[Frenchmen is a book written in 2015. It’s a story about desire, Buddhist theory and the ultimate results of death and rebirth. This chapter was written before King Bhumipol passed away in December 2016]
Chapter 3
Train Heaven
I went to Hua Lumpong, the central train station in Bangkok, to purchase a ticket to Chiangmai. Unfortunately, all of the sleeper cars were sold out over the next several days. I had to settle for a second class seat. Knowing that the seats recline and the windows open gave me some consolation. Air-conditioned cars with there way-too-cold controlled air and little contact with locals is not my style.
I arrived at the station early not knowing – I should say having forgotten – the exact protocol for boarding. I sat in a long double block of padded backed seats set out for waiting passengers. There was a large assortment.
With the the advent of bus and plane travel these days, most people who opt for the train are poor, foreign or romantics. I fit every category.
Framed Royals
In celebration of the Queen Sirikit’s birthday, large propagandistic individual images of the king, the queen, the crown prince and princess were set on large, stepped pedestals at the front of the station. At least ten wide by twenty feet high each they spanned the entire width of the place. They were framed in elaborate, baroque-style gold frames. But then again, the frames were framed again with leaves, intricately folded into cones. They were then again interlaced with orchids and tuberoses.
One could detect their scent at the far end of the cacophonous glass and steel station.
The royal family is a huge subject here.
Spanning the longest reign of any monarch in the world, King Bhumipol is loved and adored and, as far as I can tell, rightfully so. It is rumored that the Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn, heir to the throne, is somewhat of a cad and philanderer. Having married three times, he divorced twice and fathered seven children. The majority of the populace love and revere Princess Ubolratana Rajakanya, the eldest princess.
With the king approaching 90 and the current government in crisis, a military coup and take over in 2014 and the recent Erewan Shrine bombing, there is no telling what will come of it all, when the king passes away.
Even with the current political turmoil, the people at large love their Royal Family. Regardless of who ascends the throne, the family will more than likely continue to reign with the current prince as the tenth king in the Chakri Dynasty.
For more on the 2019 Coronation: A Royal Coronation – I A Royal Coronation – II Coronation Nation – III LadyBoy’s & Orchids – IV Coronation Day – The King Cometh – V
The Train
Impatient and tired of the royal propagandistic din, I took my knapsack then passed through the large double doors that lead to the platforms and trains. To my great relief my train was already at its platform. Before it had been officially announced, people were boarding. I joined the few passengers walking the platform passing by the air conditioned cars and looking for Second Class, Car 3.
Finding it, I boarded and found my seat about a quarter of the way into the car. My seat was by the wood framed window, which was already opened and set. I put my pack in the rack above and sat down in the padded, Naugahyde-covered seat. There were oscillating fans affixed to the sea-foam green ceiling that sent out an occasional breeze.
This was perfect.
With only ten minutes before the train was set to depart, there were only five other people who boarded Car 3. The prospects of two seats on the on the overnight, 15 hour trip loomed large. I settled in and watched people walk the platform – bags, backpacks, snacks and sometimes children in tow.
Cacophony is a French Word
Then, there was a sudden escalating chatter of voices. As they got nearer I recognized the language as French. Before I knew what had happened to Car 3 – my Car 3! – it was overtaken by sixty or more French college students.
They excitedly boarded throwing their packs everywhere, scrambling over their stuff and each other to find seats, friends and to figure out the mini-social structure that all older teens must establish and put into play.
People swapped seats, yelled over each other and swapped seats again. They ranged in that awkward 15 to 19 years of age and began to pair themselves mostly by age and sex. The boys seemed too insecure of themselves to sit with a girl. The girls too shy or uninterested to sit with a boy. While all of this sorting out of seats was happening the train jolted to a start which elicited screams. Loud exclamations of surprise came from everyone.
This, of course, all sounded much better in French. And we were off.
Occupied Beauty
As the train exited the station and things settled down, the seat next to me was still unoccupied. Just maybe my luck would hold. Then this guy, who looked a bit lost and confused, like the one left out after everyone else sits down during musical chairs, came walking down the aisle toward the vacant seat. He stood in the aisle next to the seat, looked at me and raised his eyebrows with that universal ‘Is it OK?’ gesture and I said,
“D’accord”.
He sat down.
In most cases I would count this as an unlucky turn of events but in this case, this guy – this man – this human, was, hands down, one of the most exquisite people I have laid eyes on. This really didn’t register until he sat down and turned, looked at me and said one word,
“Merci.”
He was at that age when boys turn into men – he must have been 18 or 19 – and are just beginning to test their securities and opinions in the world. He began to joke with two guys, friends sitting opposite the aisle. When they began to make fun of him he immediately ignored them and left them to their own juvenile tendencies. He seemed a bit tense and annoyed so as to relieve some of the tension I asked,
“Parle vous Anglaise?”
“No, onlee varri littel .”
Wheezing
As soon as he answered a girl one row behind us on the opposite side began to make low, wheezing sounds that were disturbing; increasingly so as they escalated to an almost panic. She was in so much stress that even her teenage angst wouldn’t or couldn’t prevent her from focusing completely on the task at hand – inhaling in short, loud gasps in order to stay alive. The boy next to me started yelling,
“Stephanie, Stephanie!”
Catching the attention of a young woman who was trying to settle some kids at the front end of the coach, he waved her back. She came and tried to calm the hyperventilating girl who was obviously asthmatic.
Calm Amidst Severity
I was a bit shocked at the severity of her gasping intake of breath and if she were my charge I’d be all Stop The Train! Call a Doctor! But everyone seemed pretty nonchalant and calm. Even with many of her classmates craning their necks and kneeling on seats to get a better look, it became apparent that this had happened before. It was maybe somewhat routine. Her rasping gasps eventually quieted but she continued to inhale in short, quick breaths.
By that time everyone had returned to their seats and the girl sat there, her head doubled over on the tray in front of her, fighting for air and left alone.
While all of this was happening , I was observing my new seat mate. As he twisted around he talked to Stephanie, who was trying to help the asthmatic girl.
Renaissance Man
He was tall for a Frenchman, maybe 5’10”. He had one of those lean bodies that have enough muscle so as to not look skinny. Catching the side of his face he had downy hair that extended down from where his thick sideburns would eventually be. It tapered off as it went over his cheekbone toward his upper jaw. He had maybe tried shaving a few times but really didn’t need to, just yet, with any regularity. There was the same downy hair above his upper lip that appeared thicker in the furrow that dips down between the lips peaks, right below the narrow bridge that divides the nostrils. It was all blondish brown in color. On the right side of his head his dark brown hair was parted from the front to a cowlick in back. It was thick and maintained a certain, irregular wave that gave him a bit of a disheveled look.
Flawless Panels
His skin was flawless. Oil paints can achieve these pale undertones when thinned with linseed oil and layered over and over. The whole surface gains transparency and luminousness. His whole countenance was of one such renaissance portrait.
From where I sat, his profile could have easily been the model for such a painted panel.
_________________________ All of us, men and women, find ourselves effaced by such youth and beauty. Though we may never see them again, we carry their presence in our memories. They become the dreams of what we long and hope for. Dreams that are never met - or met on rare occasions on a night-train in a foreign country, far away from our real world. Far away from people we truly know and love. __________________________
He wore a loose white tank-top that that exposed his shoulders and his armpits from which hair, that matched the color of the hair on his head, protruded. His collarbone undulated from his shoulder away from me and surfaced proud again at the base of his long neck above which his Adam’s apple protruded and, like a bobbin on a fish line, jerked with no apparent regularity with his voice or swallow.
On his left shoulder, facing me, there were two moles. One mole in front and one in back. It was if he had been pierced through with mole-marks left behind. When he turned to speak he also had a mole above the right corner of his mouth that the down of his mustache couldn’t yet cover. I glanced down and saw he was wearing blue shorts that were cuffed. There, on his his inner right thigh just above his knee was another mole. All of these beauty spots created a constellation of sorts that anyone would want to explore and fathom, in hopes of discovering more.
His eyes were light gray. Iris outer edges were stippled with a dark ocher rings that barely penetrated into the gray. I can’t say I’ve ever seen irises of such color. His pupils, like the dark depth of his moles, were in such contrast against the gray that they became a sort of a black hole of anti-light. If one weren’t careful, they could suck you into their depths and you would collapse into anti-matter so small that even gods eye couldn’t see you.
Children of the Factory Workers
Like the sun emerging from behind a cloud, he had one of those crooked smiles that lifted at one corner before breaking into its full and symmetrical display. When he spoke his lips would contract to a point, almost a pucker, common with French speakers and their fucking, irreproachable vowels. In the simplest of terms I asked him who the group of students were that he was traveling with. After consulting with his classmates across the aisle he turned and looked at me. With pride, in all sincerity and heavily accented French he said,
“We are the Children of the Factory Workers!”
Then he spoke to his classmates again and one of them leaned over and said,
“Summer Camp.”
The simple conversation revealed that last year they had all gone to Vietnam together. The girl behind us was indeed asthmatic. His name was Francois. This was their final vacation as graduates. From this trip their lives would separate to jobs and/or college.
With broken, heavily accented English, information was gleaned very slowly. It made it all the more engaging.
Track Life
While this conversation was happening the train slowly made its way through central Bangkok.
Coming to occasional halts they would let other trains pass or to change rails. Long red and white banded booms would lower electronically down. Flashing across wide avenues with traffic backed up in both directions, the car headlights strobed the trains interior and Francois face. Sometimes the train would move at a snails pace.
Shanty towns lined the tracks, built with leftover building materials of bamboo and woven palm frond walls. Rickety verandas stilted over canals. Barely able to walk babies, all naked and powder smeared, were forced to wave by the adults. Women in breast-tucked sarongs worked over woks or grilled small fish on charcoal braziers. Old, sun-wizened men sat bare chested with their heavy gold chains, Buddhist amulets and tattoos. In their crotch-tucked plaid wraps, they sat lotus style, on handmade mats of woven rice-straw. They drank cheap, homemade rice whiskey, smoked hand-rolled cheroots around a flaming kerosene lamp.
The lamp buzzed dizzyingly with lace-winged termites all out to mate in the humid, pre-monsoon air.
Open Country
It took nearly an hour before we cleared the Bangkok outskirts. The country started to open up to farms and fields of rice. Coconut palms silhouetted black against the deepening night sky. The train now raced past small lanes. Guards in small station posts hand-lowered long, tapered booms. The rain-fresh country air finally flowed freely through the car and with it the smell of buffalo plowed earth, winnowed rice, the mulch and compost of thousands of years of cultivation and toil in the sun.
Once we cleared the city and sped north for another half hour or so, we stopped at the Autthaya station, the ancient capital, where a few more passengers boarded.
Thousands of years of cultivation and toil in the sun
Merde!
Underway again, three or four train conductors suddenly appeared behind us in the train car. They began to check everyone’s tickets. Instead of assigned seats, all of the French students had gone and arranged themselves according to class and social structure. For that reason the ticket collectors began to throw the entire car into chaos, once again, by demanding that everyone return to and sit in their ticketed seats.
Of course, this was done begrudgingly, the French not liking other people rules. Suddenly everyone in the car was up, grabbing backpacks, passing them overhead to their new destinations. A great migration began with everyone on the car.
Francois, not wanting to move – and me not wanting him to – stuck to his guns. He stayed put as long as he could. Then, much to his and my annoyance, the asthmatic girl came over. She showed him her ticket and insisted he vacate her seat.
Merde!
Francois stood and reached over me to retrieve his pack. With his extended arms his loose shirt pulled up. For a brief, few seconds, his flat stomach and navel, with its trail of hair leading down into his shorts, was inches from my face. Low and behold, at eye level, right below his ribcage, was yet another small mole.
Unable to move, and with him reaching up even a bit more, his bare stomach pushed square into my face. With me riveted and him with pack in hand, he looked down, unembarrassed, and said,
“Pardon.”
With that he moved to his assigned seat, two rows up.
Heartbreak
How do you say heartbreak in French? And how absurd was it that I already missed him?
The asthmatic sat down next to me and began to try to get comfortable, still taking in short, deep breaths.
I watched him as he moved up and stowed his pack. He sat down next to his new seat mate, a Thai man in his late 50’s. With the reclining seats and because of his height, I could still make out Francois’ head above the seat back. Looking up between the chairs I could see his elbow on the armrest, the backside of his bicep.
Within a few minutes the Thai man had introduced himself. I could tell that the boy, wanting to learn, was talking to the man in earnest. The man, out to entertain, was engaging him with small talk. Very soon, in true Thai fashion, he had his hand on the boys arm. He stroked it softly as Thais are prone to do, even with strangers.
I couldn’t believe the emotions that this soft stroke by a stranger elicited in me. I wanted to stand up and yell,
“Get your fuckin’ hands off him!”
I watched through the narrow crack between the seats. A piece of paper had been produced. There they were, hunched over and writing, heads together. I mean heads literally together – touching.
I could hear them over the din of the car. He was trying to teach him how to count in Thai.
Counting Strokes
Nung, song, saam, sii, haa, hok – and at his mispronunciation there would be a burst of laughter. The man would grab the boys arm and start again, holding his hand and pulling his fingers up one at a time – nung, song, saam.
I looked at the asthmatic girl next to me, her long, wavy, dirty blond hair hanging low. In an effort to level and control her breathing, she had put her pale face down on the tray in front of her to still her shallow gasps.
With great shame I realized I had no empathy at all – none whatsoever.
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