The Mad Table

Thailand, Pattaya.
30-03-2010.

The Mad Table down on Soi Bukaouw and outside a small supermarket is another place where I like to spend my evenings, boozing with the local gang of British long termers to Pattaya, most of them on serious visa overstays and often already on their way to the Alcoholic's version of heaven by the time I arrive...

A bunch of drunk degenerates that have been in Pattaya for longer as I care to remember, surviving at a breadline excistence but somehow always having enough Dinero Thailandes to booze on expensive Red Label whiskey, big condensed bottles of Chang and Leo, keeping them cold in a styrofoam so-called condom that fits over the better part of a beer bottle and really is a great invention...

Most of these blokes might have some benefits back home and a ATM card to get at it but no health insurance or dental plan, nor retirement fund, often in the company of down and out street h*okers hoping for a few free beers and happy to gulp down the last of the Red Label - ice or no ice, as long as it does the job...a few hours of alcohol induced oblivion...

A crumbling stone table surrounded by equally badly mantained stone benches with its underbelly a trashing place for garbage like empty beer cans, my Burmese sigar butts and ice bags, plastic cups and the sort...maybe a local man in rags walking by, carrying a huge bags across his houlder and loudly ordering his two/three kids to check for empty beer bottles, plastic water bottles for deposit money...a couple of young monks in their orange robes ignoring the drunk raving...

Yeah, a pack of crazed older drunks who have spent most of their lives on the run, have reached a peak in the drunk man's paranoia somewhere along the line, went crazy at home due to a serious alcohol poisoning before discovering Pattaya where no cop will bother them despite their visa overstays and midnight drunk screaming, driving back to their lived-out condo or cheap hotel rooms on the back of a motorbike taxi or in their beat-up car...to keep it short and simple I fit in just right...