Spicy Club: Ron Muang Soi Neung

On a sultry night, down a shady anonymous backstreet, a city is resisting the call to sleep. This resistance has a name: Spicy. A form: a long dark hall suffused in wan blue light. And it has a function: at around 1am each night it fills with smoke, incipid music and a mob of drunk humanity.

They hop from Tuk-Tuks, they stumble out of taxis, they shuffle through a ramshackle yard, they hand over 300 baht... Not the city’s urban youth or funked-up fashionistas, but guys from the West: 20-plus aspirant Don Juan’s hailing from everywhere from New Cross to New Delhi. And girls from the North: dark skinned, gaudily dressed, shit loads of them…

Amidst this motley, at the foot of a raised circular podium, stand three Middle Eastern men bearing whisky in one hand and cigarettes in the other. “You have a light?” I ask one with darting eyes above the bounce of techno-pop (“Are youu go-oing to Sannn Frannn.. sciscoo?...). Dressed in a debonair grey shirt, he's transfixed on something. He barely blinks as he reaches into his pocket. I look up, to see what he’s staring at and my eyes meet a pair of ice white panties. The person wearing them – a dark skinned girl with streaks of blond and an intricate snake tattoo down the length of her left leg – shuffles closer to aid their view. So intensely are they studying her, you'd think she was a classic Greek statue in the British Museum - only slightly less naked and not priceless. The powerplay is ambiguous: the lust dripping from their eyes they want little more than a fuck toy, her pockmarked visage displays all the relish of an eagle about to sink its talons into a helpless field mouse (Thailand’s exploiter/exploited dynamic is more nuanced than the world thinks... )

Metres away, two sallow guys with cropped hair, distended stomachs and an East London twang prowl the floor. They strike up conversation with two willowy Thai girls, one pouring them whisky from atop a standup table, both in dainty dresses and high heels. Above the throb of mainstream beats, the patter commences: “where you come from?”, “you have girlfriend?”, “you speak thai?”. Like a rice paddy’s furrows in the choking dust of dry season, the conversation quickly dries up. But it doesn’t matter: five minutes later both couplets are locked in a hip swaying dance of fascination; five minutes more they’re gone…

“Ow Eek krup?” a tender hums in my ear before I've even begun to entertain the thought of downing the last of my ice swarmed drink. Service isn’t bad here. When the bill arrives with my next drink two minutes later, I realize that’s because prices are. I pick up my change (a conniving wedge of 20 baht notes), and dodge past the entangled, the ensnared, the lustlorn, the gruesome, the ravishing, the ridiculous. After a feeble attempt to dance, I stand there, swaying, wanting, lusting.... hating. As my taxi turns the corner and down the soi, into a brighter hopefully more salubrious day, I think of ‘Taxi Driver’: “Someday a real rain will come wash all this scum off the streets". Let's hope I’m indoors...