Rotting in the Bangkok Hilton: The Gruesome True Story of a Man Who Survived Thailand's Deadliest Prison (22 page)

“Tuk meun gan, meun gan.” (All the same, the same.)

The Storm

T
he sky seemed to press down on us, a low ceiling of heavy black clouds, ominous and threatening. A few miles distant they were alive with the dazzling play of lightning. The summer was unusually dry and the monsoon rains had withheld their precious moisture, leaving the soil parched and cracked. The heat was oppressive; a physical presence bullying life forms into irritability.

It was the anniversary of the opening of hostilities of WWI. The storm resounded with thunder, reminiscent of the ‘Guns of August’ long ago.

The air had the curious hollow feeling that accompanies a sudden, rapid drop in barometric pressure. It was hushed, the booms of thunder echoing in the still emptiness of the hospital grounds.

An atmosphere of approaching doom, of barely suppressed violence gripped the prison. Earlier in the day, a prisoner had dropped dead of a heart attack shortly after leaving ‘inside visits’ at 11:30 AM. These are the contact visits the Thai prison authorities grant to prisoners’ families twice a year.

He was wheeled in on a gurney and deposited in the hospital administration lobby/waiting room. It doubled as the admittance room, where outpatients and emergencies were dealt with.

Most prisoners stuck close to home, following the animal instinct to seek out the familiar for comfort. Both floors of the hospital dormitory building were crowded, everyone tense and restless.

The dorm is directly behind the admin building, connected to it by covered walkways upstairs and down; the dorm forming the upright part of an upside down “L” with it. Thus, at the back of the upstairs dorm, the corner windows have a perfect view down into the rear of the lobby. During the day, the wide double doors at the back of the lobby are left open to catch stray breezes.

When the man’s body was rushed in by panicked nurses, the ambulatory patients on the ward flocked to the two windows giving the best view of the action below.

Jaruk was immediately summoned. Crowded by the useless nurses, he tried feverishly to revive the man. The man’s sister and brother stood there watching Jaruk sweat; in shock at the disastrous turn their visit had taken.

The sister wept, her brother holding her in his arms, turning away when Jaruk left off his ministrations, the man beyond human help. The body was casually draped with a sheet, and sat there in the lobby the rest of the day; the opening act of a long macabre play.

The next bit of excitement followed a few hours later. The Thai Chinese owner of the Building 6 coffee shop was stabbed repeatedly by Samurais for non-payment of a gambling debt. He was admitted just after noon, and died shortly thereafter.

With a crude kind of justice, one of the Samurai who did the deed was brought in about 3:00 PM, countless bones broken from a savage beating by the guards. He too died within the hour from internal hemorrhaging.

These bodies were scarcely cool when a prisoner in the hospital died of AIDS. The Thais, superstitious of the fearful omens, walked about silently and wide-eyed with dread. Each new fatality inspired the shaking of heads, and the old men muttered about the calamity about to befall us. The atmosphere on the ward grew thick with unfocused anxiety.

When the sun sank in the west, unseen, the view to the north from Jaruk’s ground floor room in the dorm was awe-inspiring. Past the trees and large ponds was the outer wall, trimmed with barbed wire. Behind this rose the gaily decorated roofs of the Buddhist temple complex neighboring the prison. A mile or two away spread a silver curtain, draped across the horizon from earth to a roiling raven-black sky. Lit from within by lightning, the thick downpour shimmered, a vast living thing of uncertain temperament.

It drew closer, and the storm’s immense roar became audible, ever strengthening, until at last it filled ears deaf to any other sound. Before it reached the prison, wild tearing winds arrived, heralding a fearsome deluge.

The night guard hurriedly unlocked the front gate of the tuberculosis ward, which they had locked after the 4:00 PM count. Jaruk and the other blue boys ran outside, slammed and secured the old wooden shutters over the ground-floor dorm windows, fastening them in a race with Mother Nature.

On the upstairs ward the shutters hung loose and at the approach of the storm, everyone able to do so fought the gusts and worked to close them. With them latched, they still banged and rattled, their timbers warped from decades of harsh weathering.

The tempest struck the prison with ferocious intensity. The Thais huddled in groups, cringing with every bang and collision outside. Through cracks in the shutters we saw the havoc it wreaked.

Limbs were torn from the trees and hurled into buildings that shook from the impact. The jury-rigged prison electrical cables snapped, and spit angry sparks as the wires performed a deadly whipping dance.

Weird debris collected in the storm’s travels and was slung about by the wind. A dead goat blew by, its broken legs flopping limply in a parody of life. A tattered rug tented ghost-like, raising a huge splash when it plunged into the pond outside Jaruk’s window. A string of Christmas tree lights snaked through the air, alighting long enough to strangle a bush, which was then uprooted. A large, naked plastic doll bounced by and caused a brief flurry of
horror among the Thais. It lodged in a piece of wreckage, allowing it to be identified as a toy, not the child fevered imaginations they had believed.

What little light there was dimmed, and was lost with the setting of the sun. Electricity had been cut off hours before, and in the darkness it was easy to believe the howling of the wind contained the voices of damned souls in torment. Great gusts of wind attacked the shutters; the prying fingers of an invisible foe.

Two strange candles—thicker than an arm and standing waisthigh were brought out of the depths of a storage closet. One was placed at the front of the dorm; the other at the entrance to the bathroom at the back. The wind took malicious delight ensuring neither could stay lit for more than a few minutes at a time. The blue boys refused to admit defeat, and spent hours lighting and relighting the wicks, in spite of the relentless fury of the wind and rain. The Thais watched them intently, panic barely held in check by the quivering, fitful flames.

Long before their normal time to retire, the Thais crawled into their beds, terrified of the evil spirits loosened by the storm. With stealth worthy of a jewel thief, they crept one by one to the blue boys’ room, and dug out bedpans from some dark corner. No Thai would enter the bathroom. The bedpans were a way of avoiding the fate of becoming a victim of supernatural beings with bad intent they were sure lurked near the toilets. Considering how many people had died in the bathroom over the years—easily in the hundreds, their fear was understandable.

By a minor miracle, the prison authorities managed to get the emergency generator going, and a pale, flickering light was restored.

The evening was young, not much past seven, but the Thais refused to leave their beds, shrouded in mosquito netting, and cowering under their blankets.

The weak lights drew power from the stuttering generator, a relic of the United States Army’s Vietnam adventure, given a second life by Thai
scavengers. Its irregular cough added to the creaking and groaning of wooden shutters shaken against their concrete frames, and gave the dorm an aura of a ship soon to be lost at sea.

Rather than intimidated, Bruce and I were strangely lighthearted. The storm proved to be a pleasurable experience. Bruce—an American who had been admitted to the hospital ostensibly to kick a heroin habit, was the only other farang on the ward. I was there recovering from a thirty-three day hunger strike and had largely regained my health.
*

Normally, the ambulatory Thai patients were up and running around until eleven or midnight. They customarily kept the sole hot plate on the ward perpetually busy. The volume of the blue boys’ TV would compete with the ward TV, making a screeching racket. The Thais usually played childish games of rough-housing, and low humor prevailed among them.

The absence of these irritations was liberating. No foul reek of putrescent fish sauce polluted the air; no sloppily strung clotheslines laden with laundry impeded movement down the aisles. No banging and clashing of tin bowls and utensils against floors and bedsteads.

No shrieking; no jumping; no slapping; no running. In short, a cessation of the usual bedlam had made the place feel blessedly deserted by its occupants.

Energized by the respite from the Thai’s overweening presence, Bruce and I walked around the ward. At the far end of the rectangular ward was a separate room housing the toilets and a water tank for showers on one side, and on the other end a table and the hot plate for cooking. At the opposite end were the blue boys’ treatment and bedroom, with a stairwell leading downstairs. The dorm consisted of three rows of beds, one row each flush against the walls, the third row set in between the concrete pillars supporting the concrete roof.

We put a kettle of water on to boil and slowly paced an oval around the aisles between the beds. Bruce drank coffee, I drank tea. Eating a bag of chocolate cookies a guard we bribed procured for us; it was as good as a party.

At first, the evening was little different from any other, though the three deaths during the day were unusual. But something strange came in with the storm; some outré, fell being had blown in with the natural elements. The Thai’s dread was not as unfounded as we Westerners thought.

By eight o’clock, the violence of the wind had abated, although the lightning was still frequent as to illuminate the night. The thunder beat a lively rhythm on our tympanums, and uncanny sounds akin to voices produced an eerie music on the night air.

We opened the shutters nearest the bathroom, enjoying the magnificent light show of nature. No one protested, and the beds closest to the window, perhaps fifteen feet away, were occupied by lepers too timid to say anything, merely burrowing deeper under their mangy blankets.

We spoke of things dear to our hearts as we strolled about the ward. Of places we would visit, of feasts we would eat, of ideal women we would find and love, when and if we escaped from Hell.

The first hint that something was amiss was from a terrible odor. Not the smell of defecation, which was too common to be worthy of notice, but of feces mixed with meaty rottenness; a nasty whiff of bodily decay … the scent of death.

When the stench did not pass away on our second round through the worst area where it lingered, we peered closely through the mosquito netting of the beds, looking for any hint of the culprit.

My nose involuntarily crinkled at the vile smell. “That’s disgusting!”

Bruce’s face was a frowning mask of revulsion. “Come on, asshole! Who shit themselves? Drag your ass to the toilet, you scumbag!”

None of them spoke English, so the lack of response was no surprise. We kept trying to locate its origin. The smell seemed strongest next to a bed whose owner was rather limp. An arm and leg hung out over the edge of the bed, unlike the rest of the Thais tightly balled up beneath their covers.

Bruce poked him. “Hey you, we know you did it. Get up, you sick fuck!”

I snorted in contempt. “He can’t be bothered to answer? How rude!”

Bruce shook him by the shoulder, and he lolled lifelessly in Bruce’s hand. Bruce recoiled, and I pulled down the blanket to reveal the open staring eyes of a dead man.

I shouted “Desamoli!” (Dead man, here!)

Bruce repeated “Desamoli! Desamoli!” until the blue boys left their silent TV and rang the bell to summon the night guard. They rang it repeatedly for ten minutes, until finally the guard appeared. He made a note in his log and quickly left. The dead Thai was laid out under his blanket and his belongings were immediately pilfered by the blue boys. They left whatever they did not fancy for the other Thais to steal. On average, it took two or three days before the coroner’s office did the paperwork, and the bodies consigned to the temple crematorium next door to the prison. In the meantime, the dead man was left where he lay.

They wrapped him up in his sheets and dumped a whole tin of St. John’s Bath Powder the dead man had kept in his dresser on him. It was enough to kill the worst of the smell.

Far from diminishing our energy or creating a somber mood, we felt quickened and alive. The presence of death made our life the more precious, and our talk tended to gallows humor. Quiet discussion turned to laughter; wishful thinking grew into comical reflections on the nature of existence in a quirky, Third World country.

The livelier we became, the more we frightened the Thais. The blue boys retreated into their beds, turning off their TV at the unheard of hour of nine-thirty. Not a sliver of skin could be seen on the ward. Some beds actually shook from prisoners quaking with fright. They hid themselves, despite the fact the temperature remained well into the eighties.

We were buoyant, nerves tingling with an excitement of uncertain provenance. We drank cup after cup of caffeine, chainsmoked cigarettes, and were increasingly animated.