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Bangkok Babylon. Jerry Hopkins
Читать онлайн.Название Bangkok Babylon
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781462900039
Автор произведения Jerry Hopkins
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
“Final question,” I said. “Do you miss the calendars?”
“I'd be fool if I said I didn't.”
He said that earlier in the year he'd produced six softcore videos for Playboy and was negotiating to shoot another six, under the title Asian Angels. He said he was also talking about shooting calendars for Playboy. I recalled an earlier assignment from Playboy that hadn't worked out when they refused to run his pictures because the models were too “dark.”
“That was when they wanted the girl-next-door look,” Shrimp explained. “Times have changed. Now my tastes are more acceptable.”
Urban Guerilla Priest
Father Joe Maier took a seat at the table across from me, and as I ordered two mugs of Heineken draft, he took a call on his cell phone. It was January 2, 2000, the start of the new millennium, and we'd met to celebrate numerous past failures and occasional victories and a future of more of the same. A moment later, he ended his call, abruptly stood, and said, “There's been a gas leak at the ice house. You want to come along?”
We ran to his car, and as he sped through the Bangkok night, driving as I'd never seen him drive before, he explained that the place that produced ice for many of Bangkok's drinks was near his AIDS hospice and two of his shelters for street kids.
“Tell me what you know about freon,” he said.
“I don't know much. What I remember from physics class is that it's an odorless, colorless gas that has no effect on humans, but according to more recent studies, it screws up the ozone layer. Why?”
He said that was what he was told was leaking into his neighborhood, the Klong Toey slum, the largest of some 1200 urban areas that were officially designated as slums in Bangkok. About a year earlier, Joe said, there'd been a fire in the ice house and it should've been shut down permanently, but the woman who owned it paid a visit to a local politician who paid a visit to the cops and nothing was done. That's the way troubles were handled in Bangkok.
We were still speeding through the streets, squealing as we hit the corners, bouncing into and out of pot holes. I laughed.
“What's so funny?”
“I had a thought. You know those movies where the cop's driving an unmarked car when he gets a call and he reaches out the window and puts one of those flashing lights on the roof? Where the light is stuck to the roof by a magnet and is plugged into the cigarette lighter? I just had an image of you doing that, except you have a flashing crucifix.”
He laughed as we slid around another corner and the rest of the way to the ice house we argued about what kind of noise should be coming out of the car when the crucifix was in place. We agreed it couldn't be a siren or anything that sounded like cops or an ambulance. I argued for Gregorian chants and Joe held out for “Ave Maria.”
At our destination, our joking stopped. “That's not freon, it's ammonia,” I said as we exited the car, “–and that could seriously kill somebody.”
All around us, life was proceeding as usual. At a food stall across the narrow street from the ice house people ignored the bad smell and spooned up bowls of noodle soup. How unusual, after all, was an offensive odor in a Bangkok slum?
Joe accessed the situation and we took off at a trot toward the Mercy Centre, where, after he was assured that everything was alright, he left me with a friend. Bangkok is one of those unusual cities where personal safety was pretty much assured everywhere and at all times, but Joe insisted that unless you were Thai, Klong Toey had not only bad smells, but also the whiff of danger for outsiders. As a longtime resident known in the neighborhood, he figured he was exempt from any such threat.
As I waited for Joe to return, I remembered how he'd come to Bangkok in 1967, straight from seminary in California, to say Mass to American soldiers fighting the war in Vietnam. His grandparents were homesteaders farming wheat in what was then called the Dakota Territory. His parents–German father, Irish mother–ran a whorehouse in Chicago for a while and after Joe was born, his dad became a fisherman on the West Coast, a ship's captain running supplies for the army to the Aleutian Islands during World War II, a truck driver in Washington state, a farmer back in South Dakota, a traveling salesman, a guitar-playing minstrel, a house painter, a womanizer, an absent father and a drunk.
Joe's younger sister and brother were born in the harsh Dakota winter and both times, at age ten and twelve, Joe drove the tractor, pulling the car behind him with his mom and dad in it until they reached the county highway, where they waited for a snowplow to clear a path into town, so that his siblings could be born in a hospital. He milked cows. Ran a threshing machine. Finally, the old man just sort of disappeared and when Joe went to catechism summer camp, classmates laughed at his clothing, one pair of high-top work shoes and two pairs of bib overalls.
Eventually, his parents divorced, and his mom and the kids settled in Washington state where she had a sister and found a job as a secretary; welfare took up the slack. Joe's mother was a strong woman, Joe said–manipulative, larger than life; “I had my first adult conversation with her when I was fifty-three.”
Starting in the seventh grade, Joe was shipped off to a Catholic seminary in California for six years, during which time he became the only Eagle Scout in the seminary. He was mercilessly teased, just as he was a target in the troop for being the only Catholic. He also suffered through a bout of polio that affected some minor muscles in his face and made his fingers unfit for continuing piano lessons, although he was still able to make a fist.
After a spiritual internship in Missouri, Joe was ordained and shipped off to another seminary in Wisconsin. This is where he earned his merit badge in rebellion, challenging seminary regulations and protesting the nascent Vietnam war. His superiors got their revenge. In 1967, as the war heated up, they sent him to the country next to it, Thailand. He was not pleased. And he vowed not to stay.
“I was an angry young man,” he recalled, “and the rest of the priests were glad to see the back of me.”
The sermons on the military bases stopped when he completed his Thai language classes and was posted in Loei near the Laos border, where he taught himself Lao, and then, after crossing into Laos, took his faith to the hilltribes; he once told me he thought he still could say Mass in Hmong. This is when he got to know all the classic characters–and killers–of the secret Laos war.
By war's end, Joe was back in Bangkok, where he took over the parish in the city's toughest slum, called the Slaughterhouse for the abattoir where three thousand pigs were killed every night. Most of the butchers were descended from Vietnamese Catholics who migrated to Thailand, because Buddhists were forbidden to kill and Muslims wouldn't go near pork. Fast food joints refused to deliver in this neighborhood, taxis wouldn't take you there after dark, and if you let it slip to a prospective employer that you lived there, you didn't get hired. Joe moved into a two-room shanty squat in the middle of the slum, slept on an old army cot, dressed himself out of the poor box, offered spiritual nourishment to the butchers and their families, and in 1972, started a kindergarten. This is where the accomplishments that followed began. From then on, Joe said, it was war, and the priest not only said Mass on the weekend, he became an urban guerilla.
When he heard a ten-year-old girl whose mother was a prostitute in a brothel was going to introduce the girl to the trade, Joe negotiated a price with the brothel owner to buy the girl, then put her in a school and a foster home. When a twelve-year-old slum girl was raped and a man was apprehended, it looked as if he'd walk after paying a bribe. Joe had four hundred slum women march on the police station, telling the cops to either guarantee they'd prosecute the sonofabitch or give him to the women for one hour, and if they didn't do one or the other, he'd be back the next day with the women and media. (The man was sentenced to seven years.) When Joe learned that some gangs were planning a move on a neighborhood and he noticed that the canine population was nil, he organized a posse and “borrowed” a dozen or so animals from another slum area to stand guard.