Back in October I had just finished up at the Monday Night Jam at Boy Blues Club in the Kalare Night Market, a colorful tourist-oriented part of Chiang Mai not far from the River Ping.  I hadn’t gone on till late, played hard, and now it was time for some shuteye.  The main way into the Night Market by car from the old walled city is Loi Kroh Road, kind of a Disney version of a Red Light District. Barely wider than an alley, it is lined with a mixture of good and ratty restaurants, fancy and semi-fancy hotels, and massage studios mostly offering foot massages to weary tourists but with a wider menu in back.  Mixed in with this are clusters of little bars and pool halls that remind me of the clubs in Ubon, Thailand, when I was stationed there during the Vietnam War 45 years ago.  The clubs in Ubon were bigger, louder, featured lots of dancing to live music, and lots of smooching and hand-holding that would have been shocking for traditional Thais, but all of this was behind closed doors.  Loi Kroh is strange for me because, like Disneyland, plenty of couples and families walk the streets outside, but the bars and pool halls are almost like little stage sets with only three walls.  What goes on “behind” the missing fourth wall is shocking for me as someone who tried to respect traditional Thai culture—lots of attractive, skimpily dressed young girls trying to lure customers inside by acting brassy and raunchy, very un-Thai in a land of delicacy and grace.  And instead of young GI’s, the clientele now is mostly older Western men.

I was invited to visit Stairway to Heaven when I first moved to Chiang Mai. The owner happened to a classmate of mine in a Thai language class.  But the aggressiveness of the girls blew me away.  In the old days in Ubon, the girls helped sell drinks, but they put on a pretext of being customers like the guys.  Whatever else happened was up to the girls.  It might be a one-night stand or she could end up living with a GI.  A few ended up getting married and moving back to the states.  Now, though, the customers were old enough to be the girls’ fathers or grandfathers.  It gave me a strange flashback to my days at Ubon, but with the uncomfortable sense of these guys being stuck in in the past while their bodies had cruelly aged.  My friend wasn’t even there, it turned out, and I graciously slipped away, laughing at the brazen lies the girls were telling complete strangers about how handsome and good-hearted they were, especially if they had flashed an ATM card.

I didn’t go back to the bars, given that I’ve pretty much given up drinking, I don’t play pool, and I do not enjoy Thai kickboxing, the main attraction at the end of a pavilion of these establishments.  But I did like to play drums at Boy’s on Monday night, so I ended up parking every week on Loi Kroh or an adjoining alley or side street.

Late October, I knew, was getting near the end of Rains Retreat, the three months during Rainy Season where the monks stop wandering and stay in their home monastery.  Living in the city on my own and busy taking an intensive course of Thai language classes, I wasn’t as in touch as I had been in the past traveling in Thailand and visiting Thai friends.  I didn’t know that that was the night the Retreat ended.

But as I approached my car, an incredible thing was happening.  It was shortly after midnight and hundreds of monks with shaved heads wearing saffron robes were leaving the gates of their monasteries—oh yes, there are also several old monasteries along Loi Kroh, and plenty others nearby.  Little Chiang Mai has almost as many as Bangkok.  And not only were they walking in a large procession down Loi Kroh, they were being greeted respectfully by the same brassy bar girls who had scared me away.  And a couple of interesting things happened.  I started taking a few pictures with my cell phone, no big deal for most people, but I had been a Hollywood cameraman used to big studio cameras and still cameras that weighed a few pounds.  And after twenty five years of looking through an eyepiece, I had little desire to take more pictures.  But this night was special.  I got a powerful sense of how much Buddhism permeates Thai culture, even on an outpost catering to dissolute tourists like Loi Kroh.  The bar girls, along with massage girls, tuk-tuk drivers, bartenders, waitresses and a motley assortment of other Thais who worked there, were kneeling or standing in bare feet, offering food or incense or flowers to the monks.  And the monks, the embodiment of compassion and humility, were chanting blessings to the girls while senior monks sprinkled them with holy water.  And in a new, strange, wonderful way I saw the embodiment of Buddhist interconnectedness (what Thich Nhat Hanh would have called Interbeing) before my eyes.  And I felt blessed to witness it. (6/16/15)