and a bill for the job that guaranteed I’d be keeping the wolf from the door for a few months.
Helmut was devastated by what I told him. He’d honestly believed that he’d found the perfect wife in Mem, but she’d lied to him and stolen from him. He’d gone back through all the accounts and it was now clear that she had been skimming money from the restaurants from the day that she’d started working for him. She become greedier in recent months, a sure sign that she was planning to leave Helmut for good. He’d always thought that he had a good relationship with his stepdaughter, too, but she had obviously been more than happy to help steal from him.
Looking at it from Mem’s point of view, I guess she was just doing whatever she could to make a better life for her family. Her Thai husband was more concerned with his status in the village than what his wife was doing overseas, and he knew that she would be coming back to him one day. Helmut was nothing more than a golden goose, and so far as they were concerned he had more money than sense. What they didn’t bank on was him having enough sense to employ yours truly.
According to Helmut, she hit the roof when he confronted her with what he knew. At first she tried to lie about it, but the photographs of the Khon Kaen house and the land ownership records put paid to that. Then she begged for his forgiveness, promising that she really loved Helmut and would happily divorce her Thai husband. When that didn’t work she told him that she wanted half of everything he had or she’d have him killed. Helmut just threw her out of his house, changed the locks and hired a good lawyer. Last I heard Helmut was fit and well and hadn’t paid her a euro.
THE CASE OF THE PERSISTENT SPONSOR
When I first set up as a private eye in Bangkok, I didn’t run to luxuries like an expense account, an office or even a half-decent pair of shoes, and I certainly didn’t have an advertising budget. Not for me the delights of a full- page advert in the Bangkok Post or a twenty-second commercial in the middle of a popular Thai soap opera. I made do with a strip of stickers that said ‘When You Are Away-Does Your Girl Play?’ and gave my mobile phone number and my website address. Whenever I passed an ATM or visited a toilet I’d leave behind one of my stickers. It was one of my strategically placed stickers that brought in Hank, a frequent visitor to the Land of Smiles. Hank was at the airport waiting to catch a plane to New Zealand but he wanted to meet me. He agreed to pay for my fare to and from the airport and for my time so quicker than you could say ‘I’ve an electricity bill that has to be paid by Wednesday or they’ll cut off my power’ I was in a cab heading for the airport.
Hank was a fairly good-looking guy in his late fifties, broad-shouldered and with most of his own hair and teeth, and he was wearing a decent suit and had an expensive gold watch on his wrist. He gave me his life story in the first five minutes of me shaking his hand and sitting down next to him in the airport coffee shop. He’d set up his own travel agency business in Auckland and had started visiting Asia when more and more of his clients started heading out this way. He was divorced with two sons at decent universities, and like most Westerners who reached middle age he soon realised that he’d have a much more interesting sex life in Thailand than he would in downtown Auckland. As a fellow Kiwi I could only add a heartfelt ‘Amen’ to that. Hank was a realist, though. He knew that he hadn’t become a more interesting or attractive person simply because he’d flown halfway around the world. The fact that every bargirl called him a ‘handsum man’ and hung on his every word wasn’t because he was God’s gift to women. It was because he had money and they wanted some of it. Hank knew the rules of the game and was happy to play by them. He started visiting Thailand every few months and was a regular face around Nana Plaza and Soi Cowboy. He made no secret of his desire to ‘pay and play’ and only smiled when the girls accused him of being a butterfly. That’s one of the many contradictions you come across in the Land of Smiles. A bargirl who has sex with several hundred men a year is just doing her job. But if a bargirl catches her client screwing another bargirl, he gets accused of being a butterfly or worse and there are tears and tantrums. Funny old world.
Anyway, Hank paid and played and had one hell of a time. And then, after almost a decade of flying in and out for a bit of the old in and out, he ran into Elle. The girl of his dreams.
Hank held up his hands as I smiled. ‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘You’ve heard it a thousand times before. My girl is different, she really loves me, she’s a good girl at heart, she doesn’t really want to be a hooker, she wants to be with me.’
I shrugged. Yeah, I’d heard it a thousand times before. And it always ends in tears. Hookers hook, end of story. No girl is forced to work in Patpong or Nana or Cowboy. It’s a career choice. And girls, especially bargirls, do not give up their career for a man twice their age for love. They might, just might, give up work if a guy is stupid enough to sponsor them, but it all comes down to money at the end of the day.
It’s usually tourists who get conned. They arrive in Thailand for a couple of week’s hard-earned vacation, meet a pretty young girl and fall for her. They pay to have sex, then it turns into what they laughingly call ‘the girlfriend experience.’ She takes him out to eat with her friends, shows him where she lives (taking care that her Thai boyfriend’s stuff is well hidden), escorts him around a few temples and places of interest, and spins him a sob story about family circumstances forcing her to sell her body. The tourist offers to support her if she gives up working in the bar, and the negotiations start. He’ll offer 10,000 baht, she’ll say she needs at least 60,000 baht a month to support her family, and eventually they’ll settle on 30,000 or 40,000. The tourist flies home and starts sending her a salary every month by bank transfer or through Western Union.
What the tourist doesn’t know is that a hard-working go-go dancer can earn upwards of 100,000 baht a month. And that’s without a sponsor or two sending her money. Why would anyone with half a brain think that a pretty young girl is going to sit at home for a fraction of their earnings? For love? The girls didn’t sign up to dance around a silver pole and have paid-for sex with strangers because they were looking for love. They want money. Lots of it. And the only way to get a girl out of the bar scene is to pay her more than she can earn working. Any girl who claims to be doing it for less is lying. Not that they’d see it as lying. They’re just telling the guy what he wants to hear.
Anyway, tourists are one thing, long-time visitors or permanent residents (sexpats, as they’re usually known) are another. They should know better. But time and time again I get calls from men who’ve been in Thailand for years who for one reason or another have let down their guard and opened their hearts to a bargirl. I don’t know why it happens, I really don’t. Tourists I can understand, most of them check their brains in at the airport on arrival, but guys like Hank should know what they’re getting into trying to have a proper relationship with a bargirl.
While I’m on the subject, just because a girl doesn’t work in a bar doesn’t mean that she’s not a bargirl. Being a bargirl is as much of a state of mind as it is a job description. A lot of guys who’ve married a stunner from Isaan will take you to one side and say proudly ‘she wasn’t a bargirl, you know.’ Yeah, but that doesn’t mean that he didn’t pay to have sex with her the first few times. Or that he isn’t continuing to pay to have sex with her, one way or the other. She might have worked in a hotel or a hairdresser’s or a beauty parlour, or even be a student, but she was almost certainly a freelancer who charged for sex with foreigners. Some of the biggest rip-off artists I’ve come across have been ‘regular’ girls doing ‘regular’ jobs. Equally, there are girls who work in the bars who couldn’t be described as ‘bargirls’. There are waitresses who are working to put themselves through college, cashiers who work in the nightlife industry while a relative takes care of their children and who wouldn’t dream of sleeping with a customer. I’ve even known go-go dancers who won’t let customers pay their bar fine. One earned a big salary as a featured dancer and showgirl, plus she got a stack of tips every night. With the commission she got on drinks that guys brought her, she was probably making 40,000 baht a month. Her husband worked as the bar’s DJ and they were as happy and faithful a couple as you could meet. So, a bargirl doesn’t necessarily work in a bar, and a girl who works in a bar isn’t necessarily a bargirl.
Anyway, Hank didn’t try to pull the wool over my eyes regarding Elle’s pedigree. He’d met her in a bar in Soi Cowboy. She was dancing, he’d paid her barfine, they’d gone to a short-time hotel and he’d given her money for sex. No confusion there, then. She was a bargirl who worked in a bar. Which is why what happened next was so surprising. Hank fell in love with her. Hook, line and sinker. She was, he told me with a perfectly straight face, the love of his life. After their first encounter, he paid her bar fine for ten days and took her to Koh Samui for a holiday. They’d walked hand in hand on the beach, watched the sun go down, eaten sea food and gazed into each other’s eyes. He’d told her his history, and she’d told him everything about her life. She had a six-year-old daughter, she supported her aged mother, her husband was long gone, her dream was to open a beauty parlour. That’s why she’d started dancing in Soi Cowboy, to get together enough cash to pay for her own business. It was also, of course,
