Copyright Bangkok Buckaroo 1st edition 2016 Text by Steve Rosse eisbn 978-1-63323-879-4 Print ISBN 978-1-63323-880-0 Published by www.booksmango.com E-mail: info@booksmango.com Text & cover page Copyright Steve Rosse All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, copied, stored or transmitted in any form without prior written permission from the publisher. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author, editors, researchers, copyright holder, publisher and contributors.
Bangkok Buckaroo Dedicated with gratitude to Steve Stewart and Joe DiMaggio 3
Steve RoSSe Chapter one: Cowboys Wide Wally Wahls is fond of telling his customers that it takes more than a big hat to make a boy a cowboy. In Bangkok it takes more than a big name to make a bar a cowboy bar. Even if it s on a street called Cowboy Street. El Norte is a cowboy bar. You can take that to the bank. It ain t easy to find. You go in the nice end of Soi Cowboy and thread your way through the motorcycle taxis. You have to walk past the ping pong ball shows and the ladyboys and the baby elephant photographers and smiling policemen and hello girls and dried squid vendors. You have to walk past all the other bars that want to call themselves cowboy bars, Long Gun, Apache, Country Road, Rawhide, Lucky Star, Cactus, Moonshine, all the places that just dress the girls in Daisy Dukes and call it a day. You walk past where that old one hour photo lab finally turned into an internet cafe. When you get to the not so nice end of Soi Cowboy you go in a little alleyway that looks like a dead end but just barely isn t. There s an awning that says El Norte, but no lights. No neon. No hello girls outside. Entering any bar on a Friday night in Bangkok s monsoon season your first impression is the smell of wet feet. That s not part of being a cowboy bar; go anywhere in Bangkok in the rainy season and your first impression will be the smell of wet feet. It s why most people eat outside. The second thing you smell at El Norte is fresh cut lumber. That s because Wide Wally Wahls keeps two inches of new sawdust on the floor. Soaks up the mud and 4
Bangkok Buckaroo the blood and the beer, but mostly it just smells like pine. Wally likes a clean bar. Only a dozen pairs of feet were in El Norte on this particular monsoon Friday night. Half of those feet were slim and brown with brightly painted nails, and they were dry feet, something you d never see unless you talked one of those gals out of her boots. The girls in El Norte dress in dainty little fringed suede cowgirl boots that never go outside in the monsoon. They wear skin tight jeans and black leather vests with nothing under neither. On the back of the vests are biker colors, a top rocker that says Sons of the West MC, over crossed six-guns in an unlucky horseshoe, and a bottom rocker that says, Curve Unit. Six of the other seven pairs of feet in El Norte on this rainy Friday night were large and wet and corpse white, shod in the cheap plastic flip-flops of sex tourists too dim to read about Bangkok s weather before they bought a ticket. The men wore whatever the vendors sold from carts outside their cheap hotels. They were watching a recording of Super Bowl XXVII on a TV at the far end of the room and trying not to be too obvious about scratching the fungus between their toes. Most of the women were shifting around aimlessly next to chrome poles on the long bar and staring into their phones. There was a mirror running the length of the room behind the bar. The mirror reflected the dancing units, a collection of rickety tables and chairs, a pool-not-snooker table, and three flags hung on the opposite long wall: the blue and silver star of the Dallas Cowboys, a coiled rattlesnake on a yellow field with the legend, Don t Tread on Me, and the lone star and three colors of the flag of the State of Texas, One for God, State and Country. 5
Steve RoSSe Over the cash register in the center of the mirror was a hand-lettered sign on a bit of old cardboard that read, Aint no dart board so don t even ask. Over that was a pair of steer horns six feet across. A pair of old cowboy hats, one black, the other white, hung on the tips of the horns. There was a hing prah, or shelf for holy icons, mounted between the longhorns. A Buddha sat on it, his shoulders dusty with years of incense, his knees thick with years of candle wax. The horns themselves were bushy with a thousand dried up jasmine garlands. In the far corners of the room were a barrel of salted peanuts in the shells and a small bandstand. On the bandstand Los Tejanos, the only authentic Mariachi duo in Bangkok, were playing Cielito Lindo. Big Pepe with his tiny concertina, little Jose with his enormous guitar. Both in black suits bedazzled with thousands of rhinestones, red cummerbunds, and three-foot-wide black sombreros. Between barrel and Tejanos were four doors, marked Cowboys, Cowgirls, Employees Only, and Complaints. The door marked Complaints led to the alley out back. When Joe walked through the swinging front doors the air conditioning hit him like a slap. Well, well, bellowed Wide Wally, If it ain t the fuckin Marlboro Man. Wide Wally Wahls feet were bare and dry because he had not left the bar in years. He weighed almost four hundred pounds. His feet and ankles were puffy from liver failure. Going outside probably would have killed him. In a much gentler voice Wide Wally said, How the hell are ya, Boy? Fine as frog s hair, Dubya. How you? 6