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News of a Drugging
Personal account of being drugged and having my things stolen by prostitutes in Bangkok.
I noticed the girl before she had spoken to me. She was milling about, in Popiang House, a dingy restaurant in Bangkok that morphs, after the 1am nightlife curfew, into an illegal drinking pithole. There were the usual assortment of loose-enders – travellers (mostly drunk), prostitutes (the obvious and the less-obvious), and petty bums or criminals. The girl struck me with her eyes – a sparkling piercing gaze that I associate with passion, adventure, ambition, and mischief – and it turned out, a day later, that I was correct about her mischievousness, but it was the wrong kind of mischief. But right then those eyes hypnotized me, and when she noticed me looking at her she inched over, bit by bit, until she was close enough to start a conversation.
My Thai companion, a scruffy unconfident man who slept on a friend’s floor and relied on people’s kindness for food, was slumbering next to me, on the matt that is put out on the street late at night. The girl’s name was Dua and her friend name – a katoey, a man who had had a sex change – was Duan. I thought, ‘What is a young beautiful girl doing with a sour-looking aging katoey?’ But I didn’t think twice about such an unmatched friendship at the time, and neither did I know at the time that Dua meant ‘star’ and Duan meant ‘moon’.
We had the usual trite conversation, all dead-end small talk heightened only by the titillation of flirtatiousness. I had been in Thailand long enough to know the dynamics. Dua was tacitly available – a beautiful, sexy girl sitting cross-legged close enough for me to smell her perfume, and holding my gaze for long enough to cajole my latent desire. Philosophically I was interested, but only as a voyeur: I wanted to avoid sex with prostitutes. I just wanted to flirt, but I was also fooling myself as part of me also wanted to believe in the possibility that she was a new professional girlfriend, or an occasional one, and she could turn out to be girlfriend material. A delusion concocted in the realm of lust and fantasy.
“Why isn’t your friend talking,” I asked Dua.
“She can’t hear well,” she replied. “She has hurt her ears. She has to go to hospital this morning.”
It was already 4am. The katoey looked at me with melancholic weariness; I noticed also a tinge of bitterness in his gaze. His short hair did nothing to conceal his ugliness, and his blue spotty hat made him look all the more weird. I wondered again about how the two had been brought together, but I didn’t think the mismatch was wrong as I felt pity for katoeys in Thailand because they are the subject of prejudice and aversion.
The conversation sputtered on, propelled by flirtatious innuendos, and Dua finally said: “I can look after you tonight if you like.”
“Maybe,” I said. “No sex.” But first I needed to take a piss.
When I came back I was thinking about the idea of drinking with this girl in my room – getting close, stopping short of body contact, an exploratory kind of frolic. But was I fooling myself again? I felt ambivalent, and my ambivalence and confusion was growing by the minute. I even started to feel high. The night was growing thin, and a deep blue seeping through the eastern sky. I began to stammer. My vision was becoming blurred; everything started to have the misty detached quality of a dream. And everything was happening in slow motion. Feeling high from what? I hadn’t been drinking much.
“Come,” Dua said, motioning to her bag. “I have food and drink. You like tom yam?”
When had she bought the food? Now she was standing up, extending her hand, leading me to a taxi. Dua and I slipped in the backseat. The katoey followed, jumping into the front seat. Everything now was becoming fast, and the feelings of bewilderment were increasing. Why was the katoey coming with us? It didn’t seem like a good idea. What was the point of him sitting in a sulky manner, in restlessness or patience, saying nothing, while a man and woman flirted and pretended to be interested in each other’s mind? I wanted to speak these words; I wanted to say that we should drop off the katoey at his place. Did he have a place to sleep?
Nothing came out. I could no longer form words in my mouth; I could only utter unintelligible gibberish.
We arrived home. I was tottering; I had to sit on the bed. Dua sat next to me, telling me that I was drunk and that she would look after me. The katoey paced around – he was definitely impatient now – and he seemed to be snooping. Why had his demeanour become so rapacious now? And was he looking at me with contemptuous derision now? I thought, ‘I have to throw him out.’ Dua said something, and the katoey now stopped pacing. He picked a pillow from the bed, and lay on the floor, resting his head on the pillow. His eyes changed again, now full of pity and sadness. I thought, ‘I have to throw both of them out’ – but that was the last thing I thought before I collapsed.
It was dark when I got up. I checked my watch; I didn’t have a watch. I checked the clock on the bedside table – and I realised that it was the following night, and that sixteen hours had lapsed. I felt disoriented. Then I remembered the girls – where were they? I found the front door open, and in the front room the floor was a mess: crumbs of food, empty cans of beer, cigarette butts crushed on the floor. I stumbled back to the bedroom. Drawers were hanging open, books and magazines were strewn around. My purse was on the bedside table – it was empty. My phone was gone, my gold necklace was gone, my credit card was gone, my electric dictionary was gone, my parker was gone – everything, in fact, worth more than USD6 was gone.
Then I saw a piece of paper on the pillow next to where I had slept. It was a page form an A3-sized artist’s sketchbook, and it had a sketch on it. The sketch was of the beautiful woman, Dua, and she looked as I had remembered her – piercing twinkling eyes, high cheekbones, hair cascading down her face, and that coy mischievous smile. And there was something written in Thai on the sketch. The writing said: “She is mine.”
The Police Investigation
I was checking mugshots of katoeys who had been arrested before in Bangkok, and the young cheerful police inspector was looking over my shoulder. “Beautiful,” he mused, “but dangerous.”
The police inspector and I had built a friendly rapport. We had spent many hours together – making a detailed police report, taking pictures of the crime scene (my place), taking pictures and making sketches of Popiang House. And we had spent a whole day at the headquarters of the Metropolitan police making identikits of the two criminals – Dua and Duan – who had committed a serious crime by slipping a pill know as Rohynol in my drink (more popularly known as the ‘rape drug’, a drug that has triggered a heart attack in some cases), then took me home and stole my things. The cost of the theft amounted to Lm1,300, and that included two laptops bought on my credit card – something that made me suspect I had been the victim of an organised gang that included foreigners, as a Thai turning up with a foreign credit card under a foreign name to buy a laptop would surely arouse suspicion.
Worse than the financial loss was the way I had been violated. I had been psychologically traumatised. My possessions, strewn around my room, and the detritus of their celebratory feasting – the food they had eaten, the beer they had drunk, the cigarettes they had smoked, the sketch they had made – they must have spent at least a couple of hours in my room. They had acted like marauders celebrating and gloating over their fallen victim, and the more I thought about this, the more violated and enraged and humiliated I felt.
The police told me not to touch anything in my room until forensic evidence could be collected, and for a couple of nights afterwards I had to sleep among the reminders of my violation. I was gripped by an irrational fear. I slept facing the door. I put a knife under my pillow. I was afraid to sleep alone, and every little rustle I heard sounded like footsteps – even the faint patter of rain would wake me up. For the first time I could understand why victims of torture or rape feel so psychologically wounded. Psychological assault is a lingering irrational trauma. For a week afterwards I didn’t sleep more that four hours every night, and by the end of the week I felt exhausted, and then I could also understand the debilitating condition known as ‘battle fatigue’. Worse: I felt melancholic, I lost my confidence, I was unable to work, I became obsessed with vengeance. It was as if vengeance would exorcise me from my neurotic anguish.
The police also wanted to get them. The government had just issued a decree to the police that crimes on foreigners should be taken seriously, and that investigations had to be handled by the senior investigators. We had lots of evidence, including a toxicology test I did at the hospital that found the presence of the rape drug in my blood. I also took my own initiative, and went around Khao San Road making inquiries among katoeys. I found one katoey who knew the culprit, and upon hearing my story he told me he would help me catch him. They used to go to a gay club together, and he spilled all he knew, the real name of the culprit, and something about his criminal history: he had been in prison for four years on drug dealing, he was an addicted gambler, he had tried to drug an Israeli guy a few months before, and this Israeli guy had seen him and smashed a bottle on his head – and he had gone to Bangkok Christian Hospital to have stitches done. “That is why,” the katoey said, “his hair is short now and he wears a cap that he never takes off.”
I gave the information to the police – it was enough leads to track him down – and I asked the inspector, “When can you catch him?” The inspector laughed, and said: “Not so fast!!!” The problem was that the Thai police didn’t have a centralised database of ex-prisoners.
I said, “The hospital would have his record.”
“I can’t ask the hospital to provide me with confidential patient data,” the inspector replied.
I was tired and dejected, and I was blowing more money for the investigation to proceed. The police inspector was dedicated, but he didn’t have the resources to do his job. He didn’t have an official vehicle, and I had to pay taxis all the time for us to go around. Then I had to pay two prostitutes to give statements to the police. And then there were orders of coffees and drinks for everyone, and this and that, and the cost of facilitating the investigation was spiralling. In two weeks I had spent about USD300.
So I decided to go away for two months to clear my head. When I came back a friend who had done some interpretation for me told me the inspector had called her to tell her that they had caught the katoey, and he had been bailed for USD3,000. I waited for the police to contact me to stand as a witness, but they never did. I did not approach them again either. I wanted to forget. I was weary. I wanted to put it down to experience, but still I cannot – I still feel pangs of fury, humiliation, and violation every time I remember.
(C) Victor Paul Borg 
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