Macau's 'Whore Wars' and other juicy morsels

I have yet to set foot in Macau since it became Las Vegas-by-the-sea-on-steroids, with its Wynns and losers, its shimmering Mirages and shifting Sands, its addled Adelson monuments to dubious taste and its massive, mounting stacks of cash. I prefer to recall the sleepy Portuguese enclave of yesteryear, a place of cheap wine and lunches that lingered, of pousadas and cobbles and decaying colonial charm, siestas, fiestas and gigantic garlic prawns.

LEAL SENADO SQUARE: MODELLED
AFTER JIANG ZEMIN'S COMBOVER

So many memories: jumping on the jetfoil at 3am on a whim after a long night in Wanchai, lazy feasts at Fernando's, DJ-ing in front of a crowd of almost 2,000 people at a crazed rave party and being given a hand-painted t-shirt by my one and only groupie (short, bad teeth and unfortunately male). I look back less fondly on a night spent in the emergency ward after some local lothario decided to assuage his jealous rage by smashing a heineken bottle over the head of one of my best friends.


My last trip to Macau was just before China gave the nod to get kitsch quick. Back when Stanley Ho was the only game in town, the Hotel Lisboa the ugliest edifice for miles, and instead of Cirque de Soleil there was just the circus of the Leal Senado, with its princelings and potentates and their port-soaked posturings. It was to the Lisboa that I was drawn for a story which originally appeared in Australian Playboy and the SCMP's Postmagazine, and which involved an altogether different species of 'ho'.

GET KITSCH QUICK

Pitched battles were erupting almost nightly between mainland Chinese prostitutes and their Eastern European rivals and between the gangs that ran them. At stake was the coveted hunting ground of the Lisboa. I spent several days skulking in shadows and doing my best impersonation of a John, fascinated by the ups and downs of the world's oldest profession, risking the wrath of gimlet-eyed pimps.


I still treasure the expense form I submitted upon completing the story … a pithy document requesting reimbursement for some thousands of Hong Kong dollars, painstakingly itemized, with each ledger entry simply stating 'prostitute'. Here is the story:


THEY venture out at dusk in packs, jackets flapping like bat wings as an icy wind roars out of the north. They swoop and chirp and chatter, sending out sonar pings as they swap notes on last night's pickings. And as blackness swallows the sleepy Portuguese enclave that recently became part of China, they are drawn to the nectar of the improbable rococo confection that is the Hotel Lisboa; a beacon of bad taste that eclipses the rest of Macau's dizzy neon free-for-all.

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT WARNED THEM
NOT TO TAKE THE ORANGE SUNSHINE

The Lisboa resembles a wedding cake mated with the mother ship from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. You wonder what fevered acid flashback inspired its architect. You almost expect doe-eyed aliens to glide silently from its belly. Instead, I find sloe-eyed Vera and Katerina loitering near the side entrance, sporting scowls that might clot their mascara.

It's unseasonably cold for a spring evening. They'd like nothing better than to step inside, where it's warm and awash with cashed-up chumps. But they can't. Vera and Katerina come from Minsk, and have become unwitting combatants in Macau's 'Whore Wars'. It boils down to a triad turf skirmish. One faction of the powerful 14K gang controls the mainland Chinese prostitutes who flock down from the border and get the run of the fertile corridors inside the hotel and casino. Another gang has dibs on the lucrative trade in exotic ex-Soviets - many of whom, with their blonde manes, endless legs and strange accents are as alien to the locals as anything from Steven Spielberg's oeuvre. The Russians are permitted to trawl the dark lanes outside the Lisboa but must not dare cross its portal.

HOW MUCH FOR THE
PORTUGUESE BREAKFAST?

The result is a demilitarized zone of sorts, policed by pimps in cheap suits and huge tattoos. Sighs one veteran hotelier: 'Every so often you get some new girls who don't know the rules. They go inside the hotel and the shit really hits the fan. Cat fights. Scratches. Girls clobbering each other with mobile phones. Every so often there's a token crackdown and they round them all up, but it's always back to business as usual within a day or two.' Indeed, the world's oldest profession seems one of the few industries immune to the changes sweeping post-handover Macau. The tide of thugs kneecapping and shotgunning each other over casino rake-offs has been stemmed. The lugubrious Portuguese civil servants nodding off into plates of chorizo after three hour lunches have been replaced by local toadies. Even the gambling monopoly of Dr Stanley Ho, which long seemed carved in stone, is being dismantled. But prostitution thrives.

BIG PIMPIN': THE WORLD'S
TALLEST JOHN

One local journalist explains: 'In Macau, only pimping is illegal. So you find that hookers are extremely aggressive because they don't fear being caught. They will even wait outside the lifts in the Lisboa and when a man enters, they jump in with him.' Vera, 23, and Katerina, 25, don't seem that desperate tonight. They register at least four distinct expressions in the seconds after I approach them: Smiles. Calculation. Confusion. Hostility. When I explain my purpose is other than sexual, the shutters slam down. They might be young, but they are hard. After we settle upon suitable remuneration, they agree to answer some questions.

How long have they been in Macau? 'Three weeks'. How's tricks? 'Business is good'. What about the Chinese competition? 'Fucking bitches,' snarls Vera. 'They are not as beautiful as us,' sniffs Katerina, who has sky-blue eyes and golden hair swept up into an elaborate coiffure. 'Chinese men go crazy for us,' she adds, looking down at the fishnets criss-crossing her long slim legs. Groups of women, always in twos and threes, mostly blonde, drift past, hips swaying. 'It's safer in groups,' Katerina adds.

I SEE YOU BABY 

Same place, another night. I'm talking to Nadezhda. Tall, blonde (but with black roots), a former chemistry student from Vladivostok. She becomes more communicative after I fish a crisp HK$500 note from my wallet. I wonder if it's the most money she's ever made standing up. 'Come. It's safer to talk over here,' she says, leading me into the dank shadows beneath a flyover. The stale urine stink adds an acrid edge to the conversation. I ask her about the demilitarized zone and the mainlanders. 'Yes, it's true. They hate us and we hate them. That's just the way it is. They get the best places to work, but we are more beautiful than them.' Is it dangerous? She smiles. 'Are you joking? After Vladivostok, this is like heaven.' Nadezhda charges HK$1,000 to $3,000 a trick, depending on the customer and how many other girls are vying for attention. When her visa expires in a week, she plans to go and work in Bangkok and Japan, and then perhaps another crack at Macau.

NEIGH HO, NEIGH HO
IT'S OFF TO WORK WE GO

Inside the Lisboa after midnight, the dark heart of Dr Ho's empire is beating furiously. His monopoly on gambling in Macau stretches back decades and the oft-married Septuagenarian's vaguely spectral presence reaches into all corners of life here. The decor is equal parts ostentation and desperation; scuffed marble, dusty chandeliers and toilets where the paper is dispensed one sheet at a time. Bellhops in red lederhosen hover by the doors in search of tips, amid a swirling miasma of sweat, lust, fear and greed. The floor plan is circular - a fleshly carousel of feminine wiles. Round and round they go, trolling for tricks. I start to feel dizzy, the clickety-clack of high heels becoming hypnotic. Successful girls usher inebriated men into lifts. The rest set out on another lap. I can't manage to get a single one to speak to me.

DOES MY BUM LOOK
HORRORSHOW IN THIS?

Helen Kwok, the hotel's marketing manager, says she worries about the flagrant importuning of punters but 'there's not much we can do'. Local laws are toothless and there's too much money sloshing back into the economy for anyone to lose any sleep. One senior hotelier says Russian gangsters followed their countrywomen to the enclave, leading to dramatic and bloody shootouts between these interlopers and the local triads.

Feeling dirty and fed up with the whole scene, I retreat to my hotel's bar. All around are clusters of Slavic looking women, with heavy make-up and cheekbones that could slice you open. The Canadian band, straight-faced, strikes up Boney M's Rah Rah Rasputin. It's hard to tell if it's a rebuke or a salute.

An idiot's guide to building a house in Thailand

IN THE NEXT WAR ON DRUGS, DEALERS
WERE IMPALED ON THEIR OWN KALAE 

When the men on their motorbikes finally came, black balaclavas pulled down over granite faces, guns tucked under sweaters, no one in the village was really surprised. Not even Cousin Daeng and Cousin Bum, who were laughing and tossing back lao khao, rice whisky, as the bullets scythed them down. Not even my wife's brother, Pi Met, who reportedly was next on the list.

Ah yes. The list. The list of 'drug dealers' proclaimed as holy writ by the Dear Leader, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. A list every bit as sinister and risible as anything dredged from the dark reaches of Kafka's fevered imagination.

As a matter of fact, Cousin Daeng and Cousin Bum were drug dealers. Sure, they sold a bit of weed to tourists looking for a toke or two. They sold the odd yaba pill too when the occasion presented itself, no doubt. But they were strictly small time. And they were also farmers, and home owners, and husbands, and fathers.

It was a still and sticky morning, barely past breakfast. Flies buzzed around the pooling blood as the makeshift ambulance collected the bodies. The local police didn't want to know. 'Take them to the temple,' they said. Cousin Bum's wife sobbed, crumpled and confused. Cousin Daeng's wife was away working in Bangkok to help pay for their daughter's school fees. Bum's kids ran in circles, wide-eyed, unsure if this was all a game.

M&Ms ... METH AND MADNESS

And by now my wife was frantic. 'Honey, we have to pull down the house'. 'Pull down the house? What are you talking about? We haven't even finished building the house. And my parents are supposed to be coming to stay soon. Remember, those nice people who gave us the money to build it in the first place?'
'Yes, but you don't understand. They are going to kill my brother.'
'What? That's ridiculous. Your brother hasn't done anything wrong.'
'It doesn't matter. We've got to pull down the house, and he's got to go away for a while.'

My lips twitched with a thousand reasons why none of this could be real. But something in my wife's tone gave me pause. 'This isn't the time to argue. You listen to me. This is the time to shut up.'

How had this quiet village in the gently rolling foothills of Chiang Rai, with its shimmering rice fields and somnolent ways, become the scene of a reign of terror? There had to be some mistake. But there wasn't. This was the war on drugs. This was as real as it gets. And it was getting far too close to home.

I felt like someone was waging a war on my sanity, on two fronts. Even as our dream of home ownership in Bangkok was going to hell in a sticky rice basket thanks to a vicious ex-military conman who saw the stupid farang coming from a mile away, so our dream home in Chiang Rai, a painstaking teakwood recreation of the classic Lanna home my wife's grandparents had inhabited, was crumbling before our eyes.

A couple of months earlier, Thaksin had declared his fatwa on drug dealers. It hadn't seemed much more than a headline back then. Like some comic caped avenger, the Prime Minister boasted of how he could leap intractable social problems with a single bound.

Pi Met wasn't a drug dealer. He was the salt of the earth. In the five years I'd known him, the worst I'd ever seen him do was sell the odd illegal lottery ticket to supplement his meagre military pension. He was an ex-soldier, border patrol. He'd given the best years of his life for his country, and his left leg above the knee besides. On a dawn patrol one hot jungle morning on the Cambodian border, he had heard the terrible telltale click as he stepped on a land mine. He had waved his men away before taking the brunt of the blast. Now he hobbled about on a cheap fake leg that chafed at his bandaged stump. But he never complained. Just got a faraway look in his eyes sometimes.

He'd given the best years of his life for his country. And now that country wanted him dead. Because he was on the list. That fucking list.  What a joke.

Pi Met owned about 10 rai of prime rice land, roughly half way between Chiang Rai town and the Burmese border. He sold half a rai to my wife and I, at less than market value, so we could build our home. Some years earlier, he had sold another small parcel to a neighbour, who decided to renege on the deal. Money was owed. Face was lost. Words had been exchanged. Bad blood persisted, along with a state of cold war.

SMART ALEC CAPTION UNNECESSARY

We will never know for sure. But it seems likely that this neighbour, jealous of the big teak house being erected on Pi Met's land, or simply suffused with spite, or perhaps both, had had a quiet word to the local constabulary. And now Pi Met was on the list. So he had to go away. And our house, our unfinished house, with its gleaming teak floors and rough-hewn teak clapboard walls and bueng wow
(kite-shaped) roof tiles and classic kalae, had to come down.

OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR 

Friends and family pitched in. Each board wrenched from its frame twisted the knife a little harder in my heart. But each nail prised loose was likely one less in Pi Met's coffin. Within a couple of days, nothing but concrete poles and joists remained. The roof tiles were stacked in a friend's backyard shed. The timber divided up and stashed under canvas in the dark recesses beneath several nearby homes.

By the time the war on drugs ended, more than 2,000 'dealers' would have been summarily executed without trial, as many again arrested and jailed. Over 300,000 addicts would surrender and enter treatment programs.

The scourge of methamphetamine abuse is just as real and perhaps even more widespread today. Our Lanna house remains scattered over a smattering of backyards. Our Lanna dream lies in tatters.

The stag night, the greedy pig and the stripper's hammy

HANDS IN THE AIR AND
SPREAD 'EM

There comes a time in many a young man's life when he decides to settle down, tie the knot and put his footloose and fancy free days behind him. But before arriving at the altar and proceeding on towards the dubious attractions of matrimony, there is that tortuous ordeal to navigate popularly known as the stag night, or if you prefer, the buck's night or bachelor party.

For reasons now lost in the mists of time, no stag night is regarded as complete unless the services of a stripper or two have been engaged, preferably those armed with a fearsome array of unfeasibly large marital aids and sporting assorted exotic costumery. Unseemly consumption of alcohol is de rigueur, and apparently it behooves one's (soon to be former) friends to conceive an array of puerile pranks with points awarded for cruelty, imagination and potential to ruin the wedding photos.

Now in these days of legalised brothels and above-board sleaze, when every other corner seems to boast some cheekily named sex shop or naughty knickers emporium, engaging the services of said strippers is no doubt as simple as letting your fingers do the walking. But back in my day, which is to say the late 80s, one had to be somewhat more circumspect, not least since the Fitzgerald Inquiry into Police Corruption was drawing to its scandalous tall-poppy-lopping close.

A more apt name for this painful ritual would be the lamb's night, for the hapless groom is led like a yearling to the slaughter, not knowing precisely what cruel fate lies in store but instinctively fearing the worst. And so it was that a passel of rowdy journo mates and assorted other friends and family members rounded me up after work late one afternoon and whisked me off to some watering hole in the hilly Brisbane district of Paddington to spend a couple of hours forcing toxic cocktails down my throat while working themselves up into a frothing frenzy.

Once suitably lubricated, we adjourned to a nearby house - whose, in truth, I have forgotten - and amid much smirking, nudging of elbows and digging of ribs, settled down to wait for the main attraction. We didn't have to wait long. The suburban evening's slumber was rent by the banshee shriek of a police siren at full volume, as up into the driveway, Starsky and Hutch style, an unmarked police 'Q' car screeched. There was a shockingly loud rap on the door, and it opened to reveal a more than passably attractive if not particularly convincing Queensland police constable in full dress uniform, hat jauntily cocked and fearsome truncheon raised.

HOW TO INSPECT A
TORN HAMMY

Obviously tipped off by some shameless snitch, PC Prod made a beeline for me, jabbing me back towards the sofa with each exaggerated thrust of her truncheon. 'You are under arrest,' she barked, 'for being a very, very bad boy'. She then launched into a routine which could charitably be described as erotic. In my addled state, somewhere between anaesthetised and traumatised, I seem to remember truncheons boldly going where no truncheons had gone before, amid persistent attempts to separate me from my trousers. Her come-hither stride was only broken when a particularly high kick ended with a painful cry and her collapse to the floor. Alas, the star turn had pulled a hamstring. Gathering the shed remnants of her uniform, her truncheon, handcuffs and whatever was left of her dignity, she hobbled off stage left, into the arms of the unamused, burly boyfriend who had suddenly appeared on the scene. Through my haze, I noted fistfuls of dollars being forked over and the irate bodyguard assuaged with generous tributes of booze.

Of course that little setback didn't mark the end of the proceedings. Oh no. There were more pubs to be crawled before the grand finale, which involved me being blindfolded and shoved off the edge of Mt Coot-tha then being being stripped and tied to a tree in the middle of Toowong Cemetery - a popular spot at the time with satanists bent on practicing their dark arts. My 'mates' then abandoned me for what felt like hours. And though I didn't end up a human sacrifice, I can report that some sick bastard pissed all over my legs.

THE PHANTOM LEG-PISSER
OF THE CEMETERY?

End of story? Not quite. One blabbermouth recounted the injured stripper saga to the newspaper's gossip columnist, who obliged with a lewd snippet the following day. Next thing we knew, the newsroom was crawling with anti-corruption officials determined to get to the bottom (and presumably other parts) of the matter. For it transpired that while PC Prod may have been ersatz, her boyfriend and minder was anything but. In fact, he was an on-duty detective, using his police vehicle not to pursue criminals but to ferry his nubile young charge to stripping gigs all over our fair city.

We held our tongues. The cop lost his job. And presumably the stripper's hammy eventually healed.

Leaving Brisvegas ... and other cliches

I didn’t always want to live abroad. But by the time I departed Australia in 1992 for the helter skelter of Hong Kong, it felt like the last plane out of Brisbane was almost gone. The urge to broaden my horizons had swelled to a kind of reverse vanishing point. I didn’t just have itchy feet … more like athlete’s foot of the soul. A dull ache in some hidden hollow place that suburban bliss in Brisbane was failing to fill, and a nagging fear that if I didn’t get out and see the world soon, perhaps I never would.

HE SHOULD HAVE HIT SOME
HONG KONG MATTRESS

I’d married far too young, at 21, to Joanne, a tall, beautiful blonde from Sydney. We met at the Australian Ballet School in Melbourne, where I was pursuing my pointy-toed dream of becoming the next Baryshnikov and revelling in the realization that I was one of the few heterosexual males amidst a veritable hit parade of unfeasibly flexible, smoking hot totty. Injuries put paid to Joanne’s nascent dance career, and the short sharp shock of that, along with my own persistent aches and sprains and niggles, convinced me to hang up my tights and jockstrap. Bereft of other ideas, I figured I might as well follow in my father’s footsteps as a journalist, and secured a job as a cub reporter on a suburban weekly newspaper on Brisbane’s rough southern outskirts.

The ‘news’ consisted chiefly of alcohol-fuelled domestic violence, petty theft, vandalism, and tawdry pork-barrel politics, leavened only by the infamous 'toxic ooze' scandal. Like something from a B grade schlocky horror show, a bunch of suburban backyards were invaded by unstoppable eructations of black, treacly goo which had spent decades working itself up into a poisonous rage in the bowels of some abandoned gold mines. The decaying suburb of Kingston was the perfect setting for an amorphous evil. Suddenly, the goo was mad as hell and wasn't going to take it any more. It might have been channelling the dull and unfocused angst of the area's inhabitants, Ghostbusters-style.

SURPRISINGLY, STICKY FINGERS
WASN'T A HIT IN KINGSTON

I immersed myself in the story, but when the sludge subsided, along with a few dozen homes and my enthusiasm, it was time to head back to the big city, or at least Brisvegas. I landed a job at The Courier-Mail. The Curious Snail, as we often referred to it, sometimes with affection, boasted a boisterous and vibrant newsroom, a throwback to an earlier era of gritty glamour, where contacts were greased over long liquid lunches and stories shouted down phone lines, the words transmuted into molten lead and occasionally solid gold. Of course the hot metal rattle had long since been supplanted by the subdued hum of a hive-mind of monitors. But a certain spirit persisted. You almost expected someone to shout 'stop the presses!'. The screens glowed a radioactive green, which was apt if you knew someone else had the scoop. And Phil Dickie, a mild-mannered reporter who looked like some uber-nerd out of central casting, had the scoop of a lifetime. A series of his stories had lifted the lid on police corruption on a grand and depraved scale.

What began as some bespectacled David pot-shotting pebbles against the granite-faced giant that was State Premier, Tsar, Fuhrer and hillbilly dictator Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen and his cronies became an unstoppable wrecking ball that cut a swathe through the establishment. Everybody from the police chief to some of the government’s most senior ministers had their snouts stuck in the trough and their hands in the brown paper bags, in on ‘The Joke’, as this unprecedented gala of graft was known. Exciting times for a wide-eyed scribe manqué. As the scandal played out, I was thrust into the role of court reporter and went on a rich run of bylines, covering the trials of some of the key players.

OLD QUEENSLANDER

So there I was, living the dream. Work was going well. I was married to a dead-set stunner. We had purchased our first home, a quaint old worker’s cottage and renovator’s delight, upon which I unleashed my limited handyman skills. Life went by in a blur of backyard barbecues, home improvements and sun-and-surf-soaked weekends at the beach. 'Queensland, beautiful one day, perfect the next,’ was the advertising slogan du jour, a boast based on the state’s unusually high average of sunny days per year. But as those dazzling crystalline days accrued into years they became brittle and fractured, as the first cracks in our marriage began to appear.

I threw myself into work at the paper and pretended all was well. By now we’d moved to a bigger house; an ‘Old Queenslander’ that was all rambling verandahs and crumbling charm. Its inexorable march towards entropy was a constant and accusing mirror help up to my life. By night, I tossed and turned. Shafts of moonlight through our bedroom’s stained glass windows bathed Joanne’s peaceful, perfect features in a lambent glow while my mind roiled and raged. Was this all there was? Had I become just another faceless suburban drone living a Stepford Life? At least once in a lifetime, I wanted excitement and chaos, passion and danger. But underneath the seething unease, all this water flowing underground, a small voice was also whispering: Be careful what you wish for.

Lesbian vampire killers and the turd from hell

LICK, SIP, SUCK ... THE STORY OF MY LIFE

Google's spiders give me the creeps and put me in mind of those relentless, tentacled robots in The Matrix or the heat-seeking creepy crawlies in Minority Report. One minute you are engaged in a perfectly innocent search, the next you have been hypertextually hijacked and sent spinning, slave to the algorithm, into the outer reaches of cyberspace. Not to mention a wormhole stuffed with monsters that runs off Memory Lane.

Google's spiders don't creep me out as much as lesbian vampire killers though - which is what they directed me to while searching for an old yarn of mine on bareknuckle boxing on the Burmese border. Instead, I was confronted with belligerent bull-dykes from Brisvegas and whisked back through time to the late 1980s and the first really big, international-headline-making court case I ever covered as a mild-mannered young reporter at The Courier-Mail, Brisbane's newspaper of record.

It turned out that I was a footnote in a surprisingly entertaining academic analysis of the tortured mind of Tracey Wigginton, Australia's notorious 'Lesbian Vampire Killer', the tortured prose of the hacks who covered her gory story and the subsequent vampire circus of a trial.

Here's the link and like I said, it's anything but an arid academic yawnfest: http://deakin.academia.edu/DebVerhoeven/Papers/604764/Biting_the_hand_that_breeds_The_trials_of_Tracey_Wigginton   Apparently Brisbane's answer to Myra Hindley was the victim of a patriarchal society and forced into a crisis of gender. Sick of getting it in the neck from The Man, she decided to bite back. And I always thought she was just an uncommonly sanguinary psycho. In any case, I've now spent half the day remembering one of the most unpleasant human beings (and I use the term loosely) I've ever encountered.

It was my dubious honour as a newspaper court reporter to cover the trial in all its frothy gothic horror. In a town where the streets are as clean as the living, the possibility that a coven of blood-sucking brides of Beelzebub had run amok shook people to the core.

A FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLER

The crime was nasty and brutish. The victim, short. Edward Baldock, a ginger-haired bantamweight  of a man, was stumbling home drunk from the pub through an inner city park. Wigginton, her lover and two other friends lured him into the bushes with the promise of sex. After the victim had neatly folded his clothes and waited, naked, by the river for the romp that never was, Wigginton slashed his throat open with two knives and then sucked blood from the wound in what was later described as a vampiric feeding frenzy. The women were all lesbians and belonged to a subculture known as 'Swampies' - a kind of low-rent Goth, favouring basic black, Doc Martens and occult tattoos. Apparently Swampies only listened to 'acid house' although I suspect now the prosecutor may have had his musical genres confused. It's hard to conflate the hands-in-the-air sounds of Manchester's Summer of Love with the knife-in-the-neck horrors of Wigginton's wig-out.

As the trial unfolded, the other three women put the figurative knife into Wigginton. In hushed tones before a spellbound gallery and furiously scribbling reporters, they claimed Wigginton was a real vampire and didn't eat food but subsisted on the blood of pigs and goats. Her lover told the court how Wigginton would make her cut her wrists so she could feed. She avoided sunlight and never looked into mirrors. She could look at you and make herself disappear until all that was left were her 'cat's eyes'. She had sex with a man in a ceremony in front of a group of her lesbian friends in the hope of conceiving a child. She worshipped satan and boned up on the occult. She boasted of her prowess at cunnilingus, which she enjoyed more if her partner was menstruating. At school, she'd been expelled for molesting girls. She had 'Hitler-like powers' to control people and had mastered the art of hypnosis. She indulged in a spot of S&M and liked to force her lovers to wear collars and be her slave.

IT'S A MARVELLOUS NIGHT FOR A BATDANCE

For weeks we heard excruciating psychobabble about her 'multiple personality syndrome' - a popular wheeze at the time with lawyers who knew they were clutching at straws. Wigginton, a shrink asserted, had four personalities: Bobby, the bloodthirsty and callous killer, Big Tracey, a tough but kind-hearted salt of the earth type who was horrified by the murder, Little Tracey, an innocent child, and The Observer, who watched the others dispassionately. In Matlock mode, the silks sashayed and blustered, showily carving off each fresh morsel from the funny farm, emoting and enunciating like summer stock hams.

More? You want more? As the killers had searched for their victim, they cruised Brisbane's midnight streets in the sine qua non of the suburban family, a Holden Commodore sedan. As they prowled, they grooved to the freaky funk of Prince's Batdance. The hits just kept on coming. It was the story that kept on giving. The yarns practically wrote themselves.

Now Wigginton was an imposing specimen and certainly no shrinking violet. Edging six feet tall, built like a masonry outhouse, with cropped black hair and unblinking black eyes to match. I remember those eyes well, because every so often - especially on days when the paper's headline had been unusually lurid or not to her liking - she would slowly swivel her fearsome bulk and fix me with a withering gaze. Sitting in the public gallery and giving me the ceaseless stink-eye was a glowering posse of her fellow swamp creatures and camp followers. As the trial neared its end and a moral panic gripped the city, these women became increasingly angry. Due to my paper's ubiquity, I was the chief target of their ire.

During the frequent and prolonged breaks for legal argument (which could not be reported and thus precipitated mad rushes for the phones to file copy) some of these women would sidle up to me and issue veiled (or sometimes bare-faced) threats. We know where you live, they'd smirk. How's your wife, they'd leer. You're a poofter, aren't you, they'd bluster, which was pretty rich coming from a bunch of rug munchers. Fucken journalists. You're all scum. What about writing the truth for a change? Why do you fucken hate Tracy? What'd she ever do to you, ya dickhead.

I laughed it off for the most part. I wasn't exactly dodging bullets in the Middle East, where the first Gulf War was winding down. I figured I could handle a few Addams Family rejects. Depending on my mood, I would either ignore them, ask them what Robert Smith was wearing since they'd stolen all his clothes, or suggest that since it was another dreaded sunny day, they might be better off at the cemetery gates (although I suspected Anton La Vey and Aleister Crowley would be more their speed than Keats and Yeats). Eventually a verdict was reached. Wigginton and her lover got life. One woman got 18 years. The youngest was acquitted. There followed a flurry of purple prosed features, hectoring editorials and hand-wringing think pieces. Within weeks of the trial's end, one enterprising scribe had already turned a quickie book around (putting paid to any vague fantasies of my own to literarily leverage the lesbian vampires). Life went on, not least for Tracey Wigginton. End of story.

TWO LESBIAN VAMPIRES, ONE CUP 

Except that a couple of weeks later, my then wife, who managed a busy branch of a woman's fashion chain, noticed a tall, fat and slightly crazed looking woman clad in full Goth regalia staring daggers at her from across the street. She unlocked the store and began the morning rituals, somewhat unnerved by scowling Swampy and her unmistakably bad vibes. Seconds later, Swampy enters the store, grabs a frock that wouldn't even fit around one of her legs and barges past the bemused staff, making a beeline for the changing rooms. My wife paused, shrugged, and then went about her business. But so did Swampy.

After what seemed like a suspiciously long time to be locked in a changing room, Swampy erupted from the cubicle, door banging in her wake, and bolted for the front door like a bat out of hell. As Swampy dipped her prop forward's shoulder and blasted through the heavy glass, there came a blood curdling scream from the back.

An ashen-faced employee was holding the changing room door with one hand, and her nose with the other. Coiled with almost artistic precision, dead centre of the changing room, was what my wife described as the most enormous poo she had ever seen. So big it seemed scarcely human.

Then again, perhaps it wasn't.

An idiot's guide to buying a house in Bangkok

I'm writing a book. Yes, that's right, actually writing one, as opposed to just talking about it. So I figured this blog would be the perfect forum to try out some bits from it. So be nice and don't crush my sensitive artist's soul. On the other hand, if it totally sucks, be a dear and let me know. Publishers waving six figure advances, please form an orderly queue to the left. I jest, I jest. Here is a short piece I did for Time that explains a tiny fraction of the madness the seized my life for two years. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,629437,00.html  The working title of the book is Village Idiot. And this is how it begins.

Descent into the maelstrom

JABBA THE CONDO

It’s a baking blue-skied Bangkok day. Just past noon, and the heat has gripped me in its cloying embrace. It’s the serious kind of Bangkok scorcher the long time resident knows is a significant trip down the ladder to hell from the general quotidian sweat-fest. This is yaba fiend kills wife in argument over who gets the fan hot. Failure to apply prickly heat powder causes suppurating crotch rot hot. The kind of heat where the City of Angels dons honorary horns and grabs a pitchfork for a day.

Not even lunch time and I’ve been drinking. At home. Alone. Again. Hey, things haven’t been going so well. Cut a guy some slack. A wise medicine man once advised me of the restorative powers of beer, a horizontal position and ESPN. And as a thrusting, questing journalist, I’m duty bound to put this to the test. In the name of research, you understand. Cover the story.  But I’m shaken from my slack-jawed sofa torpor - agawp at sport, dregs akimbo - by the insistent buzz of the doorbell; angry, urgent, waspish. I gulp the last of my lukewarm brew and lurch outside to investigate. Jabbing at the buzzer with a violence jarringly at odds with the afternoon’s indolence is a very angry man. A man who, despite his middling height, has assumed mythic proportions in my mind; nemesis, scourge and telemarketer rolled into one. Perhaps it’s the heat shimmer or the beer goggles, but for a moment, it all makes perfect sense. Satan has come back to earth and I am his chosen vassal. Then I notice that he is clutching an unfeasibly large handgun in a weathered leather holster. I mean this is a serious Dirty Harry piece. Arnie armaments. But what would Satan be doing with a gun? Doesn’t he have, like, legions of fiends who could tear you enough new assholes to make you a shit fountain just by blinking their narrow yellow eyes?  So I’m standing there, thinking and swaying, OK, possibly more of the latter, but there’s definitely something very wrong with this picture.

TAKEN IN SUFFICIENT QUANTITIES, MAY
PRODUCE ALL THE EFFECTS OF DRUNKENNESS

The man’s back is ramrod straight. His booze-rouged cheeks are incandescent with ire and there's a sour whisky stink on his breath. His steel grey hair is cropped in a military manner and he sports army fatigues and a faded camouflage t-shirt. But what terrifies me almost as much as the gun is his eyes. They are cold and dead, yet red-rimmed and filled with an icy fury. To call them pissholes in the snow would be unfair to alfresco micturation. They are ruthless piggy nothing to lose eyes. End of tether eyes. I’m going to kill you motherfucker eyes.

I’m struck by the incongruity of the situation and feel a smile twitching about my lips. There is an armed, angry former Thai army colonel on my doorstep yet all around a typical village day is unfolding. I can hear the children playing across the street. A dog barks. The noisy chickens over the back are clucking. Someone, somewhere, is crooning through a boombox karaoke so unspeakably awful that they must be using auto de-tune. But the croaks and clucks go quiet, my vision tunnels and adrenaline burns off the beery thickness.  I’m wondering if I can run back inside faster than he can unsheath the pistol. We stare at each other for seconds that feel like hours.

   “This is my house,’’ he barks.
   “Umm, er, hem, haw,’’ I say, hoping I’ve made my position clear.
   “This is my house,’’ he screams this time, making sure I can see the gun. His face is scarlet and his screwed up eyes have disappeared under his screwed down hairdo. Random words pop and crackle in my brain but my synapses have suddenly gone on strike. Gun. Shit. Run. Wife. Kids. Dogs. Life. Death. Why?
   “Get out. The police are already on their way,’’ I lie. My wife, Ouam, is not home, but I shout back to the door, “aren’t they, honey!’’

His rusting pickup truck is parked outside, and I can see his corpulent wife smirking within. She looks like Jabba the Hut. No, Jabba the Condo. Grabba the House. Only with more slime. For all I know, she’s probably got Carrie Fisher crammed in the glove box. Feverish calculations are racing through my mind. Is he too old to climb the fence? What if he comes around to the front, where the fence is lower? If he gets in, should I run, or hide, or try to defend myself? Should I have bought myself a gun? Where’s the biggest kitchen knife?

 I summon up my courage and unleash all the terrifying might a trained wordsmith can muster:          “Urrghbluggoawaypleaseleavemealonewhatdidieverdotoyou.’’’
   He stiffens. Becomes still. Then calmly utters the words that shake me to my core and will disturb my dreams for years to come. “You get your coffin.’’ A pause, then he explodes. “YOU GET YOUR COFFIN!’’ He’s going for the gun, fumbling with the holster’s clip, and Jabba is oozing out of the car and slithering up the driveway. I turn and bolt inside as he takes aim and shrieks: “This is my house. I will stay here. I WILL STAY HERE!’’

NOT A THAI ARMY COLONEL 

My step-daughter has wandered downstairs to see what the commotion is all about and I bundle her back inside as I reach the front door. I peek outside and see Jabba wrestling the Colonel back towards the car, slathering him with slime, grabbing for the gun. They both bark angrily and my dogs join in. Christ, he wouldn’t shoot my dogs would he? I stab at my mobile phone, calling my father in Australia. I need reassurance, a lifeline to a calm, safe place, advice, anything. And as the phone rings, the one clear thought cutting like a laser through my panicked head is, how the hell did I end up in this mess?

Withnail, the handover, the hangover and I

RICTUS? NEARLY KILLED US.

Dateline: Hong Kong, July 1st, 1997.
Scene: The Star Ferry, approximately 7am.
Cast: Three idiots headed from One Nation to Neptunes, and the mother of all mornings after.

Idiot 1: Mate, how was Seb Fontaine's set? Awesome or what?
Idiot 2: Haha ... your pupils are enormous. You look completely wrecked.
Idiot 3: Bar City. Wow. It's going to be the end of an era when they pull that place down.
Idiot 1: That place will still be going in another hundred years.
Idiot 2: It could survive a nuclear holocaust. Like a cockroach.
Idiot 3: I saw a rat in the bathroom there once. True story.
Idiot 1: I've still got half a pill.
Idiot 2: Neck it.
Idiot 3. A cheeky half. Or perhaps a presumptuous quarter?
Idiot 1: So can you see any tanks?
Idiot 2: No, but I think that's the Chinese flag flying on top of the Legco Building.
Idiot 3: And there goes the Britannia. Bye bye Charles. Tata Chris.

WHOSE IDEA WAS IT TO PUSH THE BOAT OUT?

Idiot 1: I feel ... unusual.
Idiot 2: Do you think Scary will be at Neptunes? I think I'm starting to come down.
Idiot 3: He's always there. Don't worry.
Idiot 1: Techno techno techno techno.
Idiot 2: Hummm. Amyl.
Idiot 3: People are looking at us funny.

Dateline: Hong Kong, July 1st, 1997
Scene: A very messy flat in Big Wave Bay, approximately midday
Cast: Three idiots, Withnail and I

I: Do you want a cup of tea Withnail?
Withnail: No.
I: 13 million Londoners have to wake up to this? The murder and all bran and rape?

IF I MEDICINE YOU, YOU'LL THINK A
BRAIN TUMOUR WAS A BIRTHDAY PRESENT

Idiot 1: We must be out of our minds. I must go home and discuss this at once.
Idiot 2: My thumbs have gone weird.
Idiot 3: Is there any gear left?

I: I'm in the middle of a bloody overdose. My heart's beating like a fucked clock. I feel dreadful. Really dreadful.
Withnail. So do I. So does everybody.

Idiot 1: Whose got that spliff.
Idiot 2: Yeah.
Idiot 3: I left it on the sink.

I: There are things growing in there. There's a tea bag growing. You haven't slept for days. You're in no state to tackle it. Wait for the morning, we'll go in together.
Withnail. This is the morning. Stand aside.

Idiot 1: I think I've got to get out of Hong Kong.
Idiot 2: Yeah. We should go over to Macau.
Idiot 3: Get out into the country. Rejuvenate.

YOU SHOULD NEVER MIX YOUR METAPHORS

I: Even a stopped clock gives the right time twice a day. And for once, I'm inclined to believe that Withnail is right. We are indeed drifting into the arena of the unwell, making an enemy of our own future.