Authors: T. M. Hoy
Carefully tucking in those possessions I left in the cell during the day under the blankets, I’d roll up my mattress. In another hour, a Thai we hired
communally to clean the place came in to wake the stragglers, stacking the mattresses in a pile in the center of the cell. Before returning to the cell in the afternoon, this same cleaner would unroll each of our mattresses and make sure there was sufficient water in the cistern for the night. How he memorized the characteristics of twenty-odd beds well enough to know them in the dark was a mystery. There was a succession of Thai doing this job over the years, for about five dollars a month, with each of the room occupants contributing about thirty cents or so. Labor prices seemed immune to inflation. Even so, often the farangs that were junkies had trouble coming up with their share of this pittance.
I’d slip on my flip-flops and weave through my snoring compatriots. Carrying my small day bag, I’d plod down the deserted dorm corridor, still half-asleep, to start my day. The bag held my walkman, cassette tapes, books, snacks and candy, thermos and tea fixings, and other detritus of daily life. For three years I also carried a pear wood portable escritoire, holding all my papers. Built by a Thai master cabinet-maker, it was a marvel of the wood-worker’s art. It was a rectangular box a foot wide by two long, some eight inches deep, with two hinged leaves forming the top, with a small but sturdy lock inset in the center. Two strong U-shaped frames acted as legs that were cunningly crafted to lie flush with the box when folded up. The legs gave the desk/briefcase a foot of height—perfect as a lap-desk at night, or a coffee table by day. Surprisingly light, it was remarkably tough, and I kept it within reach every day I owned it. I bought it for 250 baht (ten dollars) and sold it years later for the same amount.
Early morning is kindest to the dorm’s appearance, empty of people, everything neatly stacked away; but the place is never attractive. The prison dorm rooms are white washed rectangular concrete boxes fifteen feet high, unadorned and purely functional. Inside the dorm, each cell is twelve-feet wide by twenty-four-feet long. A grid of iron bars faces the corridor in front, stretching floor to ceiling. The cells face each other off the central corridor,
which is ten or twelve feet wide, with ten cells on either side, with cells typically holding twenty-five to thirty prisoners. Each is allotted bed space two feet wide by five and a half long, theoretically leaving a narrow aisle down the middle of the cell to the toilet hole at the back. In reality, everyone’s feet extend onto everyone else’s beds. When walking to the toilet, one has to navigate a tangle of limbs, trying to step on the outer edges of people’s mattresses so as to show a bit of respect. When the cell is filled with thirty people (the norm), beds overlap, creating a daily source of conflict. Sometimes you can negotiate a solution with your neighbors, but often you have boors and fools to deal with that keep pushing the issue in obnoxious ways.
After leaving the dorm, my natural rhythm dictated that I head for the bathroom. Set between the dorm and the prison wall are the rows of toilets; a series of porcelain holes set in concrete with a roof over it. The toilets are raised up several feet above ground level to assist in gravity flushing. They sit in two rows of five toilets, each row back to back, facing different directions. The holes are cheek-by-jowl with low concrete dividers between them. Running in front of the toilets are narrow cement troughs holding water for washing off after defecating, as the use of toilet paper is an alien custom. In any case, tissue paper clogs up the holes, and its use is frowned upon.
It takes months for the average Westerner to become accustomed to using them. You have to pull your pants down below your ankles, taking care to slip off one pant leg unless you want dirty water splashed in your pants, and squat naked over the hole, fully exposed to the view of passers-by. More difficult still, with ten toilet holes per building having to accommodate 1,000 men, you frequently have neighbors a few inches away. Two men shitting either side of you, brushing your arms or legs whenever they move takes some getting used to. Farangs also have trouble at first with using water to wash off. You have to remember to bring your own plastic bowl. No squeamishness allowed—dipping into the water trough, pushing aside the feces floating in it is another off-putting part of the process.
Relieved, I’d take four steps forward, down the steps in front of the toilet, and sink into my chair. Like many prisoners, I purchased a lawn chair—a simple folding wooden frame with heavy cloth for the seat. Peter, a Dutch friend of mine, sat opposite me in his own chair, and we’d take turns setting up our chairs, which we stored in a nearby room. Unless you purchase a place to stay from the authorities, you’re forced to wander around chasing shade. The chairs are the feeble answer prisoners devised, for those unable to afford the $400 or $500 necessary to buy a ‘house’ from the guards.
We’d place them against the wall behind the toilets to take advantage of the morning shade. Unfortunately, only in the space directly behind the toilets was there sufficient room in the grossly overcrowded prison yard to put a chair. We were thus forced to endure the odoriferous locale if we wanted to avoid the sun.
At that hour, roughly half an hour between 7:30 and 8:00 AM, the Thai junkies mob the toilets, crouching down so that they are blocked from the view of guards and blue boys passing by on the sidewalk bordering the dorm. In circles of three to as many as five or six, they’d sharpen used needles stolen from the hospital garbage on the rough concrete paving underfoot. They attach them to empty plastic Bic pen ink tubes and jam this contraption into a vein. Mixing the heroin—China White Number 4—very potent stuff, with water from the toilet trough, the head Thai of the group spits it into the vein via the plastic ink tube. They repeat the process until everyone has their morning fix, then they vanish.
Occasionally they’d hit an artery, and a jet of blood spurts out rhythmically for a pulse or two, splattering those unlucky enough to be fixing nearby.
Of course, it’s no secret that the junkies used the toilet area as their shooting gallery. Like so many aspects of Thai society, “out of sight, out of mind.” The guards bring the dope in, and it’s better for the prison administrators not to inquire too deeply into the affairs of their poorly paid subordinates and their sorry clientele.
Peter and I, in common with most well-off prisoners, ran a tab with a Thai who sold coffee and cigarettes. Every morning, as soon as he had boiling water ready, he’d bring us as many cups of super-sweet Thai-style coffee, as we’d request. We’d read yesterday’s edition of the
Bangkok Post
and discuss the world’s troubles, ignoring the junkies as best we could. Usually we’d sit there until 10:00 AM or so, when the shade would disappear.
The difficulty of finding shade to sit in varies from building to building. Buildings 3 and 4 have a lot of greenery, while 1 and 6 barely have any. Immediately past a building’s gate, on the right-hand side sits a large rectangular field where vegetables are grown. To the left is a long thin lawn, used on weekends by Thai to dry laundry. Some buildings have trees bordering the lawn; others do without. Directly behind the vegetable field stands a building that houses the factories, the administrative offices, and a dining hall. The factories production includes the manufacturing of towels, fancy picture frames, rip-off Levi’s and Gucci goods, fishing nets, and anything else the prison officers can dream up. This building is little more than a roof on stilts, designed to catch every breeze in the oppressive tropical heat and humidity. It’s filled with small structures constructed with scrap lumber.
When the temperature began its daily climb and the sun its brutal assault, Peter would flee to a spot in the factory next to a Thai friend of his. I retreated to a room loosely referred to as the library.
The Library in Building 2 consists of disordered stacks of books donated by visitors or prisoners dropping off ones received from friends and relatives. Two large bookcases hold the motley collection, and five or six ancient school desks for children complete the furniture. A propeller fan stirs the muggy air. The ten-foot square place tucked away in a corner of the factory is usually empty. Boredom is the farang’s true enemy, as one whiles away the hours.
Unlike farangs, the Thai are forced to work seven hours a day, six days a week in the factories for a few baht a month—or pay a bribe not to work at all.
The ‘Samurai’—no-hope lifers who murder for profit or on a whim—are the only Thai that don’t pay and have a certain freedom. Social stratification is clear. Peasant slave laborers are at the bottom; small merchants in the middle; factory owners and wealthy Thai—a mere handful—on top.
Outside this hierarchy are foreigners. Asians from other countries are accorded the rank of their economic status; “no money, no honey.” Regardless of whether or not they have family to assist them, virtually all foreign Asians come up with ingenious ways to scrape up enough income to survive.
Westerners (the whites) have embassies constantly checking on their nationals’ health and safety and regularly bring cash. Whites are treated better than the wealthy Thai and make up a strange class of aliens outside the Thai caste system.
Africans are treated as an ‘untouchable’ caste, human garbage whose only value is what can be extorted from them. The Thai’s deep dislike for blacks isn’t mitigated by the money they hoard from drug dealing. This is an odd departure for the venal Thai.
The Thai peasants spend their days working with machines or on tasks of manual labor. This often involves toxic chemicals and hazardous outdated industrial equipment. A large minority are handicapped from accidents. At shower time, dozens of wooden and plastic legs, crutches, and canes can be seen leaning against the wall in a long row, bearing mute testimony to the dangers of prison factory work. Fed and allowed to bathe twice a day, they live a life not much different from slaves in any place or time.
The small merchants work almost as hard as the peasants but are wealthy by comparison. They own radios, TVs, nice clothes, and eat very well. They’re also quick to imitate Western fashions. Anything two or more farangs wear or use becomes ‘de rigueur’ for the business-owners and is sure to be acquired within a matter of days. This slavery to stylishness would be funny were it not so pathetic.
The Asian foreigners who are well off, mostly the Hong Kong Chinese and Taiwanese, and the Thai factory owners either pursue increasing their large fortunes or emulate farang amusements such as reading, playing board games, or lying around indulging vices.
The majority of Westerners are either junkies who spend their days trying to find a fix or are madmen. The circumstances are such that they drive farangs insane, or to seek oblivion with heroin. Those that don’t use drugs go insane from the privations and trauma. Only a miniscule group manage to successfully pass these ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ of Thai prison life.
Africans deal heroin or act as pawnbrokers. They cluster together, loudly engaged in cheerful social amenities in their communal ‘houses.’ None use drugs, and the vast majority send money back to their families in Africa. They are uniformly gregarious, and their attitudes are sunny. To the outside world, they appear to regard their imprisonment as a vocational choice. None ever complain, and their bravery is as immense as it is inconspicuous. In the twenty-plus years West Africans have been incarcerated in Thai prisons, one—a single Nigerian—has been released. The rest are doomed to die there.
The one that left paid a million dollar bribe.
Forming their own little subgroup, the blue boys—trustees dressed in dark blue shorts and shirts—wear weird homemade badges they fashion out of tin: insignias of imaginary rank. They are the ones who actually run the prison, with minimal oversight by the guards. They do all the paperwork, the policing, the punishment, and the security tasks the guards are too lazy to do.
The guards themselves are rarely to be seen outside of the visiting area. There are three or four per shift in each building, but they sleep all day, get massages and sexual favors from lady-boys, and do the least possible. Their wages are so low, typically ninety dollars a month, that they have to work second jobs. They use the prison job as a sinecure. A small room in a quiet
corner of the factory building near the chow hall is considered their sleeping quarters. They live there during the week, only going home to villages outside Bangkok mostly on the weekends to save money. Their meals are provided free as a favor by one or another of the inmate ‘restaurateurs.’ Their extra pay is the money they ‘earn’ from bribes paid to them to go shopping for farangs or for other kinds of smuggling.
Building guards are left out of the real cash, though, as the lion’s share of smuggling takes place in the visiting area, with the guards assigned there acting as the conduit between visitors and inmates.
At least half the Nigerians get visits twice a week, sometimes more often. There is a sizable expat Nigerian community in Bangkok, and besides tribal connections, the hundreds of prisoners involved in drug dealing maintain a kind of outside ‘support staff ‘ that handles their money, shopping, and other needs.
Westerners get regular visits as well. Sometimes, these are backpackers and budget travelers responding to posters put up in cheap guest houses in Kao San Road. Relatives and friends—mainly of the Brits—put up these flyers periodically asking guest house residents to have pity and visit the listed prisoners. These poorer visitors became known as ‘banana visits,’ as they seldom bring valuable goodies, instead giving inexpensive fruit or snacks.
A prisoner with a visitor gets the message over the intercom system in a mangled version blurted out once. You either learn to recognize your name quickly or you do without visits. Passing through the dorm building’s front gate, a concrete path leads between immaculately tended lawns and bushes bordering the twenty-foot high walls of other buildings. It’s a short path, three buildings on either side, before one reaches a cluster of one-story offices.