From the blown-out phone booth you’re huddled in pretending to make a phone call, the sign above the darkened shophouse across the street can just about be read. Yeah, this is the same place you came to about a year ago. A figure behind the plate glass window inside the shophouse can barely be made out, nervously pacing back and forth. Well, it’s now or never.

“Buut mai?” Are you open?

“Buut, khap.” Yep.

Stepping in, the metal grate clanks down behind you with finality, as if to say, “You’re here now, and you are not leaving anytime soon.” The silhouettes of chairs and tables leaning at queer angles confirm your suspicions that this place is not open for business during normal working hours. You make your way towards a dim light at the back of the shop, then follow a set of stairs to a second floor that looks something like a flophouse. A single lamp with a bare bulb harshly illuminates a room crowded with overturned furniture and clothing racks like an abandoned warehouse. Two girls in various states of undress lie uncomfortably on black pleather couches amid trashy celeb magazines and garbage. Some guy who looked like he was sleeping sits up suddenly and moves to the other side of the room. Oh shit, you think, has this place turned into a dodgy massage parlor since I was last here? A heavy woman who could easily be a mamasan sits at a disheveled-looking desk, looking you up and down while your mind races…

“Two hundred baht,” she says suddenly, and in a trance you hand over the money, assuming this is an entrance fee. She shoves a pale green ticket in your hand and points to a door leading upstairs.

Reaching the landing, you surprise the sleeping staff and the DJ robotically puts on 50 Cent’s “In da Club.” You sit at the bar and redeem your drink. Before long, a big, sleazy looking guy in a disheveled suit from some cheap Nana tailor comes into the room and puts his arms around the shoulders of two girls you hadn’t noticed standing at a nearby table. One girl is wearing cut-off jeans and a tank top from Bebe, while the other, inexplicably, has on a baby blue chamois gown from God knows where. The three appear to know each other, and the guy intones deeply, “Yo soy Americano,” in a ridiculous accent, and then, “So who’s driving the car tonight?” The girls laugh endearingly at him, and they exit. Over the next 45 minutes it’s a contest to see which is worse—the music or the clientele. The place is so depressing you’re on the verge of tears. When you stand to leave, the bartender wakes up and asks if you’d like another drink, but you just keep going out the door, pretending you didn’t hear him.

Hit the Streets

“Welcome, sir. Sit down, please.”

Street people litter the sidewalks, plying their trade like nightcrawlers: fruit vendors and flower boys, whisky slingers and sad song singers, working girls, werewolves, trannies, tourists, the deformed, defamed and dispossessed of every shape and variety. The sidewalk buzzes like a cheap electric toy hooked up to a nuclear reactor. Here, the wash of the Earth collects, the catchall filter before the dirty water flows back into the ocean.

You can’t help thinking that these are the people representing Thailand to the world. Some tourists come here and this is all they see. These people, these streets. The poor street urchins who have to deal with drunk and disorderly weirdos from all over the globe night after night after night…and they look it. Some of them have faces so young, but their eyes are so old, like they’ve seen every depravity known to man, every sin, every vice—because they have.

La La Land

You get to the second floor of some muti-level bar complex at about 3:15am and are immediately met by an overanxious lady boy dragging you into a club. The music is really loud and it’s going like this: “boom boom boom boom, I want you in my room…,” which is a bit nauseating, especially considering there is almost no one here. You sit and talk to a crew of three ladyboys and two gay dudes for a while. They tell you this bar is popular with Thai people who get out of work late but still want to party. This one dude, “Bank,” makes handbags and sells them at Chatuchak on the weekends, apparently, but when times are tight he comes down here for “freelance” work. In the corner are a couple of middle-aged losers in desperate need of gym memberships. They dance like spastics with their dates.

“Oh really?” you suddenly find yourself saying aloud, completely disinterested. You haven’t paid attention to a word these people have said for the last 15 minutes. Is that how much time has passed? You dig through your pockets for your phone and suddenly realize that Celine Dion is blasting on the stereo like it’s fucking AC/DC. “Once more, you open the door…” Uggh…now you think you might actually be sick…

“Listen…you… people,” you say, racking your brain for a single one of their names and failing, “I’ve got to be going now. But you take care and I’ll see you around real soon.” They look at you like you’ve got a set of antennae coming from the back of your head, but you couldn’t care less. Outside you merge into the wave of human traffic—one huge, seething mass of flesh on the go—and mentally debate the virtues of the 24-hour food options within walking distance—Soi Mogadishu? Villa Market? Subway? Hmmm…

Another Late Night

You’re sitting at a booth with Jun and Blake—who just passed out—along with some model and her boyfriend. The model is wearing a stunning little black dress by Miu Miu with an Yves Saint Laurent handbag, which is overkill for a Friday night but apparently they were out on a date or something.

A band that was playing Radiohead covers all night is cleaning up, but the guitarist continues to try to work out the lead riff of a Stone Roses track, which you are now dying to hear. You excuse yourself to use the bathroom before the taxi ride home, and when you come back to the booth, the model and her boyfriend are gone but a DJ has come on and the windows of the joint are closed over with heavy curtains, so that from the street it would appear that the place was closed. Sweet…

At the bar, you order a flask of Sang Som. Before you can pay for it, this drunk American girl opens it and starts pouring it into her glass, as if you just bought it for her. She downs what looks like a couple shots without flinching, then puts her arm around you like you are old friends. Finally, you say “Hello” just to be nice, and she just looks at you with an expression like, “I’m so hot,” which is laughable because she’s practically cross-eyed drunk and so not. Then as suddenly as she appeared, she stumbles away in a stupor. You notice that she dropped some money, so you pick it up and give it to her friend, who looks equally drunk but seems not nearly as clueless.

When you get back to the booth, Blake is lying on the ground and Jun is talking to some random guy you’ve never seen before. He’s wearing slim, black pinstriped Kenneth Cole trousers, black leather shoes from Jaspal and a weird asymmetrical shirt from Topshop. “So I just left the club with those two male models and we tried to pick up some girls,” he says, “but no one wanted to get naughty with us. We ended up driving around Khao San at about 6am. All we could find were a few trannies that wanted to give us blowjobs. It was a pretty boring night, really…” He lights a cigarette and launches into another story, during which time you are reminded of how much he looks like that guy Z-Man from Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. 

Minutes or hours later (you’re not sure), you turn around and see two boys in brown at the door. The words “URINE TEST” flash through your mind in bold, florescent letters, and suddenly you are frantically trying to remember any illegal substances you’ve taken in the past six months. Do vitamins count? How about flu medication? Oh shoot, you remember you were taking antibiotics about a month ago—how long does that stuff stay in your system? Luckily, the police are just here to break up the party—no wee wee test this time. It is 4:30am.

House of Jealous Lovers

The hiso fashion show you just walked out of was typical—lots of beautiful people with personalities like wet cardboard. All you can think of is going home at this point, but a friend from out of town is here and it’s her last night in Bangkok.

“Come on,” she whines, “you can’t go to bed yet, it’s only 1:45! This is my last night here and you’re going to go home just because you have to work tomorrow?!” Ten minutes later you’re telling a taxi driver how to get to this place your friends once told you about that’s not too far away. At least you think it’s not too far away.

There’s a pack of queeny guys outside who discreetly lead you and your friend down an alley to a set of stairs that open into the back door of some bar. Apparently the place is a gay go-go joint by day, and it looks like some of the dancers are still hanging around, boogying in the crowd topless. This in turn prompts some of the more “excited” clientele to take off their shirts, too. After a couple drinks, you finally get it: Shirts off means you’re horny! If only scoring was always this easy…

Here’s a change: The music here is fantastic. The DJ is playing some house remix of a Fleetwood Mac tune that you never would have imagined could sound so groovy. You get a drink from the bartender, who is far more friendly and accommodating than the one at the hiso fashion show, and return to your table to overhear a foreign man hitting on a Thai girl nearby.

“Hey, you know Brad Pitt?” he asks.

“The actor? Yes…” she replies apprehensively. 

“Yeah, he’s my brother,” he says lightly. She responds with a polite laugh while walking away slowly. He follows her across the dance floor. “You know that guy Tom Cruise? Yeah, that’s my sister…”

At about 3, some guy you barely know comes up to you and says, “I go home with you tonight.” You mumble, “Err…no, um, you see…” and then as if answering some unspoken prayer, the lights come on. You ditch the weirdo and make your way to your friend, but it seems she doesn’t want to go home just yet. “Come on, there’s another place downstairs!” she yells, following some Japanese guys.

You walk down a foul-smelling hallway where discarded foam food containers lie abandoned in dim corners. Some guy can be heard telling a story to someone two or three flights up in a thick Russian accent. “No one in the history of the world has ever died of pain,” he bellows.

Down another flight you arrive in a hallway. It’s totally silent and you assume your friend must have been misinformed. There’s no party down here. The Japanese guys are walking back up the stairs when suddenly one of the horny shirtless dudes with bleached blonde hair and nipple piercings appears. He flashes a crooked smile and stumbles past you, leaning into one of the unmarked doors. Suddenly the hallway is an explosion of noise and light. A girl sitting on the inside of the door beckons you to come in quickly, then slams the door shut behind you.

This club is jumping with a more mixed crowd, and full sound and lighting system. In fact, if you didn’t know what time it was, you could easily have thought this was just a regular club. They are playing some cool hip-hop you are unfamiliar with, which blends samples of luk thung into the mix. It’s fresh, exciting, and you think to yourself, “why isn’t this kind of music played in hip-hop clubs all the time?”

As you make your way through the crowd, you are surprised how happy and upbeat the people seem. There’s no posing or pretentiousness. It’s like a house party scene in some 80s movie where people from all different scenes come together and have a good time. Every 15 minutes or so, the lights and the music suddenly get dimmer and people freeze on the dance floor, apparently because the police are rolling by. After this happens a few times, you and your friend decide it’s time to make your way home. This will be one joint to remember…that is, if you ever make it out this late again