First night , tropical paradise

It was California summer when I arrived in Bangkok, the Thai Airways flight gets in late and when I stepped out into the Asian night I expected a blast of tropical heat and was a little disappointed, it was cool and cloudy and I couldn't figure what the big fuss was about, Jack paying me to come over here to save him and his marriage from the dreaded climate. In fact it seemed a lot nicer than my place inHollywood, my little apartment on the top floor of an old LA style wood apartment that heated up like an oven in the middle of the afternoon with the sun blasting down on the tar roof, it was miserable well into the evening when the coastal fog finally moved in. West Coast marine, they called that climate, I remembered that from my junior high geography class.

He and Dah couldn't meet me, they had to go to a funeral in her village but they set me up with a room in this middlebrow hotel, the Taipan, on Soi 23 in this lively neighborhood. Everyone seemed pretty nice at the desk, the girls smiling all the time, Even with some old geezers walking in to the hotel with some surprising looking ladiies. I started walking around the streets around midnight and these girls sitting at bars said Welcome and I saw these massage places where they actually publically advertised on big signs with flashing lights that teen girls would rub your testicles with gel, I couldn't quite believe that, but a guy in a place called the Ship Inn told me that the place was full of Japanese and they went for that kind of thing.

Back at the hotel I couldn't sleep for the jet lag and I started to fool around with some ideas, why my Hollywood place got so hot and so forth, and where I was now in the big picture, down at latitude 13 instead of up around 40 or so in California.

I had found it almost impossible to meet women in Hollywood, no one was interested in a broken down MIT guy there. This seemed like a different world. I fell asleep thinking of Boston Hollywood Bangkok, Boston Hollywood Bangkok. I has a dream of the Puritan days back in Boston, where they hanged a woman, Anne Dyer was her name, because she talked too much about the Quaker religion.

Bangkok looked like a different kind of venue, I wondered what the Puritans would think of this place.