Hello all. So, many of you will know I’ve been working on a novel for about seven years. The true story of when I went to Thailand to withdraw from heroin in a hotel room and be amongst the sex-workers I met there on a previous visit, in particular a girl called Ganya, who changed everything. This is the third teaser I’ve published on Substack but I think this one reflects the manuscript as a whole more than the other two which were edited to be more like stand-alone shorts.
There’s quite a lot of references in this sample that won’t mean anything, but I couldn’t see the point of taking them out and making more of a mess patching up the wounds.
You may also know that after three years working together, my editor washed-up into a rehab center, which is probably the best place for him right now, bless him. So this is far from perfect, riddled with typos and other issues as I’m having to do that work myself now, but I hope you enjoy it. EDIT (I’ve cleaned up this version on Substack a little from the one you’d have been emailed). Please let me know your thoughts in the comments. The novel has no chapters and very few paragraph breaks, this isn’t a badly formatted cut and paste, it’s meant to be like this. Apologies.
To give this sample some context, I’ve been in Patong, Thailand about a week now and have been keeping the ‘withdrawal proper’ at bay with alcohol, Xanax, Valium and handfuls of Dihydrocodeine. Don’t get me wrong, I’m feeling like death, but with heroin there’s always worse to come, and by the end of the day of this teaser, I’ll be there….
I step onto the decking in front of Ganya’s shop, resting a hand on the chair as I catch my breath. I am acutely aware now that the majority of this street must consider me very sick, very weak, probably think I’m aitchyiywee positive (which they probably never tire of telling everyone) and I don’t like it at all. I feel old but I don’t think I am, not that old. Damaged certainly, and self-harmed for sure, which is a bit Gay®.
There are at least a dozen pairs of customer’s sandals, training shoes, etc., scattered about in front of the sliding glass door. Business is good. It’s only midday and the place must be half full. I slide the door open and step in. It’s cold inside, air-con cold, ideal if you’re about to have, or have just had, sex. For me it’s too much and Ganya, looking up from a pile of multicoloured towels she’s folding, picks up the remote and turns off the air-con. “You cold, honey?” she asks. “Yes, but you don’t have to turn that off, everyone will get hot,” I say, annoyed that I can’t go anywhere without people having to adapt to my self-imposed weakness if I am to appear somewhat normal. “Good, him hot, man finish quick!” She says and gives me a wink and a smile. A couple of Arab men kick off their shoes outside, slide open the glass door and walk into the shop. Ganya morphs into a different creature; a shape-changer, like the Chinese Huli jing, or the Buddhist Naginis, a deceptive lifeform, a seductress, whatever it is she does, these two strapping young lads are once more like children, and something about it makes me jealous. Nevermind, it’s amazing to see how her presence - her dance, her spell-casting - has effectively already parted them from every penny they’re holding, possibly more - it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen a punter walked to the ATM on the corner having been milked of twice the money they swore they’d spend on the way in. She bends over to pick up some massage menus for them, rather than just pointing to the huge one painted on the window behind them, because this way they’re forced to look at her peachy arse and the arch in her back which is so deep it’s bordering on being disabled. She gives me a wink, my jealousy evaporating in an instant, pulling down the front of her tight, red, dress and plumping up her bosom. She stands up, turns round, takes them both by a hand, rubbing them with her thumbs. Now she’s got them where she wants them - in a trance - and all the plans they walked in with to ‘not get ripped off,’ ‘not get conned,’ ‘not spend more than this or that much Baht’ leave, as she lets her long talon-like nails drag across their waists as she walks between them, making her way to the door. “Sit down one minute,” she commands without looking, and steps out onto the decking. They don’t sit down, they look at me, and I try to give the impression I’m the boss because I am not. Ganya calls out in Lao, and two of her girls come running along the street from their patch by the main road where they drum-up business. Ganya has about thirteen girls who work in this shop, but rather than sit inside waiting for custom, they sit on the street corner where it meets the far busier, passing trade of Rat-U-Thit Pee 200 Road. All day and most of the night they sit there, telling men they’re handsome, grabbing them by the arm, touching them up, charming them, seducing them. It’s Noi and Nung who have come to serve these two, young, Arab men - who certainly promised themselves [and weirdly, each other] they’d make a selection from the available girls rather than have them foisted on them, a practice to which massage shops are prone, so as to spread the earnings fairly amongst the staff, regardless of their different genetic predispositions to such work. However, because Ganya has rendered the customers well beyond trivialities like making their own sexual decisions - apart from the one of course - that they want it, no, need it, they’re champing so ferociously at the libidinal bit, they’d probably take their own mother now if she were wearing a wig and a bit of red lippy. Predictably then, as soon as they see Noi and Nung as they stand on the decking pulling at and twisting back into place the little fabric they’re wearing, they cannot believe their luck. It’s got to beat a burka, I guess. Early twenties, beautiful, shiny, brown-skinned and lithe, feminine creatures - with breasts pushed up front and forward - and, after slipping on their heels and becoming calf-muscle-stretched, ungulate beasts of passion and lust, it’s pretty much game over. So much of the actual work of seduction and sex has been done, it’s just a question of squeezing the milk now, which won’t take more than a few well-oiled yanks. The men don’t know where to look and seek refuge in the Thai Baht that flutters like butterfly wings in their nervous hands as they spread it out, unable to concentrate enough to do the simple currency conversions required to work out how much they’re paying. They don’t even ask how much, offering Ganya a big fan of thousands, and I get the impression they’d give everything they had for these girls right now. Nung and Noi are all hands and smiles, stroking the men’s forearms, shoulders and bellies, pampering them and giving the impression that it’s them who’ve had a result, that they’re the lucky ones. It’s all quite magical, and when Ganya says it’s eight thousand Baht - about five times the usual price - it doesn’t matter, they’re happy to have something to focus on instead of Nung and Noi, pushing them closer to the milky edge before - in their minds at least - it’s even started. Ganya instructs the men to follow the girls upstairs. She speaks to Nung and Noi in Lao, and a naughty smile as they go upstairs with much laughter. “What did you say to them?” I ask. “I say ask big money for sex, them have money big.” “All men will always pay more,” I say, more of a question really. “But not you, eh honey?” she says, walking past me and looking disapprovingly at my groin area. “Money isn’t the problem, it’s the cock,” I say, swallowing a mouthful of sensual sadness that I’m not walking up the stairs giggling with Nung and Noi, or Ganya, or anyone. Or. Anything. But. This. Drag.
My cock doesn’t really get hard on heroin and goes into a kind of hibernation. Why go through all that physical effort for a dopamine hit, when you can sit on your arse and just pump it straight into your bloodstream? The motivation just isn’t there. But because a new conquest can sometimes wake it from its opiate slumber, the sexy freshness of a new woman - several millennia of genetic coding nudging me on to spread my seed - whoring lends itself to a keeping up of sexual appearances - even just for myself. I think there’s something else going on there, different chemicals at work that heroin cannot replace, something stimulated deep in the lizard brain that’s managed to creep out from under the wet blanket of sedative dependence and just about manage to achieve a semblance of arousal. New pussy is still new pussy, and encouragingly, millions of years of survival-based, evolutionary genetic coding would appear to have the edge. But on the whole, like pretty much everything else about heroin that’s not essential for my survival, the penis is surplus to requirements. And so, I move a bit further away from actual human contact, some significant human attraction, further still from some meaningful and increasingly necessary intimacy. It's a largely sexless existence, having heroin coursing through your veins. And since just pissing takes an age - and hurts - my penis is more of a relic from a previous stage of my evolution than the focus of everything I do in life, like it once was, Like It Should Be™. And quite frankly, the fact that The Velvet Underground et al never mentioned anything about that seems like quite the oversight.
During withdrawal, however, it's a different matter. Even in these early stages, it's starting to twitch and shudder. Its sore and solitary little eye is starting to open and yawn a little as it comes back to life. It’s a long way from normal though, it’s far from match-fit, but over the next few weeks the flaccid, humiliating, legacy Bioartifact™ that pokes from my low-hanging, surplus-skinned, ball-bag like a flesh coloured button-mushroom will, however much I might try to prevent it, spurt spunk as and when it decides. A few over-zealous rubs with soap in the shower and the joyless, salty, dribble will drib. Or, just an odd-angled glans rubbing on my trousers as I walk and it’s dribblesville. Either way it’s an unpredictable and largely embarrassing appendage, especially in an environment of endless and eager, beautiful ladies of easy leisure. And in truth, as a barometer of my situation, nothing gives me such a sense of my own pointlessness as that uninspiring little worm, unable to perform the basic function of being a man, sweaty, smelly, and by all accounts lumpen. Lord knows what state my sperm is in, probably stillborn itself and unlikely to recover, off the poppy or not. I imagine there’s a lot of thumb-twiddling and yawning going on in my epididymis, like a nursing home for sperm, or a psyche-ward, rehab even. Imagine the baby one of those knackered, sedated sperms would make; a monstrosity, an anomaly, some kind of unholy lifeform rigged-up to a mass of tubes and wires, never actually maturing as such, just growing as a baby, a huge, giant baby, kept alive by machines and a myriad of dialysis, extracorporeal membrane oxygenation contraptions, and various other external machines processing blood, oxygen, nutrients, waste, assisting the giant malfunctioning organs inside. This abomination, this unnatural atrocity, suspended in some kind of interstitial fluid and plasma combination tank, with nothing to do all day but by a weird twist of fature develop the ability to predict the future, therefore gaining the status of a deity, and housed in a completely sterile and beautifully decorated palace, weighing fifty thousand kilograms and referred to as ‘Big Baby’ by the nation that built an empire on the back of its precognitive abilities and that now rule the world. The hope is that one day Big Baby will produce spermatozoa of its own, and the five thousand strong harem of women - hand selected through a rigorous selection process of beauty, fertility, health, and I.Q. tests - are always at the ready, strapped into chairs, intravenously fed, legs akimbo, with their very own bespoke cervical tube and funnel unit vaginally inserted just in case that time comes and Big Baby produces sperm. However, unbeknownst to the Fifty Elders - essentially The Clergy, serving as a conduit between the adoring people of the nation and Big Baby - who oversee the gargantuan task of keeping the fifty foot high and seventy foot wide genetic aberration alive, Big Baby has seen that particular future, has seen the birth of his son, and in his mind’s eye watched an oedipal catastrophe of epic proportions unfold, involving not just the heartless disposal of his child’s surrogate mother, but the growth of Bigger Baby, and well, a hundred thousand kilo baby running around with a chip on his shoulder doesn’t bode well and explains why every night, when The Elders are watching TikTok or reruns of nineties telly classic ‘Friends,’ a kind of Jews on Prozac Utopian dream (upon which The Elders have based a lot of their scripture) Big Baby ties his ball-bag in a knot, and no amount of steroids or other fertility drugs pumped into Big Baby on a daily basis attempting to produce the milky love The Elders so desire is going to overcome the damage done there.
A couple more of Ganya’s girls come out from the back of the shop, Jada and Tippawan. They sit with me in the reclining chairs used for pedicures and foot massages. Their spirits encourage me, although being now exceptionally sensitive to the apparent honesty and wholesome nature of things exterior to me, most things are having some kind of disproportionate emotional effect. A print of an old king of Thailand framed and hung on the wall in the massage parlor has become a point of such focus. I don’t remember which of the kings he is, but there he is, smoking what looks like a long, clay pipe and making tea among the peasants. Ganya told me once how the Thais especially love this king, and how he did not covet jewels and money, fame or adulation. Occasionally I catch Ganya staring longingly at this photo, dreaming of a Thailand long past, Siam in fact, where things were much simpler and in many ways much better. Jada and Tippawan seem happy though, they know their lives, the relatively stable limits, potential transgressions, and they appear to have accepted them. Having witnessed levels of poverty tourists don’t see, don’t even know about, they have a gratitude about them that puts things into perspective. It’s this as well as their beauty attracts me. It may even be part of their beauty; of course it’s part of their beauty, and with it now so close and paying me attention I can’t but flirt with them a little, even under Ganya’s keen and ever-aware eye. She’s quick to point out to them that my penis doesn’t work, mind you. Not to embarrass me, quite the opposite really, (this is a fucking reach) she wants to protect me from further humiliation. They all know I’m coming off heroin, and they’re good to me. Many of the Isan girls have seen what heroin has done to friends, family, and entire communities back home. With the northernmost part of Isan being the southernmost side of The Golden Triangle, the only plot on the planet that produces the white, number four heroin, the fully refined version that’s had one more stage of purification than the skanky, brown stuff processed in the likes of Afghanistan and Mexico which is not really heroin - or diacetylmorphine at all - more a crude, brown diamorphine base. Regardless, unable to pay for what is a ridiculously expensive connoisseurship in the UK, let alone in Thailand considering their low wage jobs - but ‘low’ low wage jobs - averaging about one hundred and fifty quid a month, so then soon the thieving, theft from people who love them, then theft from people who don’t, then theft from anyone. So then no food, no house, no nothing. So, to see someone actually trying to get off the stuff, to actually try and change makes them happy, they don’t treat me like I’m a criminal, and they don’t treat me like I have a disease. The treat me like someone who needs a bit of help, a bit of love and attention, and because Ganya’s told them to and she’s the boss. Jada offers her food to me, four nitrogen-deficient leaves attempting to swim away from what looks like a fish-spine in a puddle of slightly murky pond-water, and Tippawan massages my neck. The massage is actually quite uncomfortable, just someone touching me in a somewhat intimate manner, and having had so much sex with Thai women - Tippawan one of them, several times - that began with a massage, I’m back into my impotence, and then my sickness, and then my heroin, and then my lack of it. But at the same time just someone touching me, someone trying to deliver me from the malady that does me harm brings me a sense of belonging, a sense of humanity, some compassion. So, uncomfortable or not I focus on that and try to forget her flesh interrogating, bony, and occasionally drill-like fingers and the agonizing pain they are causing my shoulders. I decline the offer of Jada’s food though, and while trying to make excuses without seeming ungrateful I’m saved by the bell-end as a punter comes down the stairs having just been serviced. He’s hot, sweaty and his expression twitches between relief and, well, a different kind of relief. Mook, a girl who the European men really like but who the other Thai girls consider unattractive follows quickly behind, still tying her sarong with a bunch of Thai Baht tucked into her bra and a bit more in her hand which she gives to Ganya - that’s the shop cut - who puts it under the coin tray in the till. Mook says thank you to the man, her hand stroking his arm as he walks outside, nervously struggles to tie the laces to his trainers and shuffles off to consider the confused feelings he didn’t prepare for, yet knows he will again, probably later today, probably with Mook, who he’s probably in love with. Mook sits down with me, Jada and Tippawan. Ganya tells them again in English that my cock doesn’t work and Tippawan starts pushing her breasts up and forward, holding them out for me like they’re on a shelf, which they are, a tight, lacy, curvy, tit-shelf. I do love a shelf of tit. She yanks the bottom of her T-shirt to further expose her globes, and she’s giggling at my underoverwhelmed/overunderwhelmed response. There’s twitching downstairs though, so the beast may be stirring, but I can’t help but think these girls should let the sleeping one-eyed, stray and unclean dog lie, but Jada goes straight for it, she slips her hand up the leg of my shorts, and under my pants, quickly finding the little ball of sweaty flesh that constitutes my manhood. It must feel like one of those office-toy stress relieving things you squeeze and squash and squish, marveling when the little, silicone-filled, hilariously shaped object of cultural surplus slowly morphs back into its original shape - yes, like that, but without the morphing back into its original shape part, just sweating more, and demanding you wash your hand the moment it comes back into daylight and punches all present in the nose with an ammonia-like stench. I feel a twang of shame and a dull wave of familiar emasculation. Wisely, Tippawan chooses to knead my penal pulp through my clothes but there’s still no response to speak of. I wish they’d never started. What kind of mess is a man who, when three beautiful young girls are presenting their breasts and touching him up, all he can do is smile, and even that without conviction? I understand their perseverance though, I’ve fucked them all before, several times in fact with an actual, hard cock which is no doubt confusing the issue. They think they can get it working, but are understandably underestimating the depth of my libidinal decline. These girls get cocks working all the time. They get intoxicated cocks working, sleeping cocks working, sick cocks working, guilty cocks working, innocent cocks working, old cocks working, scared cocks working, and even combinations of the above, like drunk old scared cocks - working. The quicker they can get a cock working the quicker they’re getting their money. Mook sits on the arm of the massage chair next to me and dives her hand down the front of my shorts and Jada goes back up the leg. There’s two girls playing with my cock and even if they managed to get the plug to spark, I doubt there’s enough fuel to get the pistons pumping. To confuse me more, my belly is twitching, butterflies, sexy little nerves flapping their wings. Mook is fully wanking me now, there’s a slight response, Jada starts laughing at Mook’s face, the determination, the frown, the refusal to give up on it. Good Lord she’s giving it a slap about now while Jada kneads my balls. Mook looks right in my eyes, we’ve had some great sex, me and Mook, and I know that Ganya isn’t too pleased that I have singled her out a few times. Ganya doesn’t mind me having sex with working girls. When I asked her once she said, “You like it. Why I stop you? I know you man.” She did try to put a restriction on me pissing on her doorstep though, from having sex with her girls, but that didn’t last more than one night on the Gin. As soon as the limit was established everyone on the forbidden side of it became even more attractive. I try and push more blood into my penisn’t by contracting my abdominal wall, (more of an abdominal curtain under present circumstances) like the no-handed wank I used to do at school when I sat behind Lisa Merrills and could see her red bra through the back of white shirt. But nothing’s doing. Mook stands up, turns around and goes all in, leaning forward so her arse is the highest part of her body, her hands are on the floor and quite unbelievably I can see her tits swaying side to side hanging down through her wide open legs and under her T-shirt as her arse gyrates in front of me. Ganya feigns embarrassment, but it’s all smiles, lots of laughing, it’s all good humoured, apart from the catastrophic destruction of my masculinity I’m suffering combined with additional issue of having to conceal it. This is a new low, and I’ve had a few. “It doesn’t work!” I say, trying to show I am completely resigned to the fact it’s useless them putting in so much work for so little. “It’s sleeping, come back in about two weeks,” I say, with a slight wobble in my voice, raising my palms. “Sorry,” I say, which they all find very amusing. Another girl enters the shop. One I’ve never seen before, she’s about eighteen and, well, perfect. Her huge breasts stand forward and proud - well shelved - barely contained by a cropped white T-shirt that hangs a good few inches above the little jewel in her belly-button. Oh Lord, more butterflies. Have the necessary buttons finally been pushed? I can feel the squirming worm perhaps slightly disturbed from his slumber? The new girl turns to put something on Ganya’s desk and as she leans forward, her T-shirt riding up further I see the beautiful curves of the bronzed, shiny, heavy, voluptuous undersides of her breasts, causing a fresh and surprising feeling of fuckery to wash over me. Her eyes are huge, too wide for her face, though somehow the perfect symmetry of her face and its composition is balanced by her make-my-face-pregnant, purple painted lips. Her tiny cut-down jeans are more like a pair of denim knickers and her pussy is concealed by a strip of denim the size of a very sexy postage stamp. Her over-sized eyes get bigger as - with a smile - she surveys the scene in the shop. I want her attention, and since I’ve got three girls attempting to pleasure me in a downstairs pedicure seat at midday it’s likely I’ll get it. Ganya notices the attention I’m paying her and squints at me, biting her lip. That lip. That bite. She looks at the girl, then back at me, and She Knows™. Ganya speaks to her in Laos and the girl walks over to me. Pneumatic. Fantastic. Erotic. Majestic. Facing away from me, she straddles the chair, Mook moving out of the way, making space, respecting the undeniably evident hierarchy of female seduction that’s probably expressing itself as clear as day on my face, my sudden shortness of breath, my twitching, and a multitude of other signals I have no control over. Her warm, brown legs touch the outside edge of my ghastly, ghostly, white, goose-bumped ones and feel like the fiery hands of Hephaestus, but sexier, and female, and not making swords. Her peachy, orbicular, arse is but/t inches from my face, her hands on the arms of the chair. She moves at the hips, causing her pelvis to move up and down, up and down, up and down and then she sits it right down top of me. “It doesn’t work!” I say again, but this time less to explain the situation, more to encourage its continuation. Mook, Tippawan, and Jada start clapping in time, there’s woops and woos, and cheers, and oh, life’s a song etched in the hearts of lovers, sung by fools who drink tears made of idle promises. Get in! And then it happens. My cock goes hard. It’s as if blood fills it for the first time ever, the original erection we don’t remember - or maybe we never forget? The small of her back looks incredible, I put my hands on her hips and pull her down slowly, but hard, onto me, the underside of my hard cock now pressing along her cunt which she grinds slightly left to right, then up and down along its shaft. I never want her to leave here, her tiny, round and shiny shoulders poke through her long, black, hair that pours down her back like a syrupy storm. I want this moment to last forever, maybe I’ll come, maybe I’m coming, maybe I’ve come? I really don’t care. Ganya claps loudly, twice, a la summoning a waiter, and the girl slowly peels herself away from me. My cock is hard through my shorts and now pointing upwards. I feel a mixture of relief and loss as I watch the girl, whose face I haven’t seen since she walked in, go up the stairs. At the last moment she turns and winks and I feel it in my stomach like the heat of adventure in the hearts of warriors or some old nonsense, that’ll do. I look straight at Ganya who looks up the stairs and back at me as if to offer me the girl. Jada thrusts her hand under my shorts again and grabs my cock tightly, causing my mouth to drop open and my eyes to open so wide I tilt my head back to prevent them falling out. Mook laughs out loud and screams “It hard! It hard!” I cross my legs, mainly so I don’t spurt spunk everywhere, as I feel right on such a cusp. “Honey, you want massage?” asks Ganya, looking up the stairs. “You want fuck her? No problem. I want you feel better. You do good. You strong.” I’m all of a nothing as feelings, thoughts, passions and unnameable sensations transport me through myself. “I don’t mind, honey,” she says, adding to the already colossal appreciation and infinite wonder I have for her. She turns back to her desk and counts money and for about five minutes I imagine myself actually fucking the girl who got it working, four and a half minutes of which my penis already flopped back into its fleshy trench to get out of the spotlight, and it’s all a bit of an anti-climax as Tippawan, Jada, and Mook get on with their various duties, Ganya continues counting money and doing her books, and I feel like the luckiest man alive who was too scared to do something wonderful and precious without some form of narcotic in me to separate myself from actually experiencing it.
Teaser ends here.
Thank you for giving this a read. I really appreciate your time. What I really appreciate is a LIKE and a COMMENT A SHARE on social media is the God Touch - it does me the world of good when looking at the bigger picture, which is rather small. Thanks again.
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Looks like I picked the wrong day to encourage my poor old Nan to read a Dangerfield Substack article....😳
"Hey Nan" I said,
"There's this great English fellow who hosts a YouTube channel who is based in Cambodia. He's gathered a fantastic community of wonderful people from all over the world and has had quite an interesting lifetime of often surreal experiences he shares with us. He's well read and deceptively wise with a great sense of humour. His passion is writing and he has a great way with words, and a vast vocabulary, drawing from a deep well of personal experience.
He regularly writes some excellent and eloquent short stories on Substack® and I know you like to read so I'll send you his latest when it comes out...."
EDIT...
Just got a reply from Nan :
She writes..
" Dear Grandson, I just read that Substack from that Dangerfield chap. I found it quite confusing with those foreign names and the story was very distressing.... "
"But I'm glad his cock worked in the end...."
Love - Nan.
I now know far too much about your knob. The only sperm description you missed was gametes. All those Thai ladies furiously attending your lad, massaging it back to life, i could almost hear the Rocky theme playing in the back ground.