McPherson James M - The War Nerd Dispatches

Cover Illustration: Brad Jonas

Published by Not Safe For Work Corporation

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When I heard that NSFWCORP was going to issue a collection of War Nerd columns, I went back and looked at what Id written since I started writing for NSFWCORP in September 2012.

Back then, my wife and I were planning to go back to Najran, in southwestern Saudi Arabia, to earn some money teaching ESL to The Empty Quarter, as a colleague of ours used to call our male students. Wed planned to return to Najran in August 2012, but the Saudi visa agency messed up our Iqamas (resident visas) and we were treading water and bleeding cash, wondering when, if ever, wed be granted the tremendous favor of returning to one of the bleakest, most repressive places on earth.
We were in Bangkok, mainly because its cheap there, emailing our boss at Najran university every day and watching our little cash cache dwindle by the day, when Mark Ames called and told me there was a chance that NSFWCORP, the new online journal he co-edited with Paul Carr, might want to hire The War Nerd, with a side order of Dolan now and then. (Dolans never been as popular as Brecher, which makes total sense to me; even I like Brecher better than that pompous windbag Dolan.)

We were wary; if you do this web journalism thing for any length of time, you get so jaundiced about possible job offers that your minds eye turns yellow. But we didnt have a lot of other options; the Saudi visa bureaucracy makes the Russian one seem as quick and efficient as a Mossad hit team, which meant we might wait for months in that Bangkok hotel.

And about that hotel See, I trusted TripAdvisor. Went to their site, typed Bangkok hotels, and looked in the top ten for one that had a high rating and a cheap rate. The one I found was called the Dynasty Nana. Now, Im sure some of you worldly ol degenerates out thereand I mean degenerates in the most flattering sense of the wordare already hooting at me for booking a Bangkok hotel with Nana in its name. But Imjeez, this is going to ruin my image, but its the truth: Im a lot less decadent than people think, and though Id been in Bangkok several times before, I didnt go there to pick up prostitutes, so I didnt know that Nana is what our euphemism-loving elders used to call the red-light district in Bangkok. Which is like saying its whoredom squared, the whore-y part of the whore-iest city on the planet.

I didnt know that. Hey, Im a war pundit, not a whore pundit. Not my field, as the farmer said when his least-favorite neighbors crop got napalmed. I just went with TripAdvisor, which rated Dynasty Nana #3, the only one in their top ten that fit our budget. Truth is, I was feeling kind of proud of myself, all this unwonted efficiency I was displaying as a trip planner. A regular Rick Stevens, or whatever that epicene Canuck who does travel peep shows calls himself.

We got a taxi from the airportthe driver did look a little surprised, and kept squinting back at Katherine to see if she had hidden depths of depravity he hadnt noticed at first glance, but he knew the way to Dynasty Nana, all right. Oh, he knew that route! Every taxi driver in Bangkok has been putting his kids through private school by shuttling a certain type of middle-aged European divorced male to that address. We didnt seem to fit the profile, but he had probably long since consigned Westerners of all genders and facades to the same Buddhist Hell of those who are slaves to the flesh.

We were still expecting to pull up in front of a cool, inexpensive boutique hotel, the kind where you maybe have to walk up a few flights of stairs, but the teakwood and ceiling fans and such-like atmospherics make it all worthwhile.

Instead, the driver zips across a wide street into a landscape of such ridiculously exaggerated debauchery that I thought, with a last desperate hope, that it had to be a joke or a film set, some bad Hollywood movie about expat Nam vets going to the dogs and dope in Bangkok.

Nana is a little street, a Soi (sidestreet) off one of the big boulevards. Not a big neighborhood, but that just means that a huge volume of Thai prostitutes and Northern European bulk buyers of Cialis have to transact their business in a single block.

To get to the Dynasty sign we could see down the block, we had to trundle our heavy suitcases past some of the dirtiest, saddest bars Ive ever seen. And Im not one of those liars who calls porn boring or affects pity for women who make a living at sex. No, a lot of decadence is wonderful, glorious, a credit to the order Mammaliaclever primate tech embiggening our mammal lusts, shining up a basic drive.

Not Nana. Nana is honestly depressing. Of course it was mid-afternoon, and bars are always pretty sad in bright sunlight, but the bars that formed a gauntlet between us and our hotelthey would have made Sade take Holy Orders, they were so awful.

These bars as like filter feeders on a reef; they have wooden balconies pushed far out over the filthy sidewalk, so the prostitutes can grab at potential clients as they pass. So they all crowd the edge of the balcony, and they all try to get your attention with English phrases, which dont improve by being processed through Thai inflections. The only way I can describe it is how a tired duck would sound, trying to get a big-spenders attention while jostling for position among other hungry ducks (as it were), all of them doing a really bad joba REALLY bad jobof miming lust for the aging white men who pass.
Hey Mister was popular, as was You want to have fun? I very much did not want to have fun, actually. I wanted to get the goddamn suitcases down the block, and they kept catching in the broken, wet sidewalk while big loud Aussies and sad pale German bachelors pushed past us, all of them making me instantly ashamed of belonging to their gender.

There were more of these men in the lobby of the Dynasty. They never left that lobby for the long month we spent there, waiting for Saudi to get around to issuing our visas. They had a look Ive never seen before. They all seemed to be North European, German or Dutch or Scandinavian. The youngest were in their forties, the oldest pushing 70, trusting to Cialis and some pitiful notion of Asian eroticism to grant them one last tango in Bangkok.

They looked at us as we trundled in off the street; they didnt seem embarrassed, which surprised meI sure wouldve beenbut they were so pitiful, so blank, that they couldve played extras in Houllebecqs Elementary Particles without makeup. They were zombies, corpses from the death of Europe, the death of maleness, the death of whatever the fuck you wantand yet they were sitting in that lobby waiting for the evening, so they could go out and pick up another single mom from the impoverished Isaan provinces, where a girl can either pick mangoes in the heat for basically nothing, or go to Bangkok and learn a few flattering lies in English, theas they sayworld language.

That set the ol tone, all right, that glimpse of dead Europe wandering around the Dynastys lobby like senile, vaguely lustful carp. They werent even ugly, these men; they were well-preserved compared to Americans their age, which made me think more fondly and respectfully of my fellow fat American men, who whatever else they may do, dont infest the lobby of the Dynasty Nana waiting for zombie sex. Zombie sex is impressive when salmon do it; on primates its just awful. Yes, awful is the best word here. Not sad, not shocking, just awful.

The porter showed us up to our room, with that same mild, polite surprise that Id brought an attractive Western woman with me: This guys a real weirdo, he must have thought, which was not exactly true; not a weirdo, just an idiot.