Bangkok Knights by Collin Piprell Page B

straighten her out
and fix her goddammed teeth while they’re at it. But he never wants to see her
again, he says.
    “Yeah, that’s right , and that’s not all—old Dexy’s
gone and adopted three of those little critters. Those orphan kids. Just
before he left for Jakarta. Good old Dexy. Heart of gold.”
    Eddie doesn’t believe this, not for a minute. But I can
tell him it’ s true. Just before Dexy passes out, the other night, I overhear
him tell Leary this: “Hey, listen; do you think Nancy’s got a couple more of
those kids lying around? Maybe I can do something. Goddammit.” And as luck
would have it, Leary still had some of the forms behind the bar.
    Leary figures Dexy knew what he was doing. “Got a head for
his likker, old Dexy has; what he’d do drunk, he’d do sober.”
    That’s what Leary says. But if you ask me, this
foster-fatherhood is going to be as big a surprise to old Dexy as the time he
woke up in Singapore married to a Chinese hat-check girl (or so she claimed,
anyway). Or the morning he came to in Aberdeen and discovered the ‘Mr. Nice
Guy’ tattoo—the one he still wears on his right fist.

GETTING AWAY FROM IT ALL
    “It’s a symptom of the crisis of modem civilization — an
expression of pathological alienation.” Ernest was raving, his diatribe
accompanied by suitably exaggerated gesticulations.
    Looking on, a waiter had somehow interpreted it all as an
order for one more Singha beer, another Kloster, and a plate of nuts. Since we
didn’ t argue the point, he decided we were probably going to be around for a
fair spell of boozy palaver to come, and he turned the music up to serious
good-time levels.
    “What did you say?” I shouted at Ernest.
    “The noise!” he screamed back. “It’s driving me nuts!”
    Massed unmuffled motorcycles scrambling at the traffic
lights, amplified fruit vendors cruising the laneways at daybreak, music
cassette vendors drowning out the traffic with their samples...
    My friend Ernest had only been in Bangkok for ten months,
and he had some kind of thing about noise pollution. “It’s not just all that
stuff — motorcycles and everything. Oh, no. Now people actually seek it out.
It’s a sickness.”
    I couldn’t hear what he was saying very clearly, so I
waved the waiter over and asked him to turn the music down.
    ”They crave music,” Ernest continued. “What do they do to
relax? Like there wasn’t enough noise in this city already, they go to
nightclubs where the music is so loud your beer goes flat. Or they go to
discos, which are worse; they can turn your brains to jelly. The disk jockeys
all went deaf long ago.
    “People can’t talk to each other any more; they don’t want
to talk. At the same time, they’re uncomfortable with silence. If everything is
quiet, then they start to think, and people don’t want to think. They can’t
handle it. There are too many horrifying things to think about. So they need
insulation. Insulation from each other, in case somebody says something
significant, and insulation from their own thoughts, in case they scare themselves
to death.
    “But if the music’s loud enough, there’s no problem. You
can’t talk and you can’t think. It puts you into a kind of trance. Like drugs.”
    Heaven preserve us from drugged trances, I agreed, and
swigged at my beer.
    “It’s unbelievable,” said Ernest “They can’t even get from
their ‘home music center’ to the disco without a portable cocoon of noise —
have you noticed how many Walkman stereos there are around these days? If you
want to talk to one of these zombies you’ve got to use semaphore first, just so
they’ll lift an earphone and come out into the real world for a minute.”
    Ernest was really on the boil. Over-wrought, you might
have said. By this time he was sweating beer almost faster than he could
replenish it
    “Ernest,” I said gently, “if you want to talk about the
Crisis of Modem Civilization, then just imagine what the