Pattaya attracts oddball characters almost by definition. Crazy places attract crazies. Some are immediately obvious as they wander round in their charity shop cast-offs with a look of intense preoccupation on their faces and prone to a twitchy mannerism or two. Others, including probably some of the scariest, are not obvious at all and, well, could be me or you.
The only distinctly odd person I ever got to know well was very much in the former category. I was sitting alone on Dongtan beach one afternoon minding my own business when a gaunt elderly figure in shabby clothes approached. With his shock of white hair and wild eyes he seemed to be looking round for someone to talk to. I did what any of us would do in similar circumstances and pretended to find my feet of sudden overwhelming interest. But there was to be no escape. He addressed some pleasantry at me in a lilting Welsh voice and I felt obliged to respond. Soon he was sitting next to me and a conversation began. It turned out that he was a retired professor of Russian with a wife and grown-up children back in England and spent six months a year in Thailand on the pretext of doing some writing. One or two of you may remember him since he was quite gregarious. I'll call him Owen for present purposes. His visits ceased several years ago now because of failing health.
He seemed to like my company and got into the habit of joining me regularly at the beach. He was a serious-minded person and we had long discussions about religion and politics. He told me interesting stories about his difficult working-class childhood in Swansea. There was never any doubt, though, as to his main reason for being in Pattaya. His eyes would grow bright and feverish when he talked about the boys he had had sex with. There was a clinical turn to his language at such times which I found rather unsettling. He didn't fuck boys, he 'penetrated' them. Any mention of the word 'buttocks' would immediately send him into a kind of trance. He kept a written record of every boy he had been with, marks given in various categories.
He could be kind-hearted and humorous and I grew to quite like him despite his quirks. We would meet for occasional meals but that could be disconcerting too. He was teaching himself Thai, too stingy to employ a tutor, and as a result, while his vocabulary was quite large, his pronunciation was awful. At our meals he insisted on ordering his food in Thai and the poor waiter would sometimes be reduced to begging him to speak in English, which he was most reluctant to do. When getting off a song theaw he would give the driver five baht instead of ten, claiming that that was what Thais paid. Harsh words would follow and eventually he would just walk away, lucky in my experience never to be pursued by a driver with a meat cleaver. Dogs would growl or bark at him when he passed, correctly surmising that he was no dog lover.
I never accompanied him to gogo bars, which was perhaps just as well in view of the reports I heard of his detailed inspections of the goods prior to offing boys. There was a Thai security guard in his thirties that he saw regularly, though they didn't go out together much and I never met him. From Owen's occasional wistful descriptions of the relationship it was obviously not very satisfying beyond the fact that the guard loved being 'penetrated'. Owen's attempts at showing affection were apparently met with indifference or surliness. He would chuckle in mild embarrassment whenever he talked about it. He liked to regale me with tales of farangs who had made complete fools of themselves by throwing money at boys to try to win their love, until they were impoverished themselves. There was never any danger of Owen suffering that fate. Sometimes I would see him sitting alone at a host bar late at night looking like nothing so much as a lost, tormented soul. He always referred to Pattaya as 'a sad paradise'.
He became known to farang friends of mine over the years and we all acquired our favourite Owen stories. He visited one friend and, because it was a particularly hot day, asked if it was all right to remove his trousers. My friend politely asked him not to and rushed over to turn on the air conditioning. Another friend just had a towel round his middle after a shower when Owen arrived. A lunge at my friend's rear end caused Owen to be banned indefinitely from that apartment. I would have felt left out without a similar tale to tell. One day he visited me at my home in London. As I was sitting at the kitchen table he gave me an awkward hug from behind and muttered into my ear, 'Oh, I do like you, Peter.' I had to be at my prim maiden aunt best to get out of that one.
We used to stay in the same condo building fronting the beach in Jomtien. One day Owen told me of a very unpleasant experience he had had at the swimming pool the previous day. He had been showering after a swim and had put his hand into his trunks to wash his private parts (the way one does) when a German guy sitting at a nearby table with his young family had angrily accused him of exposing himself. Quite a row had ensued. Owen's eyes blazed with indignation at the recollection. I nodded sympathetically, not entirely convinced by his version of events but willing to suspend judgment. A few days later I went to his apartment to return a book. The door was half open and I was about to knock and enter when I spotted Owen sitting bollock-naked at his desk over by the window. He was staring blankly at the wall in front of him. My clenched hand came to a halt in mid-air and I turned and quietly absented myself.
I heard not long ago that Owen had died in a London hospital. I can't say the news made a big impact on me for we had drifted apart during his last few visits to Pattaya, but I was a little saddened. Like all of us he was a complex person, certainly not all good but not all bad either. He was a driven man and I hope he has found a little of the peace which eluded him in this world.
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Originally Posted by snotface
