No More Cheap Charlies

Gullivers wasn’t so busy this week and when Anne and I went in there were a lot of free tables. There weren’t too many girls there and there won’t to many farangs as well which meant that for the first hour we sat there on our own drinking Cokes. Eventually a farang came over to talk to us after I smiled at him. Really he spoke to Anne more and he spoke to her in Thai. His Thai was really quite good. He said he liked Anne and wanted her to go back to his apartment in Soi 4 and that he would pay her 1,000 baht which is what he always paid but Anne said no, it wasn’t enough. His name was Robert which is quite a funny name because when you say it in a Thai accent it sounds like ra-bert which means an explosion. I think it would be very funny to shout ra-bert when you see him and to see what Thai people would do. A think a lot of them would run away. Robert was about forty and he said he was an English teacher and that he could give us English lessons but really my English is fine. Anne’s is quite good but not as good as mine but she did not want English lessons, she just wanted money from him.

He talked to us for half an hour but didn’t buy us any drinks. He said that 1,000 baht was his highest price. When Anne said no he asked me if I would go with him for 1,000 and I said no, of course not. When he left us Anne said that he was a ‘Cheap Charlie’. She said that a lot of farangs who lived in Thailand were Cheap Charlies because they do not earn a lot of money. Especially English teachers, she said. They only earn about thirty or forty thousand baht a month, which is not a lot for a farang. She said it was my fault for smiling at him but I said that I didn’t know that he was a Cheap Charlie when I saw him.

She said you have to look carefully. For a start, they wear clothes that are quite cheap. And they often wear a fake watch. Like a fake Rolex. And Robert was wearing one of the yellow wristbands that say we love the king and only farangs who live in Thailand wear them. Also, he spoke to Thai and tourists do not speak Thai. Anne said it was always better to go with a tourist because tourists always had a lot of money and wanted to have a good time. Cheap Charlies like Robert only want to have sex and not pay a lot of money so it was best not to talk to them.

So then we drank our Cokes and I looked around the bar for a tourist and I saw two. They looked like tourists because they were wearing shorts and sandals and black socks and they had t-shirts with Chang Beer and Singha Beer. It was funny because they were wearing the shirts as if they were designer labels but everyone knows that only low class people drink Chang and Singha. But because they were tourists they did not know that. One was bald and a bit fat, the other was tall and had very knobbly knees. I spoke to the bald one while Anne talked to the tall one. They were from Germany and did not speak Thai so we had to speak to them in English so it was a bit difficult. My farang was called Klaus and Anne’s was Frederick and they were quite nice. They bought us drinks and told us that they were on holiday. They were going to Pattaya on Monday and this was the first time they had been in Thailand. Anne spoke to me in Thai and said that we should tell them to pay 4,000 baht and that’s what we did, and you know what, they said yes. I was so surprised but Anne said it was because they were tourists and didn’t know anything. They were staying at the Conrad Hotel and Anne said that was also a good sign because only rich tourists stayed at the Conrad Hotel, it was too expensive for Cheap Charlies.

So that was that. We went back to the Conrad Hotel which was really nice. What was funny was that there was a glass wall in the bathroom with a curtain and Klaus pulled back the curtain so that he could lie on the bed and watch me shower through the window. Klaus was really sweet. He said that he was married and that he didn’t want to make love to me but that I could make him come with my hand so that is what I did and it only took half an hour. He asked me for my phone number so that he could call me when he came to Bangkok again and I said sure and gave it to him because it was the easiest money I have ever made in my life. Four thousand baht for half an hour. I can’t believe it. Now I know what to do I will not talk to any Cheap Charlies again.