Never Never Gonna Give You Up
THE GODFATHER 3 was a horrible movie; Andy Garcia, Sofia Coppola, and Al Pacino’s wretched line, “No sooner than I think I’m out, then they pulling me back in.”
Unfortunately those words hold personal resonance, for like Michael Corleone’s failure to leave the Mafia, I was unable to end my affair with my mia noi, Mint. Everything was in position for the coup de grace. She had a rich American client down from Bangkok. It was Loy Krathong. She said with conviction. “I have to take care of my babies.”
I wished her good luck and woke the next morning with a tabla rasa or clean slate.
I drove to Ban Samae San to offer my respect to the water goddess at the hilltop temple overlooking the fishing village and the deserted archipelego stretching south into the Gulf of Siam. I struck the bells outside the wat with a wooden mallet. The metallic peals cleared the air and I drove my motorcycle down to the Navy pier.
Several skin-divers were working on the quay’s support pillars.
I hadn’t been in the ocean since my motorcycle accident.
I tell my daughter that we are ’sea people’ or khon talay. She was up morth with my wife. They had no plans on coming down soon, but I only had to prove my love of the sea to myself and dove headfirst from the pier. When I re-surfaced, the Navy skin-divers wore bemused expressions and then laughed, as I explained in Thai that I had finished my mia noi and wanted to wash my body clean of her.
“Mai dai,” the CPO said wisely, for he felt the only way to end it with your mia noi was to have her find you with another woman.
They pulled me aboard their Zodiac and we rode at high speed over to the nearest island. The water was 150-proof vodka clear and the sand powdery as flour. The divers were happy to meet a farang who could speak Thai, if only badly and I ended the day with them with a promise to return the next weekend.
The ride back to Pattaya almost felt entering a new city, until I stopped for gas. My mobile was ringing. It was Mint. I didn’t have the strength to turn off the phone and answered it instead, “Yeah, what?”
“I not go with farang.”
“Why not?”
“Buah.” Like most bargirls she can’t bear to spend more than 30 minutes with a farang. “he not same you.”
And like that Barry White started singing NEVER NEVER GONNA GIVE YOU UP.
20 minutes later I was in her arms, telling her words of love in several languages and meaning most of them, but it was different and the end will come someday soon despite what Barry White says.
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