providing the money’s good. I was in Hong Kong, working in the bond department of Standard Chartered Bank, when I got headhunted by the Singapore firm. You always know when it’s a headhunter on the phone. ‘Can you talk?’ they ask. Tossers. Of course I can talk. That what I do. I talk and people buy. It’s called selling.
Anyway, I go in to see the headhunter and it turns out the guy doing the hiring used to be my boss at Barings, Chinese high-flyer by the name of Robert Tam. I always got on well with Robert, so I fly over to Singapore and he introduces me to the top guys and, of course, they offer me the job. More money, expat package, they’d even have paid for school fees if I’d had kids.
The one problem was that my bosses in Hong Kong knew that I’d try to take my clients with them, so they had me out of the office as soon as I handed in my notice, and insisted that I couldn’t start work in Singapore until my notice period was over. Three months.
They’d pay me and my bosses in Singapore said they’d pay me, too, so I was getting double salary but effectively I was on gardening leave. But I’ve always lived in flats and never had a garden, so I decided to spend three months in Thailand. I’ve done a few R amp;R runs to the Land of Smiles over the years, but I’d never spent any real time there, so I figured I’d go and blow off some steam. Singapore pays well, but it’s not the most exciting city in the world for a single guy. I think maybe that was why Nick Leeson went off the rails.
Anyway, I booked myself into the Landmark Hotel on Sukhumvit Road, between the red-light areas of Nana Plaza and Soi Cowboy, and started to let rip. Like a bull in a china shop. I did my rounds of the Bangkok bars, night after night in Nana Plaza, Soi Cowboy and Pat Pong. I went through the massage parlours, the short-time hotels, the go-go bars, hung around the freelance joints like Gullivers, the German Bar in Soi 7, the Bed Club and the nightclubs attached to the five-star hotels. I spent weekends in Pattaya, the sex-tourist’s Disneyland-by-the-sea, non-stop sex fuelled by drink and drugs.
In the first month alone, I went with more than a hundred girls. At least. To be honest, I lost count. I’d have breakfast, then a soapy massage, then a nap, then pick up a bargirl and take her to a short-time hotel, then have dinner and then go to a nightclub and pick up a freelancer. And that would be a quiet day.
Sometimes in Pattaya I’d get laid four or five times, often with several girls at the same time.
I slowed down a little during the second month. I guess I was getting bored. Funny, right? Who would ever imagine that you’d get bored with sex?
But that’s what happened. There are only so many positions, only so many variations on a theme, and after a while it all became the same, pretty much.
Drink, shower, sex, shower, sleep. And money always changed hands. I think that’s what started to take the edge off it, the fact that I always paid. The girls smiled and laughed at my jokes and seemed to have a great time, but I was paying them. I began to realize that it was all about the money. No money, no honey.
That’s when I discovered Craigslist. It’s brilliant, Craigslist. Craigslist.
org: none of that dot com nonsense for those guys. It’s a website where you can buy or sell stuff, and where you can meet people too. Real people. And if you’re looking for free sex, then Craigslist is the place to go. I found it by accident. I think I was googling ‘Free Porn’ like I often do and it took me to a Craigslist page where a girl called Porn was looking for a date. She was a nurse at a Bangkok hospital and she was looking for a Caucasian guy with a good heart and I figured that two out of three was enough, so I called the mobile number, met her for coffee and an hour later, I was in her bed and between her legs. Sweet girl, and not very experienced despite her name. And she didn’t ask me for money. Not one baht.
It was a one-night stand and the start of many, all courtesy of Craigslist.
It was brilliant: hundreds of Thai birds gagging for it and not a penny to be paid. Most of the girls who posted put up their pictures so you could see what you were getting, and a few minutes on the phone was all it took to check that they were genuine. Then I’d go around to their place. I made that a rule.
They never came to my hotel, I always went to them. That was one of the things that made it fun-you got to spend time in their world. Mind you, most of them lived in tiny studio flats full of stupid stuffed toys with posters of Korean boy bands on their walls, but that’s not the point. I was getting to see real girls in their own homes and I was getting to bang them for free.
I slept with students, teachers, three air hostesses, half a dozen nurses, and even a policewoman; and yes, she wore the uniform and handcuffed me to the bed. I never told any of them my real name and I kept changing SIM cards because I didn’t want then phoning me after the event. Besides, there was no need to make any return visits because there was a constant supply of fresh girls coming on line. Word was spreading that the website was a great way for Thai girls to meet Western guys and new girls were logging on every day.
After a few weeks, though, even the thrill of free sex began to pale because there was just so much of it, and I was actually looking forward to starting work. But the week before I was due to leave Thailand, I found myself browsing through the Craigslist website, looking for something, or someone, to do. I checked the Women Seeking Men page but didn’t see anything there that I fancied, so I went through the Erotica section, but they were all pay- for-play birds. If I wanted to pay for sex I’d rather pick up a dancer from Soi Cowboy.
Then I went to Casual Encounters and, bingo, there it was: ‘Fancy A Gang Bang In Pattaya?’ I wasn’t sure whether the offer was giving or receiving, but I clicked on it anyway. The first thing I saw was a picture of a fit Asian bird, probably Thai, with great tits and hair down to her waist and a black strip across her eyes and nose so you couldn’t see her face, but the body was out of this world. Fit as a butcher’s dog, as my dear old dad used to say.
It was hard to judge her age. She wasn’t a teenager, but she could have been anywhere between twenty and thirty and didn’t look as if she’d had kids.
She was lying on a bed, her back against the headboard and her legs akimbo, her modesty shielded by a small white towel that wasn’t much bigger than a flannel. It was her husband that had placed the advert. He said that his wife had a fantasy about being gang-raped and he wanted to film her being shagged by half a dozen or so blokes and that anyone interested in helping to realize his wife’s dream should get in touch by email.
Alarm bells were ringing because I couldn’t think that any man with a wife like that would want another man going near her, never mind inside her, but I opened up a fake Gmail account and sent him a message saying that I was interested and asking for more information.
He got back to me later that night with another photograph of his wife, fully naked this time, but with another black strip across her face, and a list of questions. Where was I from? What colour was I? How old was I? How much did I weigh? And he wanted a photograph, though I didn’t have to show my face. I did, though, have to show my dick, which seemed a fair enough request considering what I was hoping to do with it.
So, I answered the questions fairly truthfully, though I did knock four years off my age and a couple of kilos off my weight. I took a photograph with the webcam of my laptop and made damn sure that I was holding my breath and attached that to the email. An hour later, he emailed me back with a mobile phone number and asked me to call him.
I went out and bought a new AIS SIM card and tapped out his number.
He was English, quite well spoken, bit of a Hooray Henry, I thought. He said his name was Bill and I said I was Jonah. My private joke; I said I was hoping to have a whale of a time, but he didn’t seem to get my attempt at humour.
He had more questions for me, basically checking that I was who I said I was. I guess he didn’t want a big sweaty African turning up to do the dirty with his nearest and dearest, which I guess under the circumstances was only natural. Eventually, it was my turn to ask a question, and to be honest I only had the one. Why?
It turned out that his wife had a bit of a past. She used to be a go-go dancer in one of the racier Nana Plaza bars and had been working for five years or so before he met her. In his mind, he was a white knight, riding to her rescue. I didn’t see it that way, of course. Five years working in a go-go bar meant she’d probably been with more than a thousand men. Sloppy seconds didn’t even come into it.
Anyway, she’d been the perfect wife for going on ten years apparently, a whore in the bedroom and a three- star chef in the kitchen. (Or maybe it was the other way around.) But recently she’d seemed unhappy, and after he’d got her drunk one night, it all came tumbling out. She missed the life, she missed having sex with strangers, and having just turned thirty-five, she was worried that men no longer wanted her. She didn’t look thirty-five in the photographs, I have to say. I mentioned that to the guy and he agreed, saying his wife spent a lot of time in the gym and the beauty parlour.
The news of his wife’s unhappiness hit Bill hard, but she explained that it wasn’t about him, she loved him
