Bangkok Knights Read Online Free Page B

drink
tea or coffee. He always had a new theory about what either caused or else
cured cancer, heart attacks, back pains, and hangovers. He wouldn’t eat refined
sugar.
    Sid wasn’t the real name of this prematurely middle-aged
seeker after eternal youth; it was Chauncey. Chauncey Davis.
    “You knew that ‘Sid’stood for’Siddiqi’, didn’t you?” asked
Stack. “Yeah? And you know what siddiqi means?”
    I knew; I also knew Stack was going to tell me again
anyway.
    “It means ‘friend’ in Gulf Arabic. And that’s what they
call their local white lightnin’ — siddiqi, or sid for short.
Thai’s just about your best friend, living there in the Gulf.”
    Sid had had a real taste for the stuff, if you could
believe what he and his friends had to say. He had been of the opinion that all
that home-made wine and beer was full of impurities. You keep drinking it and
you wind up with everything from wrecked kidneys to arthritis, he’d tell you.
So he drank sid. “It’s just alcohol,” he’d say. “That’s not going to
hurt you.” Of course he was just about the only one in the Gulf that believed
that.
    But when he was in Bangkok he never touched anything
except beer, and not too much of that “It’s hard to drink too much of this Thai
beer,” he’d say ,”no matter how hard you try. It’s great stuff.”
    On the whole, though, his behavior tended to border on the
neurotic. His buddies from the Sandbox told us one tale that might be taken as
the story of his whole life in microcosm. Apparently, he’d suffered from an
aversion to mosquitoes almost phobic in its intensity. Before leaving the
Middle East to come on this last trip to Thailand, he’d taken precautions
sufficient to make his defenses against baldness and cancer seem positively
lackadaisical in comparison. He’d stock-piled several tubes of repellent, a
quantity of mosquito coils, and, the ultimate weapon, an electric gismo which
emitted the sound of a lady mosquito in heat, and which was supposed to fry the
sizzling Siren’s excited suitors in their droves. All this for just a short
stay in downtown Bangkok.
    Upon arrival, his buddies left him to erect his defenses
and went to sleep off the flight. After a couple of days, they realized that no
one had heard from Sid since, and no one had seen him around his usual haunts.
So they went up to his room at the Posie Hotel to investigate. Sid answered the
door wrapped in a bath towel; the curtains were drawn and the place was in
gloom. He was alone. He muttered at them to come in, and then shuffled back to
his bed, climbed in and pulled the blanket up to his chin. He looked distinctly
petulant.
    As he told it, he’d no sooner moved into the Posie and
unpacked his Maginot Line when a kamikaze mosquito of no small nerve had dived
in through it all, found Sid in the shower, and had bitten him in the most
unfortunate place possible, from his point of view at that time. And it seemed
there were sound medical grounds for his aversion to mosquitoes after all,
because the one daring solo attack had caused a delicate part of his anatomy to
swell magnificently and become quite gruesomely discolored.
    “What’s there to do then?” he’d lamented. “Who’s going to
believe it’s only a mosquito bite?”
    It does not reflect well on Sid, and we should never speak
ill of the dead, but his friends had to report that he actually pouted, at this,
and sank even deeper into his sulk. This was not the holiday he’d worked and
sweated for. When they sought to console him by suggesting, kind of mirthfully,
that there was a funny side to the story, Sid went so far as to grind his teeth
and roll his eyes fearsomely, at the same time suggesting in immoderate words
they go seek their fun elsewhere.
    “It was like a judgment,” Stack remarked.
    “What? The mosquito bite?”
    “Maybe that too; but I mean Sid’s death. If you looked at
his anxiety quotient, he’d been middle-aged from back about the time he