Moon lay asleep, naked on her bed. Her clothes were strewn across the room haphazardly. A sheet loosely covered her legs up to her lower back. I was half asleep on the floor when I noticed that she had started to stir. Her head began to move as if she was preparing to reenter the world of the living. Her eyes slowly opened and looked around the room. She frowned as if she was in pain, and then looked down at her naked body and scowled. Her head snapped towards me and her eyes locked onto mine. She raised herself sufficiently from the bed to retract her arm and threw her fist directly at my face. I edged back as a barrage of slaps and noises and fury came my way. This was the beginning of my confusion surrounding Moon.

I first met Moon in late 2005. I was sat outside one of the temples in Ayutthaya. She approached me with caution and we spoke for three or so hours with the aid of her talking dictionary. I was touched by her innocence, and when she finally left we exchanged numbers. A few weeks of awkward phone conversation and odd text messaging later and I returned to Ayutthaya to visit her. I had a room at cheap guesthouse and had met Moon in the afternoon. She made me promise to take her to a disco because she had never been to one before. I was the first foreigner she had ever spoken to in any depth.

The disco of choice was AY. It was a fairly standard, Thai affair, with bands and comedy skits, similar to X9 or X-Cyte in Bangkok. Moon bought a bottle of 100 Pipers and then confessed that she had never drunk before. She sipped cola, and when I decided I wanted to return to my guesthouse to sleep she became enraged and quickly drank a glass of whiskey and cola. She was promptly sick and we had to leave.

I tried to send her back on a motorcycle but she was unable to sit without falling over, and so I rode behind her to make sure she didn’t end up as roadkill. It was when we got home that I realized how drunk she was. Moon got to her room, which was in a small compound, took off all her clothes, covered her body with water, and lay on the bed punching herself repeatedly. It took several hours before she calmed down and eventually fell asleep. I left her on the bed and slept on the hard, unforgiving floor.

Perhaps this was a turning point for Moon. Previously she had been naïve, tame, surprised by the world, but as time passed she seemed to change. Several weeks after my visit, Moon called me to say that she had moved to Pattaya. She was overjoyed with the place because there were discos, people, ladyboys, and she was making a lot of new friends. It was all new to her. Moon’s work had relocated her from Ayutthaya to Pattaya, and I went to visit her. Her job was in hotel management, and I went to the hotel at which she had been assigned. She was all business, suited up and working hard every day.

She told me that she had been meeting a lot of the girls who worked in the bars. She had no quarms about introducing me to these girls and asking if I wanted to go home with any of them. She knew people along the beachfront, in the sois, in Tony’s, in Lucifer, everywhere. She couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to go with any of her friends, and nor could she appreciate why I was concerned that she had started letting these girls live with her. When we first returned to her room I was amazed to find two bar girls inside, one asleep on the bed, the other standing nearby. The scene was odd. The girl on the bed had apparently passed out. We left and shortly after the two girls Moon had taken in made off with her clothes, cosmetics, and money. She shrugged off the incident and the next day we found the bar girls behind it. Moon walked up to them, explained that they could no longer stay with her, and walked away.

I’ve often wondered whether Moon really has a grasp of reality, or whether it’s me that can’t see how things are, or if perhaps it’s a combination of the two. After I left Pattaya, Moon would call and tell me stories of new friends she had made on the internet for whom she was helping find ladies in Pattaya. I suspected she may have inadvertently become some kind of pimp.

I didn’t see Moon again for a long time, but every now and then she would call me from India or Chinag Mai or Europe. She said her work had sent her there but I know that she had quit her job previously. Sometimes she would say that she was with a group of Filipino men for whom she was finding girls, or sorting out problems with girls, or doing other curious things. Moon seemed to have no perception of good and bad people. At one point she had six ladyboys living in her room. She was Pattaya’s answer to Mother Teresa. Her husband had died several years before, and she had a daughter who she raised with her mother.

I have always had this unrelenting fear that Moon would some day end up in trouble at the hands of others, and indeed, last week this became a reality. She called me sounding distraught and told me that she had spent a week in prison. She said she was going to have to pay a fine of 300,000 baht to get the police off her back. I asked what had happened and she explained how she had had several girls living with her, two of whom had stolen her ID card and then paraded around Pattaya on a motorbike stealing handbags and wallets. The police eventually tracked Moon down and took a week to figure out that she had not been involved in the crimes, but she still had to pay. She told me she was heading to Pattaya to find someone who could help her deal with the problem. It sounded like she was going to have someone killed, but I think my imagination was running wild.

I can’t say that Pattaya turned Moon into a bad person, but there is something about that city that gives it an unpredictable edge. For someone like Moon, it gave her a taste of things she had never seen before, and because she had never seen them she treated Pattaya like a new world. Moon never seemed to have much of a clue what was going on around her. I look back at the first time we met and the last time I spoke to her and the difference is amazing. From that fateful night drinking that first glass of whiskey, to a week spent in a jail cell, something happened. The innocence of a Thai girl was lost to the big city, to the desires of men, to the intoxicating qualities of alcohol, to the deception of evil, and to the greed of others.

The last time I spoke to her, Moon vowed never to help another person as long as she lived. She represents something about people that I will never understand.

Techno’ tags: Girls, Thailand, Thai girls, Pattaya