Shaky Derek showed up an hour late, coming directly from the Hash Run. He was soaked with sweat, covered with mud and stinking of beer. He had on a Hash House T-shirt, with the logo of the local club on the back and on the front an illustration of a European man submitting an Asian woman to a particularly degrading sex act. For Shaky Derek, he looked pretty good. He levered himself onto the stool next to mine, twitching like a doped race-horse, and seeing that my beer bottle was almost empty, ordered us a couple more.
Normally, Shaky Derek drinks Mekhong, two pints per day, thus his nickname. But on Hash days he sticks to beer. He shouted at the bartendy "Hey! Nahng, Nahng! Song Sing-beer, lek-lek!" With his tones, this translates as "Sit! Sit! Transmit beer thing, metal-metal!" But they know Shaky Derek at the Second Sex, and understand him, so the girl brought us two beers.
"You know," I told him, "there are guys on death row that would be embarrassed to wear a shirt like that." He looked down at his chest and said "Wot? It’s just a bloody cartoon." I don’t like the Second Sex, and hate to hang around there, so I got right to the subject. "I don’t want to teach you, Shaky." I said.
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He was trying to light a cigarette, holding the lighter in both hands and still coming dangerously close to lighting his eyebrows on fire. "Woi not?" he asked.
"Because you don’t want to learn."
"I bloody-well do! I’m tired of paying the bloody farang price for everything. And I want to know what these birds are sayin’ about me."
"I’ll save you the time and trouble. They’re saying you’re an idiot."
A comment like that goes right over Shaky Derek’s head. He looked thoughtful and began picking the label off of his beer bottle. "Awroit, then. I’ll just learn by meself. A lot of the blokes talk good as you, I’ll just pick stuff up around the bars, like they did."
"You’ll never learn to speak Thai by throwing darts with a bunch of Eurotrash, man."
"Hell with them," said Shaky Derek. "I’ll have the birds teach me. Wide Wally calls it the 'Sleeping Dictionary' method, an’ he reckons it works a treat."
"That’s probably the dumbest reason for living with a bargirl that there is," I told him. "Teaching is a skill, like skiing or playing the piano. Good teachers are born with a talent, and refine it with years of training and practice. Good teachers are rare, and you never find them dancing naked in bars. Even if by some twist of fate a Miss Jean Brodie or Annie Sullivan was shakin’ her bootie down at the Meat Market, she still wouldn’t teach you any Thai worth knowing. The more independent you are, the less you need her outside the bedroom. By teaching you Thai she’s pushing herself off the gravy train. Most of these girls don’t brush their teeth in the morning if there isn’t a profit in it, and the last thing she needs is a customer who can understand when she’s telling her friends about the stupid noises he makes in bed. In most cases, all a guy learns from his 'Sleeping Dictionary' are the most impolite terms for having sex and moving your bowels."
Shaky Derek pouted for a minute. His hands danced out of control on the bar like a couple of pink spiders on a three-day cocaine binge. His right foot kept tapping the chrome leg of his bar stool: ping-ping-ping-ping... He was a living example of four-dimensional physics, traveling at the speed of light without ever leaving the barstool.
"Bloody Hell." he finally said. "I reckon Murray can teach me. He graduated from the AUA school in Chiang Mai, ya know. I’ve drunk enough beer in his bar to earn a few lessons, I guess."
"Sure," I said. "Murray speaks Kam Muang like a Lannathai prince, and none of these Malay-Chinese bumpkins in Phuket can understand one word of it. He hasn’t left his bar except to rent X-rated videos for five years; study with him and you’ll learn how to say, 'This giant lizard of an ice machine is on the fritz again!' and nothing else."
I swallowed the last of my beer and asked the bartendy, in English, for my bill. Using Thai of any quality in a Soi Bangla bar is a waste of effort; after a year on the job all those girls can make change in Swahili. "So what do I do?" he asked me as I stood up. "Look, man," I answered, "if you’re serious about it, find a Thai public school teacher who needs the extra income and pay him to tutor you. Three hours a week, hundred baht an hour, and in between lessons, watch Thai TV, listen to Thai music, read the Thai newspapers. It can be fun, you know, reading the biographies of the new sing-a-song girls in Phuket Town in the social columns of Siang Dai. Put a little effort into it, Shaky, nothing good comes easy."
My friend, and that’s what he is, I guess, looked down at his vibrating fingers and said "I can’t, mate. Those polite Thais won’t come near me." I looked at him, with his sweaty, muddy Hasher T-shirt and his bleary, blinky eyes. "Aw jeez." I said. "Courage, Camille."
But he was right, damn him, no respectable Asian would spend ten minutes in Shaky Derek’s company. I pulled a copy of Rodh Fai out of my bag and tossed it in his lap. "Study this, you jerk-off. I’ll see you next week. And do the exercises at the end of chapter one, or that’s it, I give up on you." He snatched up the book and flipped it open to a random page, making a big show out of studying chapter six. I sighed and left him there.
When I got home I told Mem about it. Since then she’s been teasing me, calling me Ajarn. Some day I’m going to teach that woman a lesson.
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