Most of us had settled for our first night at Klong Prem. The newcomers head-to-toe, trying not to move at the itch from chopped hair stuck to their skin lest their chains fall. Room leader Lim had stopped moving around under the tent that his boys had made from blankets to shield him from the light. The next day I would go to the building where most of the foreigners were kept. I was in for a long campaign, thousands of miles away from any reserves, burdened with unwilling confederates and effectively beaten by the enemy. So surrounded, I slept.
Building Two was just like the other eight of Bumbudt. Each contained three floors of caged dormitories holding 650 prisoners. Perhaps forty foreigners stumbled among them. Dark and cramped sweatshops were created underneath. A handful of guards trying to extract a living with the help of their trusties.
At ground level many prisoners had laid out mats from which they sold cigarettes and toiletries. Other Thais were working at benches. Clumped around were two Chinese groups, four schools of Nigerians and other Africans and no more than three small groups of Westerners. An American with a beard was speaking in simple Thai to a guard. When he turned from the guard’s desk I introduced myself explaining that I needed to break a large note to buy some toothpaste. ‘I couldn’t bring myself to scrape back off the ground what some bald-headed guard left me yesterday.’
‘Ah, Chazoo,’ laughed this thin man with a musical Boston accent that was confidently out of place. ‘He likes to give newcomers a warm welcome.’
The American gave his name as Dean Reed and paid for my toothpaste with a dozen small, flat packets of aspirin powder. When I complimented him on his Thai, Dean told me that he lived in Thailand. Loved the place. Married a local girl who worked for the US Information Service. I suggested that he might not be in Klong Prem for long.
‘Oh, my case is a nothing. Silly, really.’ Dean stooped at the mat of a disposable-lighter repairman to drop his plastic Bic for refilling. ‘Now you can’t change a thousand so easily,’ he insisted. ‘They don’t like to
see
money in Bumbudt. Of course, there’s a bank over there in the main prison. Let’s see if I can get you a mattress. You’ll need one, won’t you? You know that will cost you four-fifty, so there’ll be lots of change.’
‘What’s with the aspirin?’ Most of the floor traders I saw kept the packets in bunches held by rubber bands.
Dean explained that the aspirin sachets, called Tam Jai (strong heart), were the local currency notes, traded at floating rates of around one baht a packet. Tam Jai would buy any of the stallholders’ goods, including the doughnuts cooked each morning in a giant oil-filled wok. Some of the factory slaves were paid in Tam Jai. At the end of each day’s trading the shopkeepers would lend their thousands of packets to the men who ran the dice games in the dormitories.
‘By the way,’ Dean advised, ‘don’t worry if the other foreigners stare at you for a day or two. Some have been here for a long time. Anyway, most foreigners go next door to the big jail if they can fix it. It’s better there.’
Yet it was already clear that there would be few big players anywhere. No oasis of foreign luxury. Perhaps only those blown into these walls by misfortune and held fast on the jagged edges.
A group of young Thais were lined up beside a large water tank in the sun. They were to take showers by scooping water. A trusty dressed as a PE instructor blew his whistle each minute signalling each step: Strip off, splash quickly. Stop—wait for it! Now soap yourselves. You, keep in line. Stop fussing with those chains. Rinse off! These boys had admitted to taking drugs and so were being cured. The smallest patient almost fell into the tank. Only his chains brought him back to the ground.
Between the tank and a smouldering heap of decomposing rubbish was another American. He was muttering curses while washing some shirts in a plastic bucket. When I approached, this short, stocky man with a Beatles-era haircut wiped a hand dry on his arm before extending it and smiling.
‘Sorry for the rave. It’s been a hard night. My name’s Calvin.’
At his table Calvin gave me a coffee sweetened with tinned milk and introduced me to the breakfast club. Calvin was from Hawaii, Eddie from Switzerland, Paolo of Portugal, crazy-eyed Saleem from Kuwait and Mads, a motorcycle fan from Denmark. All were awaiting charges originating at the airport for attempts at exporting a kilo or two each of heroin. All wore chains except for Mads who clearly had never recovered from a bike accident. His embassy’s requests and THB15,000 had bought a medical dispensation.
Calvin invited me to join his food group. Their cook, Chang, was a hyperactive Taiwanese in his fifties who had been arrested at least once on every continent. Bangkok would be his last, not for lack of smuggler’s enthusiasm but because he would run out of years. As for Calvin, he had been arrested with a woman from California in a local hotel the week before Christmas. They had flown over to retrieve a kilo of heroin hidden in an air-conditioning duct of the hotel room a year earlier by their friend’s friend. It was to have been Calvin and Sheryl’s big break after lifetimes of lousy breaks. In a decision almost guaranteed to maintain their losing streak, they recruited someone to hold the ladder steady beneath the ceiling: a Bangkok taxi driver. The cabbie turned informer and Calvin and Sheryl were arrested that afternoon in the room with the parcel. For Calvin in prison it seemed he had more trouble letting go of his former sputtering life than others whose lives were more finely tuned. He tormented himself ritually with a thick photo album, drooping over pictures of his wife in Oahu and their six-year-old boy, Nicky.
‘I’ve still got the toy crane I’d bought for Nicky in Hong Kong. Look at the little tyke! It’s in my suitcase, still giftwrapped—wherever that is, for Christ’s sake. I told his mother I’d be gone one week. God knows what she’s telling little Nick.’
Calvin’s travelling companion Sheryl was in the women’s prison within waving range of Klong Prem’s upper floors. ‘She’s taking it okay. Doesn’t like the other foreign girls. Calls them a bunch of whiners.’
‘Wasn’t the stuff in her hotel room?’ someone asked without prejudice.
Calvin wasn’t the kind to leave someone else holding the can, he said. ‘She offered to take the rap. But the truth is we were in it together.’
Most of us knew the terrible odds against a judge pronouncing a not-guilty verdict in a Thai court and the doubling of sentence for those who fought and lost. Calvin, like most Westerners in Klong Prem, had not chosen criminality as a career. Unable to cope with the pressures of taking heroin he had become an inpatient at Hawaii’s plush rehabilitation clinic. There, too, recalcitrant addicts would have their heads shaved. Eventually Calvin graduated to the white uniform of a resident nurse, employed to apply the institution’s principles. He had been fired six months before tying up with Sheryl.
Before I could learn more a flat wagon arrived loaded with the market food bought by prisoners. There were limp vegetables, strips of chewy meat and fish that drew the flies away from the rubbish heap in a frenzied cloud. Still mouth-watering compared to official prison food. Once Building Two’s cooks had argued and collected, the wagon was used to carry an injured prisoner to the building bearing the sign: Hospital. The flies soon lost interest.
During the eight hours each day that prisoners were allowed outside cells, the Cure was busy. Most Thais worked in the small factories, each overseen by a guard who had purchased the concession from the building chief to whom he paid a fixed commission. If that amount could not be drawn from sales of finished goods, guards would extract the balance directly from inmates. Those without skills made cardboard gift boxes used as funerary offerings. Toxic chemicals labelled YUNBAO CRIMSON ACID MOO 4 from China decorated the boxes and left the workers yellow and seeping with mucus. The most lucrative factory was the one making big, inlayed mother-of-pearl royal portraits finished with fake lacquer. Dusty sacks of scallop shells would spill over the ground where workers would stone them to fragments. Once glued to poster-sized boards, grinding revealed a nacreous lustre. Upon this, artists would spend weeks with black ink creating the pictures before clear resin applied a glassy coating. The top sellers were images of King Rama V around whom a cult had formed since that monarch’s introduction of the knife and fork to Thailand in the nineteenth century. Prison guards could sell the largest portraits for THB20,000 (US$500) apiece, returning a sound profit of THB18,000. Hard workers were rewarded with a jar of coffee.
Chang, our Taiwanese cook, had made a fine lunch, my first good meal since arrest. As Calvin was hiding the small earthenware stove and charcoal there came a sudden hush. Martyn, a middle-aged Englishman, had accidentally knocked a large shell-picture from its drying stand. The guard had pushed thin Martyn to the ground. Speechless with rage, the guard moved toward this destroyer of income. I looked to the other foreigners. Fortunately the picture was undamaged and the Thais, who liked Martyn, pacified the guard. It was clear throughout the tension that the foreigners of Klong Prem would have done nothing to prevent a compatriot from being thrashed.
That night I bought bed space in Calvin’s one-hundred-man cell. His fellow American Dean had brokered for me the sale of a mattress sewn from old blankets. Calvin thought I had paid too much.
‘Be careful of that one,’ Calvin said of Dean. ‘None of the other Americans will talk to him.’
‘I’ll talk to anyone,’ I shrugged.
‘He’s been here a year. He refuses to leave the Cure for the main prison. There are people there he owes money to. Apparently he’s made a lot of promises. Kept none of them. Worse, anything you tell him goes back to the DEA. And he never goes on embassy visits. Leastways not with us. His wife works for them, you know. But it’s none of my business.’
The prisoners who had been to court that day were then returned to the cell. One, who had been sentenced to life, was then chained to the floor by a metal ring. Still sandwiched between two others he was given a plastic water bottle as a toilet. Within a few days he would be moved to Bangkwang prison which was equipped for lifers and there he would then be attached to a cell wall.
Calvin had been adopted by a Thai prisoner. Chort was a wiry old bird in his sixties with a permanent smile. He had been in prison for thirty-five years, the last seven sleeping on the same six-foot-by-two-foot floor space of this dormitory. Chort was Building Two’s venerated eccentric and he often selected a foreigner to protect. He was also the custodian of a small shed downstairs behind the toilet block. A valuable piece of real estate, it held lockers and could be rented over lunch by those wishing privacy. Chort dreamed of foreign travel, although he could not point to Thailand on any map. Calvin could not follow a word the old man said, although, between us, we understood Chort claimed to have once lived in a country called
Grantang-lagial
, apparently somewhere in Europe. Even the few educated Thais of our dormitory were not so unkind as to challenge this, for Chort was a prisoner of wisdom and influence in Building Two. He had no visitors.
While Chort told Calvin another incomprehensible story with great animation I flipped through Calvin’s photo album. Calvin had been married twice but there was no picture of his first wife. She had been an older woman and when Calvin had walked out of her life it was her third dumping. She had then become a Christian and was last seen talking to the foreheads of pedestrians though glassy eyes outside Union Station while passers-by ducked her pamphlets.
Most of the photos in the album were of Calvin’s boy, Nicky. Calvin could be seen standing to one side at a kids’ party; Calvin at the beach at night, startled by the flash; in his white uniform at the clinic, looking sheepish. Calvin had admitted to being a joiner. One who would be surprised when he found himself excluded suddenly from the latest group. Other joiners would know the feeling when they too would unaccountably drive themselves away following moments of doubt. As I returned the album Calvin was speaking of the important songs of his youth. He then sang,
‘New York, New York, that tumblin’ town
, ah,
East side up, sunny-side down
—ah, fuck it. Can’t remember the words.’
‘Long time since you’ve been there?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, long—well, I’ve never quite made it. I mean to. For sure, one day.’
The gamblers played into the night. The tube lights sang to the mosquitoes and prisoners held their chains aloft as they stole towards the open toilet. If anyone should hope to cut through those bars and into the night he would first have to subdue his one hundred cellmates. Inconceivable it seemed to me then.
First thing each morning every inmate crouched before a portrait of His Majesty while a tinny loudspeaker broadcast a chipmunk version of the national anthem. Once dismissed the cooks would begin their fires and the little stalls would open for business. All watched by twenty prisoners continuously rotating through the row of toilets, trying to balance chains and the scoop to splash their bums.
Despite our shared imprisonment there remained differences between nationalities. In Bangkok alone over 700 Nigerians were locked up. Often of the Ebo tribe they survived with little money and no consular support. While Europeans were often crushed in Klong Prem, most Africans adapted. A few of their bosses were inside, providing a comforting illusion of support and brotherhood. In my second week I met two clansmen arguing priorities. Both claimed to be Ebo princes. Thailand had become too hot for the Nigerians and a move to Cambodia was underway. That afternoon their dispute did not weigh on lost kilos or even money but on the currency of couriers. Since African couriers were always searched to the toenails, Westerners were now more often employed. A white traveller was more valuable than drugs or even connections.
Prince Nathan wanted payment for a German courier, lost while on loan to Prince Mupara. He dismissed an offer of ten kilos.
‘I know you have fifteen tourists. Five French, another two Germans and Japanese. Japanese, you know! You are a rich man.’