MangoZeen

Wall Street collapsed this fall. The whys were discussed by countless TV analysts. None of them seemed to make any sense of the collapse and the government appeared out of touch with the economic disaster. The catastrophe had no effect on me. I was broke, despite having lived the past three months in Palm Beach, so I couldn’t have been happier to have been invited by my doctor to join him for dinner at the Strip House on East 13th Street. A pharmaceutical company was picking up the tab.

“Just bring a good appetite.” My doctor suggested and I always follow his instructions on matters of health. “Be on time too.”

I arrived three minutes before the appointed time and was led into the red-lit restaurant by an attractive hostess. My doctor introduced the two reps. They were in suits. I guessed their age to be 30. Both enjoyed selling their production. The medicine was aimed at reducing cholesterol in men. The tables in the restaurant were swelling with meat-hungry men. Most looked to be perfect candidates for this drug.

“A steak house is a funny place to promote that.” My LDL (Bad) Cholesterol Level was 110 according to my last check-up. I could eat anything.

“I play hockey three times a week,” boasted the younger rep. Jim was from New Hampshire. He was in better shape than I had ever been in my life. “I ran a marathon last month. I eat what I want.”

“I’m not so lucky.” His partner was drinking Diet-Coke. Mike’s LDL was in the 200s. He ordered the 12 oz. shell steak. “I’m trying to cut down, but I suggest the 23 oz. rib eye.”

It was a giant slab of meat. Mine was medium raw.

“What about when you visit Dr. Martini?” My doctor had been in practice with this GP.

“Damn, he eats like the world is going to end tomorrow.” Jim described the portly doctor scarfing down two steaks, a plate of clams, three bottles of wine, dessert, and several gin and tonics. “And then we went back to work.”

“It’s a good thing he was operating heavy machinery.” My doctor joked, but barely touched his wine throughout the meal. In his mind if they talked about Dr. Martini, then they would talk about him. My doctor maneuvered the conversation away from doctors and medicine to sports, then family, and finally my housesitting in Palm Beach. “He was staying in a mansion on the beach.”

“It was a modest mansion and I had to take care of a crazy Airedale.” Pom-Pom had been rescued from a crack house. It took the better part of two months to teach her how not to attack me. “Afterward she wanted to sleep in my bed. It was a good thing she as spaded.”

“I would have thought you found an old heiress.” My doctor had held high hopes for my marrying a billionairess with an open heart.

“Nope, only a crazy dog.’

“Well, a dog is the only animal that loves you more than it loves itself.” Jim was finishing his steak. I had barely consumed half and signaled the waiter for a doggie bag. None of the other diners seemed to be having trouble with their meals.

“I wasn’t so sure about Pom-Pom. She was a little vicious.” Actually Pom-Pom was on probation by the Palm Beach Police. “She had attacked two dogs in the last year. Her owner was scared she would be put down. I was lucky nothing bad happened.”

“You were lucky, but not so my old girlfriend.” Jim waved for the dessert menu. “She was up in Arlington, Mass. on the Green Line.”

Being a Boston native I was familiar with that trolley line.

“My girlfriend was asked to take care of this old Lab. The family was going to Italy. They didn’t want to put her in a kennel. My girlfriend thought it would be easy and it was for the first week, then one morning she comes in the house and the dog is lying on the floor. It isn’t moving. It’s dead.”

“Bad dog.” His partner had heard the story before but obviously enjoyed every re-telling.

“My girlfriend calls the family a little freaked out, except they’re cool with it. The dog was old. They tell her to call the vet and he’ll take care of the body. The vet is two stops away on the trolley. The Lab weighs about 80 lbs., so she puts the body in a luggage bag, you know, the kind with wheels. She rolls the bag out of the house and struggle down the street to the station. A young man helps her up the stairs and onto the trolley. When she gets off, he says he’ll help her. She thanks him for his effort and once they get of the main street, he says that the bag is really heavy and asks what’s in it. My girlfriend doesn’t want to say a dead dog, so she tells him its computer equipment. The good Samaritan punches her once and runs away with the bag. When she comes to, he’s gone. Good-bye, dog.

“That’s a horrible story.” My doctor had a Lab.

“And I wish it had a good ending.” Jim had told this story countless times without ever fabricating a punchline. “She was even more freaked out about the dead dog being stolen than it being dead.”

“What about the family?”

“The vet gave them ashes from a pit bull. They buried it in the backyard. My girlfriend thought she should tell them the truth. I stopped going out with her before I found out what happened in the end.”

“She probably told them.” Most people can’t keep their mouths shut and I ordered a 12 year-old port. It was delicious and the next morning I ate the rest of the rib eye for breakfast ever so glad I didn’t have to share it with Pom-Pom. She was living in Palm Beach and dogs down there don’t have to worry about the collapse of the world economic institutions. In fact no dogs do, especially dead ones.

Bar fines in Pattaya have been stable for the last 10 years. Bar girls 200-400 baht depending on the hour and popularity of the girl and 500-600 baht for go-go girls, the higher price being for show girls, however owners concerned about the decimation of their bar staff, as love-starved farangs find love in the arms of the go-go girl or bar girl. By midnight many bars suffer a 50% reduction in staff and most of those girls are the stars of the night.

“I can’t keep girls in the bar,” one owner complained last high season. “It’d be one thing if it was only for the night, but these guys bar-fine the girls and then I never see the girls again, except when they drop off their uniforms.”

Bar owners along Walking Street has responded to this problem by inflating bar fines 300% to 1500 baht. Of course not all that money goes to the owners. They magnanimously bequeath 100 baht to the object of the bar-finer’s attention. Most Pattaya veterans balk at dropping approx. $50 of a one-nighter and invest the majority of their funds on strengthening their beer goggles. With those extra 10 beers, everyone is beautiful.

Personally after that many beers I don’t want to go home with anyone, even myself.

For a detailed barfine chart visit www.pattayaghost.com

A CBS reporter Dean Reynolds has been traveling with the McCain campaign. While the ‘Maverick’ might struggle with tele-prompters and cue cards, the reporter reveals that the Arizona senator’s day seems better scheduled than Obama’s hectic pace. Only one event a day and also that McCain’s plane smells better than Obama’s press plane.

Smells better.

Obviously this assault on his nose has to be a left-wing terrorist plot by Obama’s secret Weather Underground cult. Sarah Palin’s plane must smell nice. I betcha.

After Valentine’s Day business on 47th Street gets really slow. Customers are blown away by the arctic winds howling down Manhattan’s avenues and purchasing a diamond is the last thing on most people’s mind in the dead of winter. Some days no one enters the diamond exchange. At least no one with an honest intention of buying jewelry.

Once we set up the counters and front window, the standard procedure was to plod through the repairs and pick-ups from the setters and polishers. Those tasks usually lasted up to lunch, but not in the last days of February. By 11am Richie Boy, his longtime employee Domingo, and I were standing around the space heater shooting the shit. Richie Boy’s brother was on vacation. Manny, my boss and Richie Boy’s father, wasn’t happy with our obvious idleness.

“I might as well hired three brooms than you heroes.” Manny hates his help doing nothing.

“There aren’t any customers. What else should we do? Get down on our knees and pray for customers?” Richie Boy’s clientele came from his going out at night. None of them were getting out of bed before noon or out of work until lunch.

“Maybe that would do us some good.” Manny pointed to Domingo and me. “I got two goys. Both of you must know some prayers for getting money. Who’s the patron saint for money.”

“St. Matthew is the patron saint of money managers. He doesn’t really count.” I had been an altar and a good Catholic in my youth. Some of the nuns learning still stuck with me. “Saint Agatha is the patron saint of jewelers. She was martyred for refusing the sexual advances of a Roman. Her body is supposedly incorruptible.”

“Bleech.” The thought of a 2000 year-old virgin corpse disgusted Manny. “But say a little prayer to here. You too, Domingo.”

“I don’t know any prayers.” Domingo had dropped out of Sunday school in 2d grade.

“Say something. We need money.”

I muttered out several words to St. Agatha in hopes of making a sale, but stopped before saying how much cash I wanted, because lunch had arrived from the Chinese take-out.

“Great, first I have bullshitters and now I have loafers.”

“A man has to eat.” Richie Boy was paying for lunch. Domingo was good at tearing open the paper bag. He was always hungry. “Who ordered General Tso’s chicken?”

“Me.” I loved the succulent meat covered with crunchy batter and the sweet tang of the sauce. None of us ever mentioned the source of the meat after whoever ordered the General Tso’s chicken had finished their meal. It was just good manners.

“What about me?” Manny asked from his desk. The surface was cluttering with bills, invoices, and folded packets of loose diamonds. He never seemed to make any progress on this pile.

“What you order?” Richie Boy pulled out his order of dim sum.

“Nothing.” Manny had said earlier that he didn’t want anything.

“Then you get nothing chow mein, fat boy.” Richie poked his father’s belly. A good three inches of fat hung over his belt. He liked his food.

“Great.” Manny threw down his pen. “I pay everyone to do nothing and I get to starve.”

“You’re not going to starve. We ordered you Moo Sho Pork.” Richie put Manny’s food on the counter. “Eat here.”

“I’ll eat at my desk.” Manny started pushing his papers aside.

“No you won’t. Last time you did that you ate a diamond with a dumpling.”

“It was only a twenty-pointer.” Manny remembered everything that he had ever done with diamonds. “And I found it two days later.”

“Don’t tell us where. We’re eating.” Richie Boy had a delicate stomach.

Manny stood up and put a paper towel under his collar. His tie was Armani. Mine was Cerruti. I ate at my desk with a real fork and spoon. Something about eating with Richie was on the phone with his wife. He mumbled out his apologies. He had had a late night last evening.

“Were you with my son last night?” Manny was making a small crepe from the pancake accompanying the Moo Shu Pork.

“Only until midnight, then we both went home.” I had left Richie Boy at 11. I had no idea what time he went home.

“You’re a good friend, but a bad liar.” Manny crammed the Moo Shu Pork into his mouth. The sauce dripped on the counter. Pork was tref to most Jews, but Manny, Richie Boy, and everyone from our partners’ firm were bacon Jews. They loved the taste of pork.

“Manny, when you were a kid, did your mother let you eat pork?”

“I’m from Brownsville. We couldn’t afford pork. My mother covered everything in a gravy. I had no idea what we ate. It could have been cat same as that General Tso’s Chicken.”

“Thanks.” I put down my fork.

“What you think a Chinaman is going to serve you cat?”

“There are no cats in Chinatown.” Richie Boy shouted from his desk. “We were on Canal Street 20 years and I never saw a single cat and the Italians in Little Italy never let their cats out of the house. Cat very good General Tso’s Chicken.”

“If it’s cat, I have to admit cat tastes pretty damn good, but I have a question for you. Why do Jews like Chinese food so much?”

“Because it’s cheap.” Richie Boy never went to Chinese restaurants. He was more into Italian.

“It has nothing to do with the money. Chinese culture and Jewish culture go back thousands of years. We know each other since Adam.”

“Marco Polo found Jews in China.”

“Probably from one of the lost tribes. My father said we were a lost tribe in America. He was right, but we found China in Brooklyn. When I was a kid, there were Chinese restaurants on every corner and every Sunday the Chinese restaurants were crowded with families. We never went, because my father was so poor, but sometimes my father would treat us with take-out. We ate on paper plates, but my mother would hide them, so the neighbors wouldn’t know we were so poor. Like she was fooling anyone.”

“So you went, because it was cheap.” Richie Boy wasn’t letting go. Manny liked to save money. He wore the same shirt twice. To prevent his collars from getting dirty, Manny placed a paper towel between his neck and his collar. We called it his ’sweat rag’.

“Sure, it was cheap, but it was also good, plus we ate pork, because eating forbidden foods showed we were Americans. My father never mixed dairy and meat, which the Chinese rarely combine, plus he never ate pork, except at Chinese restaurants. He wouldn’t even look at the menu. he’d order #3. Pork Chow Mein. The waiter would say, “#3 and never mention pork. They were respectful that way. Number two, Chinese weren’t goys. At an Italian restaurant there was a always a cross. How can you eat at a restaurant with a Jew nailed to the wall. Feh. But Buddha, he always had a smile and as kids we rubbed his stomach for good luck.”

“I thought you said you didn’t eat at restaurants.” I thought I had caught Manny on this, but he shook his head. “What you think we had telephones back then. Take-out meant you went to the restaurant, ordered, and brought the food home and another thing we weren’t Jews to the Chinese. They thought all white people looked the same, so we were the same as everyone, because they couldn’t care less about anyone as long as you had money.”

“So you never ate in a Chinese restaurant as a kid?” Richie was finished with his dumplings.

“I never said never. We went on Christmas, because they’d be no one there and afterwards we’d go to the movies. Also no one there. My old man didn’t like waiting for nothing.” Manny made himself another crepe. He was an expert. “Stop looking at my food. If there’s anything I hate, it’s a schnorrer.”

“Your son is the worst in here.”

“Only because he studied with the best.” Manny bit into the pancake loaded with pork and pointed to the door. Two customers were coming out of the cold. A man and woman. My prayer to St. Agatha had come through. “Enough talk. Work.”

“You got it.” I put away my food before Richie Boy or Domingo could get out of their chairs. I was hungry for money and ‘nimmt geld’ or tale money was the first rule of 47th Street. I could eat my lunch later. Chinese food always tastes better with a little money in your pocket. Even cold.

In response to the bad press from the fictional account of a Belgian TV Show Matrioshki Matroesjka’s 2, Thai authorities have clamped down on Pattaya’s Soi 6. The popular TV program portrays sexual trafficking around the world, as girls from the Ukraine, Lithuania, and Thailand are used by Belgian gangsters to transport drugs and sex. One sequence featured evil mama-sans chaining innocent country girls to beds for sex with middle-aged sex tourists. The location was Soi 6.

In order to protect the good image of Thailand, City Hall has decreed that Soi 6 bars can only operate from 6pm-1am and none of the girls can accost men on the street. Fines for violations can be up to 50,000 baht.

www.pattayaghost.com covers the story in sad detail.

Where is the wickedness?

Watch this trailer from Matrioshki Matroesjka’s 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMqhm17unOY

The story should sound familiar to ST visitors.

Thailand has been under siege by anti-government protesters since the last election. The army refused to use violence against the demonstrators, while also swearing to not stage a coup against the pro-Thaksin coalition. This confrontation was strictly between the two political parties, until Tuesday morning when the city police pearl-harbored the supporters of the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) at the country’s parliament.

The use of tear gas and clubs of the nearly 5000 people outside Government House was authorized by the Prime Minister and Defense Minister Somchai Wongsawat. Thaksin’s brother-in-law had been operating out of the old airport Don Muang and wanted to resume normalcy even if it cost lives. In this case at least two with hundreds injured in the early morning melee.

In the wake of the violence Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat has refused any calls to step down from his position. His Deputy Prime Minister Chavalit Yongchaiyudh has already left the house. He knows when to fold his hand and he should, since he’s done it so many times before.

An Army spokesman reiterated the position of the military.

“The army is concerned about the incident. Demonstrators who did not carry weapons did not deserve to be harmed. I can confirm that the army remains strictly neutral.”

Meanwhile the man behind the scenes Thaksin Shinawatra has filed for asylum.

Old Blue Eyes knows when to call it quits too.

A recent study found the average American walks about 900 miles a year.

Another study found Americans drink, on the average, 22 gallons of alcohol a year.

That means, on average, Americans get about 41 miles to the gallon.

Makes You Proud To Be An American!

Last weekend our friend from Iceland came into the city for a show. His art work represented his belief that everything is being destroyed soon after its moment of creation.

“Or even before that.” Gutjon wasn’t sure when the cycle of chaos began or ended, however his native Iceland has won the undesirable title of first nation to go bust in this global financial debacle.

The national debt is $30,000 per capita. The Kroner lost half its value. Banks went bust. The SE shut down. ATMs froze.

Everything was fucked.

Djofull or Damn.

Gutjon responded to the crisis by drinking in true Viking style.

Early and often.

Guess it’s back to fishing.

Watch out you whales.