Rotting in the Bangkok Hilton: The Gruesome True Story of a Man Who Survived Thailand's Deadliest Prison (16 page)

I walked a few steps closer to the outside gate until I was even with the hospital gate on my right. I glanced in at the administration building. Five broad concrete steps led up to a lobby/waiting room, filled with benches and a wooden counter, the old-fashioned double doors left wide open. The three-story cement structure squatted in silence. The staff and patients had vanished, and placidity reigned.

Facing forward again, I looked more closely through the outer gate. Numerous trees dotted the courtyard, each in a round brick planter. A faint zephyr stirred their leaves. The temple grounds were as devoid of life as was the prison hospital.

I wore a t-shirt and shorts, with flip-flops on my feet. I held a plastic bag containing a carton of Krung Thep cigarettes, eight cans of tuna fish, and some sweets. I had left a visit minutes before, and the small bag was full of items bought at the outside prison canteen where visitors could shop for prisoners. In my pocket was 150 baht (six dollars at the old exchange rate).

Dare I go? What would I do without money or a passport? My friends were scattered on different continents, never mind the fact no one had heard from me in years. Forget about relatives as well, too much water under the bridge to go there for help.

The work of years—two manuscripts, my address book, money, and belongings sat in the drawers of a dresser next to my hospital bed. It was impossible to retrieve them if I wanted to escape. These things had to be left
behind. The moment stretched out painfully, my indecision taking on form and substance.

What to do;
what to do
?!

Count time was at 4:15 or 4:30 PM at the latest. I had at most a bit over an hour, pre-supposing I could stroll through the temple grounds without incident.

There was certain to be a massive man-hunt for an escaped farang. What the guards did to people they caught escaping was enough to make me shudder. The seconds slipped past, each one precious and irreplaceable.

Near penniless, without resources, an alien standing out starkly in native crowds, was not my escape attempt doomed from the start?

I cursed the logic that locked me in as thoroughly as any cage, but could not break or refute it. I did not see how I could succeed. If I was willing to commit new crimes, a slim possibility might exist. That was something I refused to contemplate.

The dilemma and my response to it made my guts clench repeatedly and my muscles strain.

There it lay before me—freedom! If ever there was an invitation to flee, this was it. Would such an opportunity ever come again? How could I reject such a gift? With longing I stared at the outer gate, as if hypnotized.

The chance to escape strained belief; so effortless, it mocked my occasional dreams of leaping walls in darkness, risking bullets from armed guards in watchtowers. The situation was surreal.

I took another few steps toward the temple gate. Why was it unlocked and unattended? What insane carelessness had allowed an exit from a maximum security prison?

I was rooted there, the moments stretching and shrinking in tandem with my mood. The bag grew heavy in my hand, my palms slick with sweat.

What kept me immobile? Why did I not pass through the open door? Was it cowardice? Could I live with myself if I did not ignore the cold ball of fear in the pit of my stomach and run?

With a sinking sensation, a cloud of gloom dimmed the lovely light that enfolded me. This ‘gift,’ if gift it was, was poisoned.

I’d have to live the life of a fugitive; to spend untold years looking over my shoulder, forever dodging pursuers—real or imagined.

To succeed meant the abandonment of my past, and a desperation that demanded I follow the old maxim “the ends justify the means.” Or was I fooling myself, justifying my failure to act upon a God-given way out of the nightmare?

I felt a shadow gently cool my skin, a palm tree turned sundial. Time had run out while my inner debate had raged. It was now or never.

I confronted a terrible truth. I chose to stay.

My feet seemed to gain the weight of cement blocks, my limbs heavy and numb. I forced myself to turn away from freedom and pass back through the gate onto the hospital’s front yard. As I skirted the administration building, I peered inside and saw that the lobby was deserted.

Slowly, I trudged down the cement path that ran along the left side of the building. Two rows of tall broad-limbed trees shaded the path and building. Large fish ponds took up the space between the tree-lined path and the prison back wall. Shafts of sunlight fell through the leafy canopy, caressing the water and the grass. The gilded rooftops of the temple could be seen sparkling over the top of the wall. Their reflections on the ponds were broken into thousands of golden shards, the ripples made by carp breaking the surface to feed.

The calm beauty of the place only served to heighten my misery, an ironic silent commentary on how deceiving appearances can be.

Past the administration building and the laboratory behind it, ponds lay on both left and right sides of the path, the tree-lined banks a picturesque scene. Straight ahead lay the vegetable garden, and on the other side of the pond, the two-story dorm and the one-story madmen cells formed a quiet backdrop. To the right the walkway passed the guardhouse, a high airy roof
on stilts, without walls except for the coffee shop in the back right corner, and the Building Chief ‘s office in a corner on the left. Not a soul was visible anywhere.

Wrapped in my own concerns, I headed for the dorm, oblivious to the message imparted by the unnatural stillness.

I went up the dorm steps wearily. Just inside I saw a huddle of every ambulatory prisoner crowding the entrance to Jaruk’s room, belonging to the head blue boy in the hospital. Everyone was straining to hear or see the TV.

The Thais grudgingly gave way to let me through, knowing me to be a friend of Jaruk. The guards and the nursing staff were there in a tight semi-circle around the flickering black and white screen.

Normally, the prison staff fled at noon on Friday, leaving a skeleton crew behind. They would take buses or ride motorcycles into the countryside to spend the weekends with their families. The poorly paid guards could only dream of owning cars, which were prohibitively expensive from import taxes. That they remained there past working hours could only be the result of a catastrophe.

The images were bordered in black, and the soundtrack of funereal music made the situation clear. The Queen Mother—a woman the Thai people loved dearly, had died of old age.

My entrance shook the guards from their reveries, and they hurried to finish their duties. I rued the decision I had made. Had I not intruded, the bunch of them might have simply sat there vegetating all night. Instead, the dorm was quickly locked up. They gathered again around the TV in groups to watch an endlessly repeated documentary on the old Queen’s life, and stayed there, unmoving.

Whether or not the gods were involved, the circumstances were never repeated.

Sharon Stone Gets Married

‘H
er’ ring was custom-made, twenty-four karat gold, with three diamonds set in a row in the style jeweler’s call ‘channel setting.’ Two royal-blue enamel Thai initials encircled the diamonds, a gaudy symbol of personalized love. The thing cost better than three or four hundred dollars— a small fortune in a Thai prison.

The day the guard smuggled it in, the lady-boy (the Thai translation into English of transsexual), showed off the ring to anyone who would stand still long enough to look at it. Her ‘fiancé’ owned the towel factory, the main employer in Building 2, and the lady-boy wanted everyone to know just how highly that important person valued her.

She was better looking than most of the lady-boys in Bang Kwang Prison, who tended to be ugly and shrewish. She had had the hormone injections that started the transformation into a woman. Inmates can have any kind of health care they want, so long as they pay for it themselves, and add in appropriate bribes for the guards. She had fully formed breasts, of which she was inordinately proud. She flaunted them, wearing t-shirts a few sizes too small, and always braless. She had not been cut, though, as that might
have resulted in her being sent to the truly hellish women’s prison down the road.

Instead, she taped her genitalia up between her legs, giving herself the look—if not the actual equipment of a female.

Throughout the day, you could see her swinging her hips as she did her chores, gyrating her body in an exaggerated pretense of femininity. She did the laundry, the cooking, and other domestic duties for her boyfriend and herself. She was a normal part of life in Bang Kwang Prison and merited no special attention.

She received her nickname when the Thai magazines devoted to popular culture (local versions of
People
and
Paris Match
) featured a visit by Sharon Stone to Phuket, a favored resort in Southern Thailand. The articles had lots of close-up photos of her in various stages of undress, and gossip columns gushed over the star. The ‘news’ made the rounds widely, as several inmates subscribed to the magazines.

By the time the tabloids were worn out from Sharon, Thais began to use the star’s name whenever they referred to something or someone as sexy. ‘Sha-lon Sto,’ became the latest ‘Tinglish’ (Thai-English) term for ‘hot.’

Sharon had always put on airs like she was a sex goddess, and it was no surprise when the Thais started using the name to describe her in jest. Farangs were the avant-garde in the prison, the stylesetters, and when Matty—a sarcastic Brit, began greeting her as Sharon, the name was immutably hers. Sharon took it as a great compliment.

Sharon, like all of the other lady-boys, sold her body occasionally, principally giving blowjobs for a hundred baht (which equaled four dollars at the old exchange rate). She also sold her ass from time to time, depending on how much she liked the customer. Once the factory owner decided to make her his concubine, that all came to an abrupt end.

The process was fairly straightforward, as it was prevalent enough to have established precedents. First, the lady-boy had to be ‘wooed’ with gifts,
given regular spending money, and other goodies. On the down side, not infrequently, a few beatings would be administered to both the lady-boy and to her johns to discourage the habit of selling sexual favors. Sharon was spared this, as she was less promiscuous than many of her peers.

When this mixture of bribery and coercion was judged by the ‘groom’ to have produced a properly compliant mistress, the two would progress to the status of boyfriend/girlfriend. This was the most crucial phase, as the lady-boy had not yet obligated herself to any lasting commitment.

At this stage of the game, the lady-boy let her boyfriend know what had to be done to make the relationship an enduring one. This might include having the boyfriend insert glass beads under the foreskin of his penis to increase its size, much like the ribs and bumps on a condom. Theoretically, this made intercourse more enjoyable for the lady-boy, and is a common practice inside Thai prisons. Other requirements often involved periodically buying clothes for the lady-boy; an increased budget for food; a walkman, cassette tapes, and electronic toys, among other desirable items.

Kai arranged to have Sharon sleep with him at night. All the ‘wealthy’ Thais slept in the prison dorm corridor, which ran the length of the building between the cells on either side. Corridor dwellers thus had the most freedom of movement—able to use the spacious private bathroom at the end of the hallway as the blue boys. Kai paid the necessary bribes to the guards, and they put their beds together. He also let the corridor merchants (Thais who sold everything from coffee by the cup, cigarettes, sweets, and prepared foods, to those who ran the casino) know that he would pay for what Sharon bought; in effect opening lines of credit for her.

When everything had been settled to her satisfaction and finding that they were indeed compatible, Kai and Sharon decided to formalize their union. This was accomplished by obtaining a kind of marriage license from the Building Chief.

As is the custom in many parts of Asia, official favors can be purchased with a bribe. The entire prison bureaucracy, with the Building Chief leading the fray, would devote themselves to making the largest possible amount of money by corrupt means. The Chiefs elevate extortion to an art form, displaying a remarkable creativity noticeably absent from their official activities. They take a cut of the money guards earn smuggling heroin into the prison for the Nigerians; take monthly percentages from the factory owner’s profits; pocket the money paid by junkies and thieves when caught to avoid punishment for their crimes, and as many other scams as the rapacious Chiefs could dream up.

The Chief in Building 2 was only too happy to make the relationship semi-official for a price … 2,500 baht ($100). With his stamp of approval, anyone committing ‘adultery’ with the ladyboy risked a severe beating, and other sanctions applied. It entitled the couple to most of the considerations bestowed on man and wife, though, should the couple change buildings, new bribes would be required to renew the privileage with a different chief.