Retrouvez Le Guiche
Return to Bangkok
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Ba Dinh, Hanoi. Phạm Hữu Đạt was 63 years old when he felt his calling. His face had accreted the requisite look of ancient and tired wisdom and his feet and hands were calloused. He was on his way to the market to buy some chicken innards and vegetables for the evening meal, but for some reason felt compelled to deviate from his habitual route.
At the corner of Dao Tan and Lane 24, outside a small convenience store, he felt a sudden urge to assume a relaxed crouching position. Succumbing to this urge he noticed he was no longer wearing his neat slacks and shoes, but rather some worn track pants and some beat up flip-flops that revealed his calloused feet. His toe nails were dirty.
He felt an overwhelming desire to smoke, even though he had not indulged that pastime for a good 37 years since his son was born. He found that inexplicably a half burned cigarette was there between the thumb and index finger of his right hand.
He took a slow deliberate drag on the cigarette. He felt a sharp pang of regret that his wife will worry and miss him, but he had always known, deep down, that this moment would come. As the smoke infused his lungs, his eyes took on a watchful faraway look. He has joined the ancient fraternity of Curb Elders. They exchange knowing nods across continents. He sees everything now. His eyes glimpse scenes in Manila, in Denpasar, in Beijing. He has become part of the network. His cigarette will burn eternal…
It’s the smell that hits you…
Let lane!
… but it’s just not like that. It’s something different
neon glitz, ancient earthworks, fresh pussy…
MBRAKO – smeared graffiti in the flood drain
As I write this I am aware for the first time. Now is the moment of consciousness
Looping back on itself, recursive, iterative, searching for fragmentary connections
Connective tissue of mycelial algorithms…
Connecting tissue
It’s the smell that hits you first
Liminal spaces, subliminal spaces, supraliminal spaces, spaces, spaces
and every moment a place in time…
through the wardrobe and through the looking glass
People in glass houses
The smell hits you first like outer space
And every place existed in its own moment
looks past the tourists on a busy street in Denpasar. looks past looks present looks future looks sideways
The smoke curls in eddies that defy don’t defy the laws
The laws of man like stories under squalid skies and cities whose bones…
small quiet places at the edge of the cultivated land
And beams indifference
Causality? So much for your causality…
The Frenchman! Where is the Frenchman?
Listen. In those days there were giants…
a poss a pinta porter pease
and never so many
But the electrons whiz and whir and it’s all part and parcel of all the little quantities of quanta…
Smell hits you like a brick
Glazed eyes that see street corner scenes…
There are two types of places
There are places and times
I am alive. This the moment of consciousness. Awareness is now!
The slo-screen was inevitable. The transformation was part of the program. The program defined one reality. And slowly influenced another. One damnable frame at a time…
At some point it all breaks down
At some point it all breaks up
At some point it accretes
She’s not conscious. She’s not even unconscious. They reckon she simply ain’t there no more. It’s hard to fathom.
At some point it coheres
At some point it coalesces
The skin of it all keeps changing but the bones are there eternal
Semper as ox-house-humper
Holes and wholes and nets that forget and nets that don’t forget and holes that grow the wholes that grow that grow
Stale beer and stale pussy. Bus stop shelters that smell of piss and schizophrenia.
I am aware for the first time. This is the moment.
the smell used to hit you like a brick
Oh it’s all so long ago now
Listen. There are Gaps.
Gaps between spaces between stories between gaps between memories. It’s the smell that hits you first
They were weaving you see, weaving the worlds, norns, fates, what have you…
And he sees street scenes in Nepal, and men smoking herbs by the squatted forest fire, and in caves and rawhide dwellings
The moment is Now!
It’s the smell, petrichor and ozone, like the moment of creation.
And it more plus and very premium it grows
and finds its friends and connects if it can be avoids the others, repelled even
It’s just so…
Let lane!
Down by the abandoned broken lock where the water sluices past through rotten rotting wood flows
No. You are not getting what I am trying to convey to you, even though I am doing so… trying to do so… to the best of my ability, notwithstanding the state I am in… now where was I? …right… every moment was a moment, and every moment was a place in time
… Ormo Koncept?… don’t worry about it… it was just some shit I made up…
… the girl on the back of the scooter. My scooter. The Vietnamese girl… she just kept shouting it at me. So I just kept shouting it back at her… she just wanted me to change lane…. – you didn’t get what she meant? – yeah… of course I knew what she wanted… I just thought it was funny to keep shouting it back at her… she was getting really pissed off… kept shouting… and I just kept shouting it back…
it’s the smell, incense, shit and barbecued meat…
The Yella Fella and the Pinkster? Fixot? Gilgamesh? … who fucking knows.
it’s all folded up… too fucking small for us to see. And anyway, kinda like at angles that our eyes couldn’t even process anyway… I mean we are built for 3D. All that other shit don’t make any sense to us because it wasn’t important for us to develop the wherewithal to make sense off it… no evolutionary pressure – you get me? No selective influence… so, we don’t evolve the machinery to deal with it cause it don’t make no nevermind… it just runs in parallel. So… for our purposes it’s kinda there but it ain’t there… or probably more aptly it ain’t there, but actually it kinda is… – like the Jin you mean? – the Jin? – yeah, it’s an Islamic thing – Jin? Like in genies? – … well yeah, kinda, genies are kind of folk myth based on the Jin… – so what are the Jin? – ok, well, according to the book… the qu’ran when Allah pulled the creation stunt he made three types of beings, the angels, the humans and the Jin
it’s just some syncretic bullshit… I mean most of the rest of it follows the Hebrew version. They just threw the Jin in there to help get the local heathens onboard… it’s like the way Catholicism got all those Saints… a whole bunch of them are just old bog deities that locals cleaved staunch to…
it’s the smell that hits you first, black bog dirt and turgid water. Blood mixing. Ferrous. Dirt. Water. Blood. Shit.
Time to get in the box. Lilliput? Har-fucking-har.
They got us running jaunts that are straight out of fucking Alice goes to fucking wonderland.
I got this feeling that Spenski knows something of it, but on the other hand Spenski don’t know shit. Spenski don’t know his ass from his elbow. But still…
Gilgamesh is an epic pain in the ass. Greasy little weasel Turk or whatever he is…
And the smell hits you like…
Let lane!
I see the Soon.
… and it hits you like…
Every moment is a place in time
Every time is a moment in Bangkok. It’s been 20 years…
I’m back in Bangkok. It’s been 20 years.
This place don’t even smell like it used to. It used to punch you in the face the moment you opened the door of the cab from the airport. Sewage, barbecued meat and incense against a backdrop of the traffic and the river hanging in the humid air. The heat, the humidity, the smell. It was sure as fuck that you weren’t in Kansas. These days it’s like someone took a test tube full of the smell and did the homeopathy thing on it. Diluted the living shit out of it like maybe 500 times and then threw a light dose of marijuana on top. There are hemp joints everywhere, ranging from high end boutique to street corner ganja.
And the smell ain’t the only thing that’s changed. All the tuk-tuks are all gone too. In the daytime at least. At night a few old vampire tuk-tuks emerge to suck the blood out of tourists. They’re like gondolas. Enjoy the romance of a traditional form of local transport whilst we empty your wallet. In the daytime they hole up in coffin lock-ups.
I went round some of the old haunts just to see if I could catch a sniff of the ghost of Guy “Le Guiche” Guicharde. That some echo or lingering fragment of his essence might remain. But too much has changed. I could not even imagine him in this place. I couldn’t even picture where the bones of the old place might be hidden under its new corpulent flesh. It sure was leaner back then.
I took a stroll down Soi Cowboy. It was in a bar there that I first met Le Guiche. He made me the moment I walked through the door. Me, I didn’t even clock that I was made until he came and introduced himself. His tradecraft was always much better than mine. Truth be told, he was a better man than me in any number of ways, which was probably why my gut instinct was to dislike him intensely… good luck with that. Introducing himself! That was a ballsy move, but it was typical of the man. He just came over, bold as brass and said “Mon Ami, I am Guilluame Francois Guicharde… and I am at your service”.
Back then there were three main red-light areas in Bangkok, as indeed there still are. Patpong was always for the tourists, with its night market and ping-pong ball shows. Nana plaza was a production line minge factory – fat old whiteys would overflow from their barstools drinking copious beers and alternately use their dicks for pissing and for fucking a piece of passing trim in the by the hour rooms at the back of the stages. You could smell pussy overlaid as a top-note on the standard Bangkok funk. Soi Cowboy was always for the kind of punter who liked a little bit of old school charm along with their sleaze.
In those days, on Soi Cowboy, all the Johns were punters and all the punters were Johns, and all the girls knew that it was not a matter of if, but rather when they were going to drop their loads. And the girls always outnumbered the Punter Johns by maybe about 10 to 1, so it was kind of a buyer’s market. But it was kind of also a seller’s market, since less than 1 in 10 of the girls were worth taking the trouble to fuck. So it kind of evened out. That was Le Guiche’s thoughts on the matter anyway. Which ever way you look at it a lot of the girls were just there to make up the numbers. It’s the one thing that’s still the same.
Man, how things change…
Anyway, thing is… Le Guiche… turns out the full on Franglais is pure bullshit… I mean, sure, he’s French, but he’s just dialling it up for effect… turns out he can speak English just as good as any other white man…
Talking of white men…
– for a brief moment my corner eye thought-caught a glimpse of the Yella Fella when I was mooching down Soi Cowboy… but it was just a stag-week tour boy in a yellow tee-shit and bucket hat. T-shirt read “Wayne’s last pussy hunt”. Further down the lane there was a whole gang of the pussy-posse all decked in lemon. Not a single one of them could spot a katoey, I reckon. Some of those boys are looking at an interesting night…
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Published Excerpts
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Pretty in Pink (The Bookends Review)
Retrouvez Le Moustache (Blood + Honey)
Retrouvez Le Nuit (Blood + Honey, forthcoming 2026)