U PickAPath

 read more rambling here

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

How a Bangkok woman was driven to living on the street, and cutting off her ex-husbands penis.

The streets of Bangkok are alive with the sound of music. A bony, disorganised, rambunctious kind of music; it sounds like a television blaring when you’re trying to concentrate, like an old machine in need of grease, an oil drum, the sizzle of oil in a hot pan, a distorted phone line. It sounds like a thousand horns, a a gaggle of geese, the growl of a peacock, like the melody has been salvaged from the recycled bits of a rubbish tip. The sounds come at you from every direction. It is menacingly beautiful.

Rain begins to fall in downtown Bangkok and it’s smudging her mascara, washing the grime from it’s buildings down the gutter. People scatter like mice.

In amongst it all, horizontal on a banana recliner chair, a couple of inches from a roaring street, a street tailor is trying to gather some sleep. Several others that line this street everyday, fixing travellers clothes and backpacks, are ducking for cover. With piercings in her eyebrow and nose, she appears a rough character, a lived-in character. But she looks incandescent lying there, peacefully, in the rain.

I decide to wake her. She’ll soon be as sodden as wet toilet paper if she’s left there. She doesn’t seem to mind when I shake her by the shoulder and we both huddle to a shop window. I help her drag her ancient industrial singer sewing machine under shelter. I remember seeing the same sewing machine in many living rooms back home as decorations. Here, it is somebodies livlihood.

I’ve brought a pair of my shorts that have acquired a gaping hole in the crutch. Don’t ask why. She tell me she can fix them and offers me a chair when I indicate I would like to sit with her but I plant my ass on the concrete next to hers. Her English is makeshift but understandable. Her name is June.

She hasn’t slept in days, she tells me. There’s a new gang of homeless that have moved into the area and are giving the street’s long-time tenants grief.

“They try to steal my sewing machine every night so I chain it to my ankle,” she says, poking an eye at me through the gaping hole in my shorts.

“You sleep here by the road?”

“Yeah, I must – room is very expensive in Bangkok,” she tells me.

“But I sleep at my son’s apartment some nights- this is enough.”

I make sure I understand this clearly. “You sleep on the street while your son sleeps in a house?”

“Yes,” she says, sounding irked.

“I pay 5000 Baht a month for their rent and I sleep under the stars.”

She’s exaggerating: Bangkok’s skies resemble a swamp through which no stars shine through.

Her sewing machine starts to clatter like a machine gun. A passing man takes a photo of us both. June cackles a laugh. I feel like she’s more laughing in his face rather than posing for the photo.

When he leaves her face transforms and becomes sour.

“Too many tourist in my life,” she says.

The rain has stopped and the street has let out its breath.

“It's a hard life in Bangkok, never any money, never enough and nobody cares,” she says.

“Why do youlive on the streetJune?”

“My last husband threw me out!” she laughs.

“I used to drink a bit too much when I found out he had other young girlfriend.”

“I could understand why,” I said.

“ But this is normal in Thailand – many men have many girlfriend and for most women this is ok, but I can’t think about it.”

“ My first husband was worse.” She has stopped sewing now and is looking straight at me with a straightened back.

She tells me he was a “bad man” who “couldn’t get enough sex.”

“I begged him so many time after I know he has a girlfriend but he would just laugh at me,” she says swatting the air in front of her face with her head down.

“ I used to threaten I would kill him but I never could...”

“Instead when I came home drunk one night and he was sleeping...I cut it off,” she says with a sinister grin.

"Cut what off?"

"His penis!," she remarks with a sinister grin.

“You cut his penis off?!”