should say hi, but I looked so deep in thought, so they didn’t want to intrude. Just daydreaming, I say, and ask if I can join them. “Sure, of course, pull up a stump,” Puja, the girl I saw earlier doing sun salutations, says. She says “pull up a stump,” because the chairs are not actual chairs, but makeshift tree stumps with cushions. Puja’s boyfriend sits atop a cajón and periodically makes percussive sounds to accent our brief conversation. He extends a hand and introduces himself as Immanuel. Both are a year older than me and come from Canada, but Puja’s parents are Indian and Immanuel was born in Mexico. I tell them I’m going to find some dinner first, but if they’re still here by the time I’m done, then SURE, I’ll join in on the fun. After a surprisingly good Italian dinner in a town with surprisingly mediocre Thai food, I rejoin the couple. We get to talking about the politics of India and she tells me all about how Narendra Modi is a genocidal Xenophobe. I don’t have a strong opinion about Narendra Modi, but I’m enamored by their uncensored projections of passion. Immanuel goes back and forth from bopping on the cajón to plucking on the guitar, and we’re all drinking mug after mug of Chang. The bartender, a short dark-skinned man with small black eyes and a backwards baseball cap, commences the open mic night. He pulls out his guitar and harmonica and is a regular Bob Dylan. He keeps pressuring me to sing, smiling and looking at me and pointing at his guitar and microphone from the tiny makeshift stage. I eventually go up and do two god-awful renditions of The Cranberries’ Zombie and Four Non Blondes’ What’s Up. He keeps switching around the key to try to match it to my voice, and I keep switching around my voice to try to match it to his guitar, and then there’s a frog in my throat. Three Chinese girls come in not too long afterward and sing three Chinese songs. One of the girls sings a very beautiful folk song about the moon, or something heartbreakingly poetic like that. Later a guy named Shua, short for Joshua, shows up and gets on the guitar with his frizzy head of hair and beard, and starts strumming away, singing his heart out. He sings these wonderful, soulful ditties he wrote, like some kind of Southern–sounding Jason Mraz, even though Shua says he’s from Maine. I don’t ask his age. He could be anywhere in his twenties or early thirties, but it doesn’t really matter. Anyway, he moves on to some quirky songs he made up with sing-along-type lyrics. One is about a girl who eats nothing but kale; another is about the different types of vaginas. All of a sudden, a whole swathe of people are piled in this little dive bar and spilling out into the streets, listening to Shua. I bond with Puja over our experiences visiting our respective motherlands. She had spent some
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time in India and says she got a lot of dirty looks from the natives for being an unmarried Indian woman traveling around with Immanuel. It’s apparently OK for Caucasian women, who are not accustomed to the culture, but for a woman of Indian descent, it’s a definite no-no. We’re all drinking up a storm and having a good time. Shua tells me he’d been to Cambodia and Laos before coming to Thailand, and is planning to hitchhike up and down the West Coast when he gets back to the States. I tell him I’ll pick him up if I see him. I swear I’m sober, but I get it in my mind that I might actually pick him up. I had already been planning my great American road trip along the West Coast anyway. At this point, Shua says he only has about 1700 Baht left to his name, but he doesn’t seem a bit worried about it. Eventually, he pulls out a tattered notebook and crooks his left hand to write something in it before handing it to me. I immediately notice his lefthandedness, as all lefties do, before looking at the word “Skin” sloppily written in the heading. “What’s this?” I say. He says he collects poems whenever he gets around a group of people. So I start it off with “the skin I’m in is brown and thin.” Shua follows up with something flowery and profound, and passes it around the room. It comes back around and I laugh at how sexual it got, ending with “will you flock to my cock? I want to drown in your folds.” He tells me that’s how all the poems end up. I have no idea what time it is when Puja and Immanuel declare they are heading back to their bungalow. Puja is clearly drunk, swaying around and giggling. Immanuel has to hold her steady. They tell me they’ll come and visit me the next morning. I inform them of my plans to depart, but maybe we can get some coffee. They take off and suddenly the whole place is deserted. Only Shua, the bartender, and I are left. “Time for me to go,” I say, and Shua says, “Where you going? Let’s hang.” I consider it for a
Uncle Jam Quarterly, Volume 43, #106 Summer 2016