Traveling with my daughter Aimee was never dull. On our first night on Phi Phi Island in a dilapidated guesthouse beside the shore, I had just tucked in beside her on our mat on the floor and closed my eyes when I sensed something and sat up. I thought it could be the furry spider that had leapt out from behind a mirror earlier and plopped to the floor, but it wasn't. As I stared down, a black and yellow snake almost six feet long slithered over my daughter's stomach and on to my thighs and slowly off the mat to the floor. I didn't scream, I didn't move a muscle.
I took off our sheet, bunched it up and threw it over him as it crept away and pushed the creeping mess out the door, even though the bottom of the door ended five inches above the floor. I tucked in every inch of our mosquito netting and went back to bed. The next morning, I told my friends I'd be moving.
It was a scary snake, for sure, however not nearly as scary as the snake from the Garden of Eden I was about to meet up with when I changed guesthouses the next morning.
The next day Aimee and I checked out. Enough of snakes and hairy things. I knocked on the door of a beach house that had a sign planted in the sand out front with an arrow saying 'Thai Massage' and 'Rooms.' A stark-naked blond woman of about sixty with breasts shaped like papayas answered the door. She hauled her breasts out of the way and said 'come in, come in, I'm just a guest here,' as if it were totally normal to nauseate strangers who are seeking a room.
'Don't mind me,' she said. As I stood there garping at her loose flesh, an old fat Thai woman came into the room wiping her hands on a tea towel, who said yes, I could stay there, but I would have to stay in the front room on a double bed because all her rooms were full. Fine by me.
'This is a Christian home,' she informed me.
'I could tell by my reception,' I said.
My bed was in the living room, a large room surrounded by windows and filled with blankets, pillows, towels, and massage equipment. I still couldn't get my eyes over the Swedish cake marching all over the house naked with just her teeny pair of knickers to cover her nest, her thin skin rippling like a breeze over water. I knew she was completely nuts. How the hell did she get there? And why was she allowed to walk around like that?
I was starting to like the islands. That night Aimee and I went out with Elaine and Gina, two British women I had met in Krabi and who were the ones who had convinced me to come to Phi Phi, to a fabulous seafood restaurant. They were drinking Mekong Whiskey and encouraged me to buy a pint even though I'd heard it was the worst rotgut in the world, its main intoxicant being formaldehyde. They said they had been drinking it since they had arrived in Thailand to no effect, so I ordered a bottle. After finishing dinner and our whiskey we went to the beach and stayed there half the night with some other people we met who had music and tapes and were loads of fun. We swam and talked, and when Aimee was tired, I tucked her into a sleeping bag beside me. A full moon lit up the bay and it was gorgeous beyond belief. We all had a gay old time.
When I finally made it back to the house at 3am with Aimee, the old woman was up and at it and all fired up and shook her fist and gave me grief for having my child out at that time. She went on about herself being a Christian and why wasn't I being a responsible Christian parent, blah, blah, blah and all this crazy shit. I ignored her and went to bed. It was too late to get into it. The first time I'm out past 10pm with my kid and I get flak from this old bag of wind?
The next day I woke up with the worst hangover in my entire life; I felt like my head had been shot off and reattached with pliers. The old Thai woman's son gave me a head massage and I lay down and slept it off. Later on that night, I met up with Gina and Elaine again, but I had a quiet night because my head was still in recovery. I had left Aimee at the house because she wanted to stay there and watch television and everything seemed to be fine, but when I came back at about 9pm the Swedish cake told me that Aimee had been crying for me and that it had totally irritated the old Thai woman. I shrugged and packed up all my gear and tied up my knapsack and then went to bed, but I never got undressed because intuitively I just knew shit was coming down the pike in the morning. What I didn't realize, was just how much shit.
She didn't waste any part of the morning. At 7am, the old Thai woman strode into the living room where I was sleeping with Aimee and started thrashing around the place saying that I had to find another room as Aimee was crying the night before, and I wasn't there, and what kind of Christian was I, and finally, that I didn't deserve to have a child. Whoa. Back off Satan.
I leaped out of bed ready to go and told Aimee to get dressed, we were leaving. The old woman snarled that she wanted her money for the two nights that I had stayed and I snarled back that I was owed the money for having had to put up with her bitchy ass for two days. But as I was tying up the laces on my shoes and Aimee was putting on her dress, she came at me with a massage roller that she had picked up, a long, rounded piece of assault weapon that she held over her head as she ran at me like a cracked-out banshee. I grabbed her two wrists as she was about to strike and we wrestled and danced left to right, right to left, and I was struck by how strong the old cow was for her age and how I didn't think I could hold her off for much longer. Aimee started to cry and scream and hung on to the old woman's arm that carried her up off her feet, crying 'don't hurt my Mommy, don't hurt my Mommy.' I was yelling, telling her to back off or I'd kill her, when her son ran into the room and grabbed his mother's arms and twisted them behind her back. He pried the massage mallet out of her hand and tossed it into a corner and hauled the old woman backwards, shouting at her in Thai. He looked at me, 'get out now, just go. Sorry, my mother...'
I was missing one shoe, I had sprained my finger, my hand was cut, and I had a traumatized daughter by the time we finally slammed out the front door, the old woman still yelling from the back of the house, arguing with her son. An audience stood collectively outside their huts watching us limp away, but I was positive they'd seen it all before and I waved to them. They chuckled and shook their heads, she was totally mad.
