232 Bars: A Novel About Scuba, Ladyboys, and Living the Dream

232 BARS.

A novel about scuba, ladyboys, and living the dream.

By John Triggerfish © 2012

All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

The right of John Triggerfish to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN: 978-1-4716-6589-9

Note from the author:

I would like the readers to know that I think that PADI is the best diving organisation in the world with the highest of standards proliferated by many fine diving instructors. As in all organisations it may have a few bad eggs that are constantly weeded out. Although I may make light of some situations, it is not my intention to disparage the PADI organisation. Far from it. I admire their conduct and highest safety standards.

Please remember this a work of fiction, albeit written in the first person.

JT

There are approximately twenty three million certified PADI open water divers, though no one really knows the true figure. However, not one of them has ever been this shameless.

Welcome to the Land of Smiles.

You will always be Farang.

PROLOGUE.

My name's John Triggerfish.

I'm a factory worker, and I'm thirty five years old.

Some people in Burnley call me Melonshagger.

I will explain why later, but for now I can sincerely say that I never started out on my travels searching for sex with any kind of large fruit.

Anyway, the events in this book never happened.

Honestly.

Especially for the benefit of any lawsuits involved.

In fact this is probably the biggest metaphor you will ever read.

I'm a Burnley lad born and bred, and some Burnley lads have a reputation for being as mad as a box of sink plugs.

Oh and by the way, if you've never heard of Burnley, and many people haven't, it's way ''up North'' in a small country called England.

That might have something to do with what follows.

Enjoy the ride.

Enjoy the diving.

Lift a glass to Buddha.

May you drink Samsong often.

2008.

It was late in February on a cold, dark, Burnley morning. Unusually no one was around, not even a burglar, or a bunch of gypsies hunting for flagstones to nick.

I stepped through the porch and shut my white PVC door, glancing up at the sodium glow from the rusty street lamp for the last time. Reluctantly I turned the key and reached down to heave a large forty litre rucksack to my shoulder.

It contained all my worldly possessions; which amounted to a sleeping bag, some clothes, toothpaste and brush, razor blade, a three pack box of condoms (out of date), and a few travel documents.

I looked at my reflection in the grimy living room window.

Tatty blue jeans and a faded Lambretta denim jacket reflected back at me. Underneath the jacket I abused a grey Lacoste copy jumper from the Asian man with shifty eyes on Padiham market. My trainers bore a famous sports motif but they were second hand from the charity shop, and my woolly hat came from the bargain bin at Matalan.

My name was John Triggerfish.

I had fuck all, and a lot of it.

I placed my cold hands in my jacket pocket, turned and marched away down the road.

Burnley was a place of the past.

I was off to follow a scuba diving career in paradise.

THE MODERN WAY.

The first bus out of town was at six forty five.

It was empty and the driver hadn't turned on the heaters so the temperature felt like it was minus five on the lower deck.

I looked through the window at the moonlight illuminated frost on the fields as my breath froze to icicles in the air.

It was an hour to sunrise.

The date was February eighteenth, four days after my divorce had come through on Valentine's Day.

It brought back bitter-sweet memories.

I remembered buying a tow rope from the cheap motor factors place on the corner.

I remembered putting the rope around the beams in the attic.

I remembered tying a noose in the rope, eventually getting it right after the seventh soul destroying attempt and a few minutes finding an instruction video on You-tube.

I remembered putting the noose around my neck.

I remembered closing my eyes and stepping through the hatch into the abyss.

I remembered bashing my head on an upright beam as I was falling forwards.

That had hurt.

Knocked me right out.

Prevented my body from dropping through the hole.

So when I regained consciousness I decided that I wasn't cut out for the afterlife just yet. I was simply stuck in a rut and I'd better get out of it.

The day after I didn't turn in for work, leaving seven people without a day's wage because I had the work's vehicle. Not to worry though, because I was on my way down to the travel agent for an immediate life changing plane ticket to paradise.

The M62 motorway encapsulating the conurbations of Manchester approached. In one hour and thirty minutes it would turn into a car park and the intellectual capacity of a hundred thousand people would plummet into a chasm.

Normally charming human beings would suddenly become angry rabid dogs, bull sharks, nasty snakes, and special breeds of lonely, frigid salesmen.

I thought about where I could go to escape all this stress. I needed to get laid too, and it just wasn't happening around here.

A friend had told me that sex was an industry in Thailand, and hardly ever more than twenty quid in the sex bars, which were legal. The vast majority of the population were poor and families were selling their daughters everywhere apparently.

'Twenty years behind,' my friend Darren had said, though the neon future was catching up with them quickly. He'd had a life changing accident. A bin wagon's front wheel had run over his left leg when he'd worked for the council's refuse team, squashing it flat, and it had to be amputated at the knee. He'd received over a hundred thousand pounds in compensation.

The day after he was on a plane to Thailand to buy a sex bar; in particular ''Shag Nasties Sex Bar'' in Pattaya Beach.

I'd seen the pictures of the place he'd bought in the middle of Pattaya in the Bay of Thailand; the seediest, sleaziest, sex city in the world. He'd been surrounded twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, by good looking women who could do strange tricks with a combination of their genitals, insects, sea creatures, and assortments of sports equipment.

My friend had purchased seven bar girls along with his bar and there wasn't an ounce of burger, sausage, bacon, extra chips and two pints of lager on any one of them.

I was pondering this as the bus pulled into a busy Piccadilly station; a station that was hastily waking up to the commuter influx. I stopped in my tracks, checked my list, and gazed up at the arrival boards bringing in the multitudes; the blood cell's of society, flooding in to the heart of the day, blessing the country's organs with the angina of a new capitalist dawn.

A red faced man with a large gut and an ill fitting luminous vest smiled toothlessly in my direction. He gave me a copy of the Metro free newspaper. I asked him for the time but the man was grinning in a way that suggested he'd never uttered a word of the Queen's English. He refocused on dishing out more newspapers to the passing rail users. He was probably from Romania or Poland. Maybe they didn't have time in Romania or Poland.

Suddenly I found myself thrown backwards.

A big black man bumped into my shoulder and gave me the evil eye. It must have been my fault for being a stationary object in his way. He sneered, adjusted his briefcase and wandered away, embroiled in the anger management sickness that infected millions of people every weekday morning. In seconds he had become lost in the crowd.

I shrugged and casually wondered why I hadn't headbutted him in the nose and kicked him in the teeth. After all, I was six foot two and seventeen stone.  Piccadilly station could have used a lick of claret paint.

I must have been feeling out-of-sorts. The ghost of Burnley past appeared as a shimmering vision. He turned his back and sighed, solemnly shaking his skin-headed cranium with supreme disappointment.

After a short train journey where I saved a few quid since the conductor never came round, I reached Manchester airport. I disembarked and wandered over the sky bridge to the check in. A large group of sheiks and tropical looking characters lounged around with an air of relief in front of the Etihad desk.

At least all the staff looked very smart and worthy of my expensive air fare, and they even had an exotic stunner from the Twenty Best Belly Dancing Porn Stars DVD working on the check in.

My heart missed a beat. She was gorgeous with green eyes and a pretty hat. I couldn't take my eyes off her symmetrical face and high cheek bones.

'Have yer got yer ticket love?' she asked.

I offered her my ticket and passport. A small amount of drool escaped the side of my mouth. I placed the rucksack on the conveyor.

'One on the nine thirty to Bangkok via Abu Dhabi,' she affirmed in a happy, well trained manner. 'Enjoy your flight sir!' Within a second she'd placed a label around the handle of the rucksack and whooshed it away down a mysterious conveyor belt. I was rooted to the spot in admiration of her ample cleavage. She smiled and pointed towards the departure gate.

'That way please, sir,' she ushered, with a flash of her pearly white teeth. 'Have a nice trip. Thank you for flying Etihad Airways.'

I snapped out of it; managing to think of the decaying pigeon I'd hidden behind the boiler back in Burnley for my ex wife to find. There was also the dead road kill badger I'd placed in the once shared bedroom wardrobe. She was selling the house. Prospective buyers would be well impressed. Luckily, after a few seconds of thinking about this and the mice I had been breeding in the kitchen bin, my erection subsided; leaving me able to wander towards the departure lounge without too much embarrassment.

Soon I was in the air aboard a giant Airbus wondering how these leviathans of the air defied gravity.

I watched six movies in the twenty two hours it took to get into Bangkok Suvarnabhumi airport. Fortunately I managed to blag an extra ration of two bottles of red wine, a cognac, three double vodkas, some whiskey, and seven Heineken, so I was pretty sozzled by the time we were coming into land. The three Valium I'd bought off my schizophrenic mate were working a treat too.

I stepped off the plane a sweaty drunken mess (sticking up for England) and was probably very lucky not to get arrested by the short but stern looking policemen standing on every corner. Somehow I managed to get my head together and only fell over four magazine racks, two fridges, a food display and three small disabled children in wheelchairs on the way to the baggage collection point.

I had a connecting flight to Phuket, Thailand's largest island on its west coast in the Andaman Sea, south of Phang Nga Province. After a few hours of walking around one of the biggest airports in the world (not in a very straight line I may add) I found the correct departure gate and boarded a dented excuse for an airplane manufactured from recycled beer cans circa nineteen seventy two, in dire need of some TLC. However I didn't care though because I was completely knackered, very drunk, and had no idea whatsoever what day it was.

One hour later I landed in Phuket, dropping peacefully over a sandy beach onto the tarmac of the runway. Palm trees were abundant and a single track road ran alongside the airport fence. From the aircraft window I could see small shanty huts filled with people in tattered clothing and I had the distinct feeling that I was about to join the cast of a Hollywood movie; possibly Apocalypse Now or Platoon.

I collected my baggage from the carousel, headed for the exit, and checked the address on a scrap of paper I was clutching. I handed it gingerly to a Thai taxi driver outside the terminal.

It read:

The Beach House.

Nanai Rd.

Patong Beach.

That was approximately thirty miles south of Phuket International Airport, said the well dressed taxi driver in broken English, but he was nodding in a way that led me to believe he knew what was going on, because I certainly didn't.

I commanded him to take me there immediately, and in a couple of minutes we were out of the airport into the heat of the Kingdom of Thailand.

A BRAVE NEW WORLD.

The taxi cost five hundred baht, or the equivalent of a ten pound note, which was fine because I couldn't believe the value for money it represented.

A tenner in England might just get you around the corner, and that was without the extra quid for stopping off at the off license.

Here it was an hour's trip.

The Toyota Avensis had air conditioning too, for which I was grateful because stepping off the plane into the South Siamese heat was like stepping from a freezer into a fan assisted oven. I estimated that if I bought a half kilo chicken from the shop, it would easily cook on the pavement in under five minutes.

The driver negotiated the roads thirty kilometres south to the town of Patong. A wide highway was choked with old rusty scooters, even older pick up trucks, and ancient pre-ark buses made from woodworm and gaffer tape. Cautiously, because none of the other traffic could stay in a straight line, we dropped down over a mountain road cutting through the jungle into the metropolis.

I was in complete culture shock.

Old idiot way too far off the beaten track, I thought.

This may go horribly wrong.

Completely out of your depth, I thought.

The taxi driver grinned as he hit ninety five miles an hour into a reverse camber around a bend narrowly missing an old double decker bus, two pickup trucks, and an elephant pulling a few logs.

Barmy.

Nanai road was at the bottom of the hill on the left as we approached from a small town called Kathu.

I was looking for ''The Beach House Bar''. It should be easy to find I surmised, but in reality the small annoying fact was that every single building on Nanai Rd. was a bar.

How long was this road, I wondered?

The taxi driver said four kilometres.

I glanced in the rear view mirror at the lengthy queue of scooters and pickups forming behind us as we chugged slowly down the road looking for this elusive fucking bar. Behind every driver's smile was a polite dagger, I was sure of it.

The cacophony of scooter horns was just about becoming unbearable when the taxi driver's face lit up like a set of after-market Toyota headlamps. He smiled and pointed to a small sign depicting a palm tree and a wooden bamboo hut. Underneath the hut were the words ''Beach House'', although this was absolutely nowhere near the beach. He pulled over, and forty scooters roared past like the stopper from a bottle of fizzy gridlock had just been removed.

I pondered upon the two wheeled method of main Thai transportation.

England this was not.

Women rode side saddle pillion, for one thing.

A family of four balanced precariously on a moped's small seat, for another.

A five year old child rode past me on a Yamaha, driving it from the footwell because  he wasn't big enough to reach the seat.

Bare-topped, helmet-less westerners wearing shades on Harley Davidsons swerved all over the road, no doubt drunk.

A family of three rode past on a twenty year old scooter carrying a set of ladders.

Grinning children sat on handlebars.

Swaddled babies stared at the blue sky from the comfort of the shopping basket.

Young women combed their hair while driving.

A Thai man in nothing but shorts riding a Suzuki smoked a cigarette while talking on his mobile phone.

In between all this, a group of hairy American bikers revved their Suzuki Hayabusa's louder than automatic gunfire.

Nuts.

I admired the indigenous etiquette at junctions.

Bikes would pull out as if the traffic light was something to be ignored. Then another rider would cut in front of that rider and everyone to the rear of that rider would try the same thing, and then a pickup truck would try to pull out and that would give a tuk-tuk the invitation to try and squeeze into a gap no bigger than a gnats fanny; and as a consequence nearly every one was crashing into each other but being very nice about it all!

I had yet to see someone frown!

Maybe this was indeed the fabled Land of Smiles.

KICK OFF.

The Beach House was an open sided bar furnished with big bamboo arm chairs and deep cushions. There was a pool table on a higher level towards the rear that had huge, bucket-like pockets. They played American pool here. A small bar ran down one side of the building, underneath a painting of a Thai warrior; tattooed and fearsome with a ring through the middle of his nose. I wondered if he was pretending to be a bull, and if he had a wife she could possibly lead him by a rope to the farmer's market.

Three T.V. screens were mounted in various positions and a sign advertised English football.

I looked around some more. There