A Brass Knuckle Tattoo
By KorskiWhen we are young, we collect stamps, baseball and football cards, toy cars and trucks. When we are older, and if we have enough money, we collect antique cars and motorcycles, mountains climbed above 20,000 feet, classic 78 records. A great many academics--although they would deny this is what they are doing--collect publications, the more, obviously, the better. And indeed, collecting in this sense is even highly institutionalized, to the point where promotions and raises are based not on the quality of what one does, but on the number of publications. The collecting mentality of the eight year old never dies.
There are tens of thousands of people who have Bird Lists, and a clear aim of making yearly trips to exotic parts of the world, trips that may take precedence over family vacations, is to add to the lists. All in order to be able to brag to other “birders” and friends that their lists now exceeds 2,000 or 3,000 species, or that they are in a small elite group of birders who have spotted all the known birds of paradise and parrots of New Guinea.
When I was in college, I lived in an apartment one year, and in one adjacent to mine were four students who had a thick bamboo pole that ran from the floor to the ceiling near the front entrance. The students used the pole to record their sexual conquests, one notch per new girl, triple this number if one scored a virgin. It was all about keeping score, bragging rights, the conquest of the night before, and the one before that and...
Recently, on a bus going to Bangkok, I met an Englishman with painted black fingers and toenails who spoke of collecting countries. He had thus far visited 67, and he was planning to add three more within the next year. He seemed to have no particular rationale for doing so. It was just something he found enjoyable and clearly liked to talk about to perfect strangers.
Almost all of this collecting is rather innocuous, or depending on one’s point of view, obsessive, laughable, even trivial. But now and again, it is hard to laugh or find amusing what someone reveals what they are collecting, and how they are doing it.
I had gone to Mike Shopping Mall on Beach Road in Pattaya to buy a new pair of blue jeans, and on leaving I wandered down one of the small alleys that would take me to Second Road, where I could get a baht bus back to my hotel on Soi Eight. This particular alley is cluttered with imitative artists and their oil paintings, and as you get closer to Second Road, several open-fronted tattoo shops.
As I passed one of them, my eyes were drawn to a Thai girl who had one of those ubiquitous nasal sniffers struck in a nostril. Her face was soft and yet she had one of those tired, blank looks, as if she’d worked until the early hours of the morning in a bar and then spent several more at one of the discos. She was getting a name tattooed on her ankle, right behind the ankle bone. The letters had been inked in and the tattoo artist, at the point at which I stopped, was adding further ink and definition to the name, which was Jon.
Sitting in a collapsible tan cloth chair about six feet from the girl and the tattooist working on her was a large, muscular Caucasian man with short red hair, small teeth, and wire-frame glasses. I would shortly learn that he was the bargirl’s “boyfriend”—but just for a day or two—and was paying 600 baht to have the tattooing done, bargained down, he told me, from an asking price of 1,500 baht. His name was Jon. He said he hailed from Iceland, but had a U.S. passport since he was born there. He had been coming to Pattaya for the past seventeen years and now lived here for a good part of the year. He was proud of his body, and verbalized this rather boastfully, drawing attention to his biceps. He also wanted me to know that he was the best dancer to be found anywhere in Pattaya’s discos. He stood up to demonstrate how he would grind his partner from behind while holding her hips. As he performed for me on this bright afternoon, I thought he looked foolish, like an unreflective clown. He was, he said, sixty years old.
Minutes into our conversation, Jon startled me with something I had never heard before in all of my travels in Southeast Asia. The reason his bargirl girlfriend for a couple of days was getting a tattoo was that he liked to “mark” girls who he had fucked. He said this matter-of-factly, adding that the mere memory of shagging a bargirl or one he picked up at one of the discos—his favorite pick-up spot—just wasn’t good enough.
I immediately felt revulsion at what he told me; and yet for a few long seconds I was stunned into silence. I simply didn’t know what to say.
Finally, I said, How many girls have you marked with a tattoo of your name?
Many. I don’t know how many.
How long have you been doing this?
A long time.
Do you know others who also mark the girls they fuck with tattoos of their names?
Some, he said.
I looked back to a girl whose name I now knew to Fon. I saw another name high on her right arm: Jas. I turned back to Jon and said, Do you always have your scores tattooed on an ankle?
No. Usually on the back, above their ass.
Is Jas, on Fon’s shoulder, someone else’s score?
He smiled and nodded. Fucking sick, I thought, reading what I wanted to read into his smile.
The tattooist finished his job and Jon took out 600 baht and paid him. Fon was bent over at the waist, admiring her new tattoo, running her finger over it. The Chinese looking tattooist with a black wispy goatee was nearby.
How long will it take to heal? I asked the tattooist.
Forever.
I shook my head and felt sympathy for Fon and her ignorance, her stupidity. I repeated the question and he said, Five to seven days.
Jon said to Fon, What will your German boyfriend say about my name?
Fon looked at the fresh tattoo and said, The J is like F and he will think it is Fon.
Jon smiled again. He seemed to like the idea. He then took out a small pocket camera and bent down low to take photos of Fon’s new tattoo. He took three, all from different angles.
I’d had enough. I began walking away, but found that Jon and Fon were right behind me. They were headed for a motorcycle, a huge Harley, Jon’s. It was painted a gaudy yellow. He then told me that this ugly hunk of metal was one of several that he owned. He handed Fon a helmet and she put it on. She got on the bike. I had now lost sight of Jon’s “marker,” the latest addition to the collection of women he had fucked in Pattaya. Young women who would, whether or not they liked it, long remember Jon, even after he’d forgotten them. Even after he was dead.
I walked along the edge of the fruit market and toward Second Road, and I wondered: If I’d had some brass knuckles in one of my pockets, would I have put them on and tattooed Jon right between his eyes? I could not remember the last time I had physically hit someone, but as a baht bus slowed and I headed toward it the remaining doubts I had about giving Jon his small due disappeared.
Stickman's thoughts:
I have been vilified for my on and off, hot and cold, commentary of the bar scene. At times I say it can be fun and at other times I wax that it is evil. It is stories like this - and assholes like this - that make the scene bad. This is a power thing, control and what this guy has done is oh so very wrong. Quite disgusting.
The author can be reached at korski1@cox.net.
The author of this website, NOT this article, can be contacted at: stickmanbangkok@gmail.com.
