Midnight Patpong

Midnight Patpong, water color on paper, 5x7 inch

By midnight on Friday, Patpong’s full, twenty thousand tourists from Europe, the U.S., Australia, India, the Middle East and Japan, ten thousand girls, hundreds of ladyboys, plenty of beer, whiskey, endless stalls selling counterfeit goods, thirty or forty different disco tracks blasting out of the gogo bars, a world vortex of man woman interaction, a combination sexual theme park, shopping mall and inferno, fiercely consuming an endless stream of humanity and their desire.

Patpong Girl

Patpong Girl, water color on paper, 18x24 inch

For two years, she’s been dancing in a Patpong bar, about a hundred tourists a night, thirty-five thousand a year, seventy thousand in all, from Europe, Australia, the Middle East, Japan, Korea and the U.S.  She looks at each one, knows them better than they know themselves, who they are, what they are looking for and whether they are worth her time.

Dancer Agogo

Dancer Agogo, water color on paper, 5x7 inch

For a thousand nights, she’s danced in a daze of smoke, sparkling disco balls and the thumping beat from gigantic Bose woofers.  She has seen the faces of a hundred thousand men, their eyes caressing every inch of her flesh.  Tall, short, handsome, ugly, dark, tan, yellow and white, obese and thin, some of them in wheelchairs, others with stutters,  old and young, every kind of man, from every country on earth.  What are they thinking and what do they want, why are they there, in the Bangkok bar where she works and lives and dreams?