The Hounds Of God Were Hunting

*

The hounds of God were hunting, not just through the deeply dysfunctional past, but here, now, in the fabric of things; the final denizens of Spicy spilling out into the street after a long, drunken night, the final negotiations between the English lads and the flint eyed hard faced girls, you have a place? I don't know. I don't know. Thousand baht. Alright. Some of the boys so drunk they could barely stand; wobbling on their feet, stunned. You alright? the Thais ask, always kind, even at the end, even without money. The hounds of God were hunting; but in the coming days the net would be cast wider, and he would do things he thought he would never do. But in these fractured contempts, in a body which had ceased functioning, in a morality which knew no bounds, doing the right thing was a matter of discernment, and dancing boys, cavorting girls, it's not good it's not good they told the American woman on the internet, but he knew what went on behind closed doors. What was most surprising was the skeleton men had disappeared; not just from the edges of vision but even in plain sight; their dark sunken eye sockets, holes into the bleaker, most terrifying futures imaginable, no longer held any power.

Fear had disappeared; and with it the black treacle essence that had distorted everything. Sins of the flesh. If only he could manage. The reawakening. Suddenly thanks to tall Pete he had a thousand great songs on his Blackberry phone; and the streets were alive with music pumped through headphones into the chamber that was his dancing heart. Love stirred; well an abstraction affection; for what he had no idea. The now dwindling harvest moon as it sank over Chiang Mai; the sky turning pink in a mild cacophony of sounds; the sight of the final negotiations as night turned into day and the music stopped pumping; here in the last nightclub before homes and hotels became the only option. Why did he think of Una now; lifetimes away? She was no doubt dead, or very very old, and would not be thinking of the drunken drunken boy she would sober up at three or four am with black coffee and ice cream; the boy she tried to help to fulfill his dream, to finish high school, to one day go to university, these most unlikely dreams. You'd look wonderful in drag, the trannie said, raking her gleaming, false nails across his never shaved face. Peter, another Peter, was often there at that hour, boasting about the number of his clients, gossiping with the drag queens about what coloured hair suited him best. He had just gone a kind of strawberry, amber blonde; sharp contrast to his natural black.

Sydney had never seen anything like Una's. It was a bit of Europe, a bit of the world, in this deeply suburban place. Every time he went to a meeting, so far into the future it might as well have been ten thousand years, here in this dysfunctional spring, where discernment and beauty had never sat right, he simply despaired, felt worse, is this all there is? Where are all the other attachments? The other ways of staying sane? Could he cop the bombardment, the happily brainwashed, the arrogant, self obsessed, tub thumping Americans, those very few who had embraced "the program" and prospered; while the truth lay elsewhere, in dead friends and horrified bars; where even the bar tenders expressed concern as their clients drank themselves to death; the stupors rising from melancholic to suicidal. And it had begun so long ago. Way back there at Una's where the kindness of strangers, the kindness of that German cafe owner, was the first genuine kindness anyone had ever showed him. Because they all wanted something; of course they did. I wasn't as damaged as so many others; he lied. I was just out of it. The customer's came and went. They weren't very demanding. I was more intelligent, more manipulative, had flash cars and often lived in nice apartments. Like all truths, it was only a partial truth. That level of abnegation could never go unpunished.

He heard them, heard their rare voices; in later years; when they spoke of the Rex Hotel as their own Heart Of Darkness; not just as something evil and malignant, but as something beyond the soul, beyond the ken, beyond understanding, what one human could do to another; how they were left on those streets and in those bars with no child welfare workers but Rosie, who came along in the early seventies and didn't really do much. She didn't know what they went through, behind closed doors and locked offices, when brutes took their fill and they drank and drank and drank, not just to negate the pain buyt to obliterate their own psychic hell, to squander every shred of consciousness and to pass out pathetic, vulnerable, glamorous as they dripped with pathos and the pump of the disco echoed up through the corridors to these places which should never have been. Yes; he was out of it, who wouldn't be? But in this level of abandonment there was some other driver. His contemporaries, the boys he went to school with, were still kicking balls and living with their parents and giggling in the school yard about sex they knew nothing about and which he could only imagine: asking a girl out on a date.

While all of these scenes, well, some of these scenes, would be exposed in a Royal Commission decades later; and he would make the point as a grown man that in all these transactions there were shades of grey, that the kindness of strangers took place in the most unlikeliest of circumstances and for many of these kids the kindness of the predators was the only real affection they had ever known, that some of these boys, while as they grew older no longer the objects of desire were put into businesses or through university, bought homes, established in life; for most the endings were never so kind. Discarded. Exploited. Made to dig their own graves. Passing from jail to jail. Or passing into rehabilitation. He heard their damaged voices. He heard the way they spoke of the bars he had regarded as the centre of the known universe. As places of abuse. Of some terrible psychic pain that reached beyond understanding, beyond the mere curdling of life circumstance and untold stories; for who would ever want to admit we did what we did. Who would ever want to admit, yeh, we were there.

Only that other Peter, from so long ago; the one who thought it was all a great laugh and the clients a joke. Pop. Make them come quick. That's the trick. Why even mention these things, all these years later? To skate across tragedy, for so many were dead. To be the final witness to a different soul: to the shouts out of windows, murderer, murderer. Was it his fault they fell in love; that they died? That almost nobody but him survived? That's why, when he heard those voices, those stories, of people who had been in the same bars, the same places at the same time; he heard their stories of profound damage, of life long dysfunction; of a terrible fragility no person with a normal, unexploited childhood could ever imagine, the shock of recognition was so profound. He scurried to connect the dots. But no normal narrative structure could carry this pain. So he brazened it out; as he had always done. Pretended to be the one that wasn't hurt; a manipulative little bastard who could stand the coating eyes, who knew, and didn't care, exactly what it was like to be up for sale. Who had survived untorn, undamaged. And who lived to tell the tale, to rewrite history, to eradicate the pain; as was the right of every survivor.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity/robin-williams-apologises-to-kevin-rudd-over-redneck-jibe/story-e6frfmqi-1225848770895

COMEDIAN Robin Williams has apologised to Kevin Rudd and offered to take him to a strip club next time the PM visits the US.

Williams yesterday laughed off the controversy after he dubbed Aussies "English rednecks" on US TV, but said he was sorry.

"Mr Rudd, I apologise," he said. "I would like to modify my terminology and use the term `English good old boys' instead."

Williams also jokingly begged the Prime Minister to let him back in the country and offered to send him transcripts of any future material he planned to use that mentioned Australia.

"If not, I'd love to go to a strip club with you in New York," he quipped, in reference to a storm created when it was revealed Mr Rudd had had a big night out at a New York strip club.

The US comedian, speaking on Fox FM's Hamish and Andy show, said his comments were an interpretation of Aussie accents, which combined the rounded English and drawling American sounds.

Mr Rudd angrily rejected the description of Australians and said: "Robin Williams should go and spend a bit of time in Alabama before he frames comments about anyone being particularly redneck."

Williams said he was shocked the Prime Minister had taken offence.

"The bottom line is I said that line on stage in Sydney and they didn't have a problem," he said.

"Every time I've been in Australia it's been wonderful. I love it down there."

In another backlash, the governor of Alabama has lashed out at Mr Rudd.

"I'm not sure if Prime Minister Rudd has ever been to Alabama," Bob Riley said. "If he has, he would know that Alabamians are decent, hard working, creative people."

http://news.brunei.fm/2010/03/28/thai-foreign-affairs-minister-thaksin-would-have-shown-new-evidence-earlier-if-he-really-has-it/

HUA HIN, Thailand March 28 (NNN-TNA) — Fugitive, ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra would have submitted new evidence to the courts earlier if indeed he really possesses such, to contest the February 26 ruling to seize Bt46.37 billion of his frozen assets, Thai Foreign Affairs Minister Kasit Piromya said Saturday.

Mr Kasit told journalists that lawyers of Mr Thaksin, ousted in a bloodless coup in September 2006, would have received new evidence relating to frozen assets since last year and appealed the Supreme Court’s Criminal Division for Holders of Political Positions’ ruling which had ordered the seizure of Bt46.37 billion of his frozen assets.

His remarks were made after legal advisers of Mr Thaksin’s family on Friday submitted appeals against the ruling by the court in a bid to seek an injunction to delay the assets seizure.


The Supreme Court will later select a five-judge panel to consider whether to accept the submitted appeals.

Mr Kasit said it is the duty of Thai ambassadors and consulates to monitor movements of Mr Thaksin and inform the ministry while it is up to a cooperation from the country which grants a temporary asylum to the ousted premier in extraditing him to Thailand.

Mr Thaksin avoided his two-year prison sentence after being found guilty for a conflict of interest and malfeasance when he was prime minister to help his then wife purchase prime land near Ratchadapisek Road.

On reports that the Saudi Arabian government has denied entry to Deputy Commerce Minister Alongkorn Ponlaboot, Mr Kasit said they were untrue but that the Saudi government remains quitel unhappy with three of four pending cases, which have dragged on for several decades.

The cases were part of the 1980s gems scandal and the murders of four Saudi diplomats and the disappearance of a Saudi businessman in Bangkok who is preseumed dead.

The case dates to the late 1980s when Kriangkrai Techamong, a Thai worker employed in the palace of the Saudi crown prince, stole jewellery and other valuables from the Saudi royal family’s palace and escaped with a cache of treasure to his Lampang home.

Thai police retrieved some of the stolen items, but a number of valuable gems and pieces of jewelry pieces were not recovered.

Moreover, when the recovered treasures were returned to Saudi Arabia, the main jewel, the Blue Diamond, proved to be artificial, having have been replaced with an artificial stone along with other pieces of paste.

Relations between the two countries have not progressed and it is the duty of Thai judicial agencies to more quickly solve the cases, said Mr Kasit. — NNN-TNA

By Robh. From the Broadview Blog.