Oneway East

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Bandits













So I wasn't going to write this, because my poor parents will worry about their reckless lunatic of a son, but here we are. That's the situation. Worry not. I always come out basically ok.

I would have told them eventually anyway, and now that I'm mostly healed up, it seems more okay to talk about it.

First date at the hospital, second date at the police station.

My stitches are due out today. A week ago, I was the victim of a violent crime, completely contrary to my expectations of what happens in Thailand. Daisy and I were driving home from a party on my bike, then all of a sudden there was another bike way too close, way too close, they're going to hit us, what the fuck is happening, I'm being sucked towards the hostile bike, sucked hard, almost felt like a sudden sharp crosswind, then we were down, dragging and skidding. Looked up, the guy on the back of the other bike had white shirt with a collar, a standard shortish haircut, part on the left. Dark blue Honda Dream. They smoothly arced away across the bridge and vanished. Check the injuries. How bad are you? What hurts? Where else? Everything moving okay? How deep are they? Check self. Right ankle protrusion: deep gouge, the bone's okay. It moves fine. Knee and calf: a lot of roadrash, one pretty deep one on the part that sticks out the most. Right hip: not too bad, but bleeding. Right elbow: that one's pretty bad, a little bit of ragged tissue hanging. Everything moves normally. Right shoulder: bit of a scooped-out deep gouge on the bony tip, roadrash on my triceps and forearm. Daisy's hand and forearm got a number of scrapes, but nothing as bad as mine. I think the pedals of the bike acted as a fulcrum point and the front of the bike where I was was pushed down whereas the back lifted up, so she was kind of clear of most of it. That's good; scars don't look as good on girls as they do on guys.

"They were trying to take my bag..." They dragged us down with her bag. What idiots. Did they even look? See that the bag was over her head and shoulder? Did they see that the strap was four inches wide, not going to break? Callous vicious thugs, who don't mind really hurting people to take a little bit of money. There was nothing even in the bag. 500 baht maybe.


When you're hurt and going into shock, you feel like you're freezing, even in the tropics. I curled up and bled on her bed until I got warm enough to drive us to the hospital. four stitches in my elbow. That's all. Nothing too serious. We got off relatively easy.


There's a distinct system of local enforcement here. Everyone knows each other. Most people figure they were off-islanders, maybe high on yaabaa.
Yaa: drug
baa: crazy
ie methamphetamine. Makes you a bit crazy. Not the normal process of thinking things through from beginning to end, cause and effect, consequences. I don't know though; I've tried speed and you still have to be a shitty person already to do something so callous as drag someone off a motorbike to take their money. Drugs or no drugs, if you do that you're missing something. Young men.

Perhaps a byproduct of the negative cultural exchange I've written about before. In heavily touristed areas, it's perhaps easy to dehumanize the visitors, that they're all rich idiots, they're not people like us, they don't matter. So what if they die or go to the hospital? They're rich. Fuck'em.

Funnily, I've heard so many bad stories about corrupt Thai cops it didn't even occur to me to call them. The detective said, maybe we could have got them if you called us right away. At the police station the next day, the detective was really excellent. Did a great job of coaxing out what little bit of detail we could recall. He was very professional and very concerned. An attitude of, " I will not tolerate this kind of shit in my district, I promise to try to protect you better in the future." We drove back through all the relevant places to examine the scene, try to jog our memories a little bit. What we came up with is the thieves must have picked up on us at the 7-11 where we stopped. There were a few guys outside, but I confess I didn't pay much attention.

Be more alert at night. Carry your bag on your belly, not your back, sandwiching it between your two bodies. Strap on one shoulder, and don't keep too much in it. Things we learn the hard way.

But we're okay. Daisy's gone away now, we're both mostly healed up.

So since the attack I've been trying harder to be more outgoing and friendly to all the Thai folks I talk to, speak more thai, be more present. You are a person and I am a person. Let's treat each other like that. Would you do something like that to a family member? Someone from your town? Of course not.

Same goes for all the vile stories I've heard about Indian men and their treatment of western women. The ceaseless and aggressive staring, even nastiness like groping and attacking. Disgusting stories, like a girl who fell asleep on the beach in a swimsuit, and woke up to see two men standing next to her and masturbating. There must be an "US-Them" disconnect. Would you dream of doing something like that to your sister? Your neighbor's wife? The woman who runs the shop down the street? Of course not. Incidentally, the penalty for rape is execution, but notwithstanding. It happens. It must be an extremely sexually repressed culture.

C'est la vie. All is well. I'm coming home soon.

1 Comments:

At Wed May 21, 11:13:00 AM PDT, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Wow. I had no idea. Thank you for writing this.

 

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