Apologies for the hackneyed title. This story was beating at the boundaries of my brain for a long time before I originally posted it here and then on catfightfemmes. It came about from some discussions and some roleplay with a member here, and is based on some people and places I know from my travels in Asia years ago. I hope you all enjoy it.
A warning - it does include some significant involvement from a transgender character. I don't have a problem with that - if I did, I wouldn't have written it that way - but it did cause a few negative comments from some people, so I'm mentioning it. If you read on, then don't complain on that basis.
Cheers,
Scrib
***
The Thermae Coffee House is an institution among the farang after-hours set in Bangkok, at least among the regular visitors and the local expats. This isn’t a place where tourists go, though it isn’t hard to find, in the basement of one of the lower class hotels on Sukhumvit Road, in the middle of a forest of open-air bars and flea market stalls that start near the Marriott on Soi 2 and stretch all the way to the Sheraton on Soi 19.
The Thermae is where things happen after they finish happening everywhere else. Bars and nightclubs are supposed to close at midnight, though most stay open until 2am if the police tax is paid. Inevitably though, there are those still looking for more fun, beer or whatever it is that keeps them going until the following sundown, and so the flotsam and jetsam of the Bangkok bar scene gravitate to the Thermae. Reputedly owned by a couple of senior army officers, the Thermae operates outside the local laws. Truth be told, it seems to operate outside the laws of nature. When I was first introduced to the place, I was told ‘imagine the cantina scene from Star Wars’ and the comparison was pretty apt.
If you’re not yet ready to fall into the arms of Morpheus after an evening of drinking, the Thermae is a great place to indulge in some people watching. The place gradually fills up after midnight until by 3am you can barely move through the tightly compressed, sweaty humanity. You never quite know what you're going to see – local gangsters, bar owners and other glitterati of the late-night scene, middle-aged men whose tired souls aren't yet addled enough with booze to let them sleep, bar girls still hopeful they’ll find a customer and therefore a bed for the night, the khatoeys who are always distinguishable from the real women by their short skirts and high heels. The girls who are girls typically can't wait to get out of heels and into jeans and comfortable shoes.
On the night in question, I’d found myself bored and listless after a day of fruitless and frustrating business meetings. Not looking for companionship but not wanting to be alone either, I’d wandered in and out of a few usual haunts in Soi Nana and as the night wore on, I inexorably drifted toward the Thermae.
My usual tactic in this place was to push my way through the tide, get a beer, find a spot where the long-suffering air-conditioning would reach me, and see who and what drifted by. This night was no exception, and I found myself leaning against a table mid-way between the bar and the door. Like I say, I wasn’t in a good mood and I shook my head politely at a couple of bar girls who shot optimistic come-hither looks in my direction.
Idly scanning the room, I noticed a girl checking her makeup in the beat-up mirror on the wall by the door. I hadn’t seen her before and I presumed she must be a new arrival in town, and new to the Thermae at least. I guess she caught my attention because she seemed out of place – petite but more solidly built than the usual reed-thin gaggle of bar girls, not stocky but nicely curved in a pair of khaki shorts and a pink t-shirt. Her black hair was cut short, falling almost to her shoulders, and the roundness of her features betrayed some Burmese blood in her ancestry. Probably from the northwest, up near Chiang Mai, I decided, indulging myself in one of my usual private bar games.
The girl rubbed her lips together one last time and, obviously satisfied with what she saw, made her way through the crowd toward the bar. My eyes followed her path, already on the lookout for the next character that would pique my interest. I noticed a well-known expat author holding court at the far end of the bar, and spent a few moments admiring his notoriously attractive wife as they chatted with several other expats and a couple of Thais.
A sudden shout, audible even above the thumping music that permeated the room from the juke box, drew my gaze back to the bar. The girl from the northwest was standing with her back to the bar, arguing angrily with another, taller girl who held a bottle of white wine spritzer out of her reach.
I didn’t need to see the taller girl’s face to know she was a khatoey – her four-inch heels, denim mini-skirt so short it was pretty much a wide belt, and black spaghetti-strap top confirmed that. Her hair reached to her waist, swaying as she pushed the shorter girl in pink back against the bar with one hand. I thought I recognized her, one of a trio of bar girls who worked at a bar on the third floor of the Nana Entertainment Plaza and sure enough, I spotted her two friends a few feet away in the crowd. They were regulars here whenever they hadn’t managed to score a customer at the bar. There were plenty of guys who got off on transsexuals and good luck to them – each to his own – but I guessed that these three came up dry more often than not in the bar. That wouldn’t improve their temperaments which, from what I’d seen of them here in the Thermae, were pretty damn nasty to begin with.
The taller girl gave the other one a last shove, sneered something that was drowned out by the music, and turned her back contemptuously on the newcomer, her thick mane of ebony hair slapping the shorter girl in the face. The khatoey was slender, narrow hipped and her breasts were full and high, almost bursting out of her top, a testimony to the surgeon’s craft.
I’d seen this same scene played out before. The khatoey and her clique liked to single out and pick on a lone victim, stealing her drink, teasing and terrorizing. I’d even seen them do it to a guy or two. It was some kind of perverse power game that appeased whatever demons they carried inside. Bullies came in all shapes and sizes.
What happened next though, made me almost choke on my beer. The shorter girl’s face darkened, the blush of rage visible even under the multi-colored lights of the bar. She took a step forward, reaching out with both hands to grab the khatoey’s glossy hair, jerking backward ferociously with a scream of anger.
The taller girl’s head whipped back as she let out a shriek of pain. Her arms flew out and the stolen drink flew out of her hand, hitting another drinker in the back of the head and falling to the floor where it shattered on the worn, once-white tiles of the floor. She staggered back a step, her right foot going out blindly in an effort to retain her balance, and another patron yelped as she spiked his foot with her heel. She kept from falling by cannoning off yet another guy who rounded on her indignantly, then stopped as he glanced from her to her assailant and put two and two together.
She spun round to face the shorter girl, who still had one hand gripping her hair. Lunging forward and screaming something in Thai that I didn’t understand but knew was far from complimentary, she sent her clenched fist in a tight arc that connected with the other girl’s head just below her left eye, breaking her grip and sending her reeling back against the bar.
The entire bar held their breath. The music continued to blare, but there was a collective silence in the midst of the noise. This was the moment that would decide the course of the night, whether it would be another forgettable minor disturbance or something that would go down in the unwritten but eternal history of the Thermae.
The girl in pink shook her head, lifting her hand to her cheek. A couple of long black strands of hair, torn from the other’s scalp, drifted from her fingers. She looked up, and her eyes narrowed to dark, dangerous slits. Her mouth opened and she roared out a curse in some language that certainly wasn’t Thai – maybe kham muang, the local language up in the border regions. I didn’t spend much time thinking about it. I was too busy being amazed at the volume of sound that could come out of that little body.
The taller girl froze for a crucial instant and the other surged forward, grabbing the straps of her tank top, hauling her forward as she drove her own head forward and upward in a head butt aimed for the nose. The khatoey instinctively threw her head back to avoid the attack but that didn’t help, as the other girl’s forehead simply slammed into her mouth instead of her nose, splitting her lips. She stumbled backward, her hands over her face, crashing into a table, sending another round of drinks flying.
I noticed a movement in the crowd as one of the khatoey’s friends lunged out of the crowd, a bottle already swinging at the head of the girl in pink. The intended victim simply ducked under it, twisted deftly toward her attacker and rose up onto her toes as she sank her left hand, fingers steepled into a spike, deep into the underside of the girl’s right breast, knocking it upward out of her scoop-necked crop top. Despite the outfit, the way her breast bounced told me that this one’s breasts were real and therefore so was her femininity. She screamed and clasped her hands across her chest, leaving her belly open to the northerner’s right fist which drove deep into her midriff. Her eyes opened wide and she sagged to her knees, gasping. The girl in pink didn’t let it go at that however, ramming a bare knee up into the girl’s shocked face that sent her over backwards, her head striking the tiles hard. Her arms flew wide and she lay there unmoving.
The khatoey saw what the newcomer had done to her friend and came off the table screaming with rage, her fingers hooked into claws, seeking the other’s flesh, shrieking promises of death or worse at the girl. The northerner glanced over her shoulder, saw the enraged khatoey rushing at her, and I expected to see fear in her eyes, maybe even for her to flee. Again she surprised me, spinning on one foot, planting the other firmly as she lunged and drove the heel of her open palm at the khatoey’s face, crushing her nose and stopping her charge cold.
The khatoey half staggered, half flew back onto a table behind her, long shapely legs flailing wildly in the air. Her skirt rode up around her waist and the entire bar fixed their eyes on her miniscule red thong with an incongruous bulge swelling the crotch between her legs. There were murmurs from the crowd – surprise, dismay, who knew what, and who cared at this point? We were all caught up in the fever of the fight.
The northerner stepped forward, her right arm already pulled way back, and as the other raised her head from the table, her fist slammed into the other’s face, pulping her already ruined nose. The khatoey shrieked in agony, her head flying back, hair strewn across the table in a beer-soaked tangle, a spray of blood flying from her nose and spattering the floor tiles.
With a roar of blood lust the shorter girl lashed out again. This time her hand plunged under the khatoey’s skirt, grasping her forsaken manhood. The khatoey screamed in shock and horror, her hands grabbing for the other’s wrist, her head shaking wildly in desperate protest. Unheeding, the girl twisted viciously, and this time the khatoey’s scream drowned out the music. She jack-knifed up off the table, her face twisted in agony, and the northerner speared her free hand into the other’s hair, dragging her up by hair and cock, hauling her off the table. She spun to her right like a matador, dragging the other girl past her, flinging her headlong toward the bar. The staggering, screaming girl still clutched at her tormented groin, hunched over as the top of her head struck the unyielding edge of the bar. With a final grunt of surprise and agony, she dropped to the floor like she’d been pole-axed. The newcomer put any doubt to rest by slamming her foot hard up between the khatoey’s legs with a scream of triumph. The slender body barely twitched.
The victor spun to face the crowd, her eyes burning into the onlookers who mostly averted their gaze from this fury in their midst. I was still too shocked to look away and suddenly found myself staring into a pair of ebony eyes that bored into my soul. I froze, forgetting to blink.
The girl reached behind her, over the demolished khatoey, and picked up her bag from the bar where she had placed it before all this started. The crowd melted out of her way as she walked over to my table and put her bag down in front of me. “You buy me drink,” she said simply in halting English.
That’s how I met Nok.
THE END
