role, he
leaned back and lit an already half smoked cigarette, inhaled deeply and
relaxed, watching with crossed arms.
Then there was up there among that peculiar smatter of
humanity, a strange blind creature seated somewhere about back of centre
stage. Squeezed between his widespread
legs sat a plank and a metal tub, connected to each other by three thin strings
of wire. Out of the blue his right hand
would rise and the bow held in it would suddenly drop, start squealing
away. And there would be this banging
bonging booming from quarks with musical quirks. And all those orbiting electrons of flash and
splash on legs would spark to jiggling wiggling shiggling life.
Then stop.
For from somewhere out there, beyond interstellar
emptiness, something would call on this blind nuclear wizard with bow in hand
to bring an end to that particular tune.
He would do it, he would, with a few rapid squeaks and squarks and the
symmetry of chaos on that human stage would wither, they would, into aimless
soulless anarchy.
Momentarily.
A pause of too long held breath.
Because out of the same mysterious yonder blue, the
mighty bow would rise up, and down it would swing into a-squeaking and
a-squawking. And that withering anarchy
would hop back into its morass of thumping wumping, wiggling jiggling, godless
chaos. That nucleus of the manic musical
menagerie, would work his magic, a twisted little excuse with a corkscrew face
from which the eyeballs had apparently been popped.
And on the floor, in the hollows of darkness before
the stage? A whispering, shadowed sea? A fecund world lurking in dark despair? Hunger and rancid sexuality? No.
Simply clientele. Just the guys
out for a drink. Familiar with who they
are and where they are. Ensconced in the
moment. Patrons at home in the warmth of
what they called The Weeping Prairie.
These patrons were mostly samlaw drivers. Samlaw drivers have huge legs because what
they do all day long is peddle samlaws all over town. Samlaws are oversized tricycles. They have seats big enough for two in the
back, although it is not uncommon to see three, four, even five family members
plus the groceries catching a lift home.
Long after nightfall, dayshift done, a few baht in their pockets, the
drivers get together and peddle out of town.
They park their samlaws in a tidy row outside a ramshackle den of ill
repute. Groups of five or six mammoth
legged peddlers tromp inside, sit down with their legs buckled up under the
tables, and drink up inordinate quantities of beer and rice whisky. Their few baht mostly spent, they stare with
glassy eyes at the manic zoo on stage.
In The Weeping Prairie the tables were cheap. Aluminum tube contraptions with scratched, worn,
colourless plastic tops. The rickety
chairs were bent. The concrete underfoot
was scudded and dusty. No pictures or
posters hung fixed to the walls. Square
posts were haphazardly placed about the room, holding up the ceiling or
something heaven maybe, three of them right in front of the stage so that
customers had to bend their necks to keep track of the action. Above their heads were cobwebs, dishevelled
and dusty like the floor. Maybe the roof
was going to fall down despite the posts, all the years of rat shit and dust
hanging over your head.
In the far corner to the right of the stage was the
ice box. There were stacks of bottled
beer, a shelf of whisky, and a waist high partition on which sat the cash register. Behind the partition stood the proprietress,
a woman dressed up smart, scarlet, business suited, matriarchal frown writ
across her face, watching with narrow eyes all details passing by. She was the source of garlands. The samlaw drivers would send a table’s
delegate to sheepishly purchase a garland.
The delegate would then take that garland and proffer it to the specimen
which had pleased his friends most amongst the glitter on stage. The specimen
would then come down into the closeness of the drivers’ little world, for a
time, soft feminine words that whispered through and soothed the harshness of
their lives. With a signal from the
proprietress, the dancing girl would up and stand and return to her bath of
dazzle and brilliance, everyone separated again by the horrible comfort of
darkness and light.
This bar they called The Weeping Prairie. It was in that part of the country, flat as a
pancake, sand and dust, where for five years they had drought and the rice all
died and then the next year when it rained everything flooded and the rice all
died. So they called the bar The Weeping
Prairie. It was a place where young men
and women, their shared world turned over, came together, the world of green
rice paddies long gone. It was a place
where a band made music. And a place
where Scooter did his best to sing. And
sometimes, just sometimes, he made them all laugh.
