Pattananikom School

My alarm rang. I threw the synthetic, translucent blanket from my bed and arched my back to upward to the ceiling as if in a yoga position. My bed was uncomfortable as hell, and I don’t mean in any normal sense. Every morning I would awake with a cramp so bad that it would cause me to flail around like a flapping, caged goose. Laying back down, I leaned against the wall and grabbed my phone from the floor. I had an iPhone 4s – it was a cool model, at the time. I thought so, at least. As I did every morning, I opened the Clash of Clans app and checked out what was happening. We had been invaded. The whole place was fucking trashed. That was what I got for using exclusively goblins in my army. I was stubborn, though – goblins are fucking cool. I didn’t care if they weren’t the strongest creatures in the world – I was going to use them.

I walked out of my bedroom into the bathroom area. Light shone in through the open-air screen window. I sat down and took a shit, subsequently standing and pouring water into the bowl with the ladle to manually flush it. I took a cold shower – the only option, in my apartment. That wasn’t much of a problem though, most days, considering how fucking hot it was all the time.

The rooster crowed. He was late; he was lazy. Grabbing a small, bruised Nam Wah from the fridge, I strolled out the door. The bright sun and suffocating humidity instantly sapped my energy. I felt about to pass out. I blinked repeatedly:

“God damn,” I said.

I peeled the Nam Wah, ate half, and then tossed the other half to Killer, my dog. Killer was a stray. He kind of looked like a dingo, but I have no idea what breed he actually was. He had decided that my apartment was his apartment, too. I don’t know why or when he made that decision; he was already there when I moved in. He never left, though. He liked me, for some reason. I had started feeding him. I even let his dirty ass sleep inside, sometimes. I loved the stupid bastard. He was a dog with a personality. He always gave those awkward, guilty looks – his eyes bulging, though afraid to make eye-contact; his mouth twisted into some creepy grin. Locals said it made them nervous; said they didn’t trust Killer. That was some bullshit, though – Killer was harmless.

Killer ate his half of the Nam Wah in a single gulp and then returned to his previous task: chasing the rooster. My apartment building opened into a gravel parking lot, which stretched backward to the road and was bordered on either side by small wooden huts. The neighbors had chickens, which clucked around freely. Each morning, the rooster would strut into the middle of the parking lot and crow proudly, after which he would be chased around by Killer, whom he had just awoken. It was a funny sight. Killer was well-aware that he wasn’t supposed to harm any of the chickens, though – he had been chased off by the broom-wielding neighbors too many times – so he just followed the rooster around playfully, pretending as if to snip at his tailfeathers.

The neighbors also had a dog, named Suki, who really aggravated Killer’s hormones. He would also chase her around the parking lot, but she wanted nothing to do with him. She would put up with his advances for a while before turning and snapping at him – her canines bared and quivering – after which he would put his tail between his legs and sulk back to my apartment. I couldn’t feel that bad for him, though – he was well-fed; he had an easy life.

I got on my moped and twisted the key into the engine, hoping I could pull-off before Rafael woke up. I couldn’t, though – I never could.

“Hey, big chief!” he yelled, strolling happily outside. Rafael was one of my neighbors. He called me big chief, for some reason. He was from Cameroon. We were both English teachers at the local public school: Pattananikom School. I used part of my meager salary to pay monthly rent on a moped, which was well worth it, considering the mountainous beauty of the Thai countryside in Lopburi province. Rafael didn’t have a moped, though, which was understandable – he made even less than me. His English was terrible, so I can’t say that he deserved to make more than me, considering we were both alleged English teachers, but they didn’t pay him less because of his inferior English skills. They didn’t give a shit about that. No one at school could speak much English, anyway – they had no clue whose language skills were best. They paid me more and him less because he was from Africa and I was from the States. They weren’t bashful about it, either – they would tell him right to his face.

I nonetheless still disliked giving Rafael a ride to work. I was terrible at operating the moped – especially in southeast Asian traffic. It scared the hell out of me. I had already crashed once, making one of those tight U-turns that are all over the place in Thailand. As bad as I was solo, I was even worse with someone riding with me, and Rafael was no small dude. He really weighed on the bike. When he hopped on the back, I felt as if it was going to fall spinning into the road at any slight turn.

“Let’s go, man,” he said, climbing onto the back of my motorbike.

We skidded out of the gravel parking lot and took a left onto Soi 10, the curvy country road leading to our school. Protective dogs – local enemies of Killer – sprung out from each house as we sputtered past, briefly barking and chasing us down the road until we made it out of their territory. That’s the primary reason I hated walking anywhere in Thailand – there were dogs everywhere, and a lot of them were total bastards. I needed the moped, for that reason.

Before going to school, we stopped at Chang and Pa’s shop – a small shop-house featuring basic conveniences. I grabbed a cold, 6oz. can of Nescafe and slid it across the counter.

“Sawadee Ka!” said Pa.

Sawadee Krup!” I responded in the most broken, fucked up attempt at speaking Thai you’ve ever heard. Chang and Pa were good people. They couldn’t speak much English, but they liked us. They came over to the parking lot and drank endless bottles of Singha beer with us on the weekends. One of my other neighbors – Wei, a Chinese guy – could speak both English and Thai, so he would translate for everyone as we all got drunk together.

Pa looked at the money I gave her and laid it on the counter. She had been trying to teach my dumb ass to count in Thai. I stared at the scattered coins:

“Sip ha baht,” I said.

“Ohhhhh, very good!” she said, “You speak Thai! Bye-bye! See you!”

Rafael was waiting for me outside, sitting at a picnic table. We drove the rest of the way to school, arriving early. It was our morning to greet the students as they showed up. All teachers had to do that at least once a week. Rafael and I were scheduled on the same day. Our other two neighbors – the other two foreign teachers – Ben, a Welsh guy, and Wei, had the opposites. The school administration staggered our greeting days, so that there was always a foreign teacher greeting. It was a simple enough task – all we had to do was stand at the front gate and say hello to students as they arrived – but it still pissed me off; made me a little uncomfortable. Pattananikom School, being a rural public school, liked to show off its foreign English teachers. That’s why we had double-duty greeting students – we were essentially school mascots. The four of us were confronted with a similar situation whenever someone from another school, or someone from the government, visited Pattananikom School. When that happened, we were tasked with following the principal around as she gave the out-of-towner a campus tour. They scheduled substitute teachers for our classes, just so we could do that. It was bizarre.

“Hello!” I said again and again, as students entered the school-gates, whether by foot or on their motorbikes.

“Teacher hi!” they waved in excited response. All the students wore short-sleeved button-up shirts as a school uniform. The younger students (seventh grade to freshman in high school) wore yellow shirts, while the older students (sophomore to senior) wore light green.

After my thirty minutes of greeter duty were completed, I walked to the café-pavilion, sitting down at one of the lengthy wooden picnic tables lining the muggy, open-air cafeteria. I got the same breakfast every day: a bowl of white rice topped with fried chicken, an over-easy fried egg, and brined, diced chili peppers. I would be lying if I were to say that food wasn’t one of my favorite things about Thailand – it was, and the breakfast was no exception. I would eat it so quickly that the chilis would burn up my mouth and sour my stomach. I would spend the next ten minutes sucking air and chugging water until the burn subsided. Sometimes, I had to speed home after my first class and take a huge shit.

I was an awful teacher. It was my first-ever teaching job, after receiving my certification, and the school didn’t provide me with any materials or curriculum to work with. I mean nothing. They didn’t even give me, or the students, textbooks. I had a chalk board; the students had notebooks and pencils – that was it. I tried to set up lessons based around specific vocabulary topics and related conversational structures. Students would practice pronunciation, parroting me as I shouted the vocabulary at the front of the room like a private in the army. Then they would write down the conversation model, filling in some blanks with their own creative responses. After that, they would practice the conversation with one another. It wasn’t a very effective lesson-plan format, but it was all I had to work with – I wasn’t a skilled or experienced teacher. It didn’t help that I taught huge classes, sometimes with more than forty students, all of whom had a very low level of English, and I didn’t have a Thai co-teacher to help with classroom management. It was stressful as hell, that job. There was a lot to love about Thailand, but I grew to dread the actual work. Teenagers can be nasty.

On one occasion, while I was helping a genuinely curious student, another student ran up to the white board and drew a gigantic sketch of Satan. The king of hell was naked and had a gigantic cock which stretched across the entirety of the whiteboard. He was smiling and giving a peace sign. The artistic student drew it not with a whiteboard marker, but with a sharpie. I thought I might be dismissed, after that.

Our foreign teacher’s office was a small, unused computer lab. It was so tiny that computer-closet might be a more fitting term. I had my own desk, though – as did the other three foreigners. We would spend our free periods planning lessons, reading, or being lazy. Wei would sometimes take full-blown naps at work – lifting his feet atop his desk, covering his face with a hat, and snoozing. Ben often played a football-club manager computer game on his laptop. I did a lot of reading. I was working through some books about Myanmar, in preparation for a trip Ben and I were planning to take at the end of our teaching contracts. I read The Glass Palace, by Amitav Ghosh, and From The Land of Green Ghosts, by Pascal Khoo Twe. I was so excited for our trip – I saw Burma as such an adventurous, historical, interesting place.

“Let’s go, mate,” said Ben, nudging me. I had fallen asleep at my desk. My cheek was plastered to the splintery wood of the table, which was collecting a pool of drool, the liquid of which was expanding near to swamping my opened book.

“What?” I said, lifting my head. I squinted and shielded my eyes from the tropical sunlight shining in through the open door.

“It’s seventh period,” said Ben, rolling up his slacks, “Let’s go play some ball.”

All the foreign teachers were free the last period of the day, but we weren’t allowed to leave school early. We were expected to plan lessons, and to be available in case the administration needed to show us off to someone. Sometimes we would be asked to take the stage during school assemblies, just standing there like a collection of novelty dipshits.

I looked over to Wei, who was also napping.

“Let’s go, man,” I said, shaking him awake. We staggered out of our office into the sweltering afternoon, walking down the steps to the courtyard and out to the sports fields.

Many of the students played soccer or basketball outside at the end of each day. Ben would play soccer, and Wei and I would play basketball. It was always a great time. Thai people don’t tend to be the most skilled or experienced basketball players, so they thought I was Pete Maravich reborn. Wei wasn’t bad, either. The two of us, with three of the younger students as teammates, would usually take on the best of the older students – the contrasting yellow and green school uniforms made for easy teammate recognition.

I loved playing basketball in Pattananikom. The rims were clunky as shit, the jungle humidity was suffocating, and the concrete court was eternally covered in dust and dirt, but I loved it nonetheless. It reminded me of home, back in Kentucky. It also didn’t help that I was by far the best player in town; it revived my confidence each day after having it destroyed during my disorganized, chaotic English lessons.

Revving up my moped after the ring of the final bell, sweat rolling down my face and further dampening my white button-up shirt, I skidded out the school gates, across the town’s main street. We had planned to go to the market and get some vegetables, and maybe some chicken, before going home – for a soup. Hanging down from the handlebars of my moped, in a swinging plastic bag, was Killer’s dinner. The lunch workers at school scooped a couple ladles of whatever they had leftover each day, and Killer loved that shit – you could tell that he considered himself king of the neighborhood. He saw himself as the alpha, because he was the dog who got this delicious, heaping daily portion of leftover slop.

The outdoor day-market was right across the street from the school. As opposed to the night-market, which sold an assorted collection of all sorts of different items – electronics, clothes, cooked food, whiskey bottles filled with gasoline – the day market sold mostly fresh, uncooked food. We bought some onions, carrots, potatoes, broccoli, and chili peppers, along with a live chicken, whose talons were bound, after which it was tossed into a sack. The sack hung in continuous, swinging collision with Killer’s slop.

“Let’s go, bitch” said Wei, getting onto his own motor-bike – a red and black model much flashier than mine – “I’m fucking tried and hungry.”

Wei used as many English vulgarities as possible. He thought it was hilarious, so he was always calling us ‘bitch’ or ‘shithead’.

Passing by Chang and Pa’s shop-house on the way back to my apartment, I raised my hand to wave to them. My moped wobbled:

“Woah! Woahhhh!” said Rafael nervously from the back. Nearly crashing to the pavement, I finally managed to right-ship and continue down the road.

We had some decent cookware, between the four of us. I had a rice-cooker, which I won at a school competition. I’m not sure if I actually won it, or if they school administration just thought I might starve if they didn’t give me something to cook with. Thai people hate giving things or saying things to people which they feel might embarrass that person; it’s part of their Kreng Jai culture of politeness.

Wei had a large wok and Ben had a small crockpot. After turning on the rice cooker and pouring in a healthy portion of white rice, I walked out of my apartment to the parking lot, where Wei was cleaning the chicken. He had already slaughtered it – its blood painting the chalky gravel of the lot – now he was defeathering it, sifting it around in a bucket of near-boiling water. If we unnerved the neighbor’s rooster, who was still strutting confidently around the parking lot, he didn’t show it.

After finishing defeathering and chopping the chicken into bite-sized pieces, Wei heated up the wok, added some peanut oil, and dumped the meat into the pan. I stood by, watching him work – a cracked bottle of Archa beer in my hand. I opened the YouTube app on my iPhone and put on some music: I’ve Got a Name, by Jim Croce. Wei loved that song, though he was a little disappointed upon discovery that the lyrics were ‘I’ve got a name, I’ve got a name,’ and not ‘I’ve got a-you, you’ve got a-me.’ His English listening ability wasn’t always the best.

A little later, Ben came outside and began dicing vegetables to put in the stew.

“Two chilies,” I said, gesturing with the thin red peppers, “We’re making this bastard spicy, tonight.”

“All right,” said Ben, “Suit yourself. I’m putting some spring onions in, too. I love these things; they’re much better than what you can get in Wales – far superior to whatever they sell at Tesco.”

He was right about that. Not about the Tesco part, necessarily – I’d never shopped there – but about the quality of vegetables from the market in Pattananikom. Everything was fresh, and always delicious.

I began helping him. I diced a red onion, crushed several cloves of garlic, and cut the chunky carrot into bite-sized hunks, subsequently throwing everything into the crockpot, dumping in some water, salt, and pepper, and flipping it ‘on’ to the high setting.

“It will probably take a few hours for everything to finish,” I said, ‘This crockpot is never in a rush to cook anything.”

“Ah, well – we’ve got time!” said Ben, raising his bottle of beer in the air. I clinked glasses with him and took a healthy swig. Rafael then swaggered outside, a basket of wet laundry on his hip. He set down the basket and began hanging his clothes to dry on the line outside his door.

“Are you going to eat with us, Raf?” said Ben.

“Yes, of course!” said Rafael, “I will always eat with the biggest of chiefs!”

“Good,” said Ben, slicing into a bulbous potato. The sun, though not yet setting, had abated its previously brutal shine. It was becoming nice outside.

Killer was running around in the rice paddies behind our apartment building, angering the neighbor’s beast of burden – a malnourished, though brutish water-buffalo. I could see him, splashing around in the irrigated mud of the field. The farmer hated that, and it always made me nervous when Killer ran off. It shouldn’t, because Killer was raised in the wild, but I always felt a need to watch out for him. On one occasion, he had been gone for quite some time, and wasn’t answering my calls – normally, he comes running through the field back to the parking lot when I call his name, expecting some food. Ben and I, driving our mopeds down the dirt paths of the neighboring farm to search for him, found Killer cornered by a trio of local dogs – presumably the farmer’s. We made it out of there unscathed, but I’m not sure how. Those dogs chased us down the path and back out onto the road. They were out for blood, too.

“Killer!” I yelled, standing at the edge of the parking lot, looking out into the rice field.

He wasn’t lost, this time. I saw him prancing around out there He darted through the field back out to the parking lot, jumping on me upon arrival. He got mud all over my shorts, not that I really gave a shit about that – all of my clothes were in ragged condition.

“Food’s ready,” said Ben, picking up the entirety of the crockpot and moving it over to the stone picnic table we had set up in the middle of the parking lot. The table sat beneath the shade of an adjacent mango tree. Upon arrival to my new apartment, I had naively assumed that the tree was wild-growing, and that the mangoes were as a result free-game. I was wrong about that. The neighbors were pissed.

Ben, using a deep wooden ladle, scooped healthy portions for each of us, and then dumped out a portion for Killer as well. Wei gave Killer the unused remnants of the slaughtered chicken. He was in gastronomic heaven.

I looked to my three companions, slurping down the last of my soup:

“Hell yeah!” I said, “That was some good shit! So, what’re we doing this evening?”

As if waiting for someone to ask, Chang swerved into the parking lot on his green motorbike.

“Sawadee Krup, hello!” he said, taking off his helmet. He set a plastic bag on the picnic table, which contained a two-liter of coke and a fifth of Mekhong Whiskey.

“Thai whiskey,” said Chang. He couldn’t speak English very well, but he knew how to get his point across. Anything more complex, he had Wei translate.

Wei went into his apartment, coming back a few moments later with five whiskey glasses and a bucket of ice. Chang poured the first round, the group of us subsequently raising for a toast.

“You boys; my brothers!” said Wei. “China, UK, USA, Thailand, Cameroon. Five countries, we have in this small place.”

Wei stood silently, as if he didn’t know what to say after that.

“Hell yeah!” I replied finally, “Brothers for life!”

Everyone cheered.

“Hey, Wei,” said Ben, “So what would you do if China went to war with the States, both you and Rob got drafted, and you saw him on the battlefield?”

“I would do the only thing I could do,” said Wei, “I would kill him, and then I would cry over his dead body.”

At that, we all stared blankly momentarily, then eventually, we all cheered, again clinking glasses.

We started the fire not long after that. It would remain flashing long into the early morning, the sound of its crackles interrupted only by laughter and deep conversation.

End