The Color of Money

Last Wednesday I was in a taxi heading from home to my dear friend Bob's for a day of movie watching. The driver pulled up to the fare booth at the Rama IV-Hualumphong expressway entrance to and opened his door--a sun visor on the side window meant he couldn't roll it down--to pay the 40-baht fare with the 500 baht note I'd given him.

Fare Guy handed the driver the change. The driver shut his door and then handed me the change which was neatly folded inside a receipt. (Whenever you pay with a large denomination bill, fare guys always give you a receipt.) We started up the incline towards the expressway. "Hey wait a minute," I told the driver. "I gave him 500 baht but he's only given me three 20-baht notes in change! He owes me another 400 baht" "Yes, I saw you gave him 500 baht," agreed the driver. I felt hugely supported by that remark because Thais generally avoid taking a concrete stand on either side of an issue unless it's absolutely necessary.

Since we'd barely moved from the toll booth, the driver carefully backed up, stopped the car, talked to Fare Guy for a moment or two and returned to the taxi. He went through a series of searching-for-money motions--checking under his seat, under the car etc. even though we both knew the change had gone directly from Fare Guy's hand to the driver's to mine. By asking the driver to check around the taxi, Fare Guy was tacitly admitting he knew I'd handed him a 500 baht bill. For all the good that did.

OK, enough of this sense diddling around. I got out on the passenger side and walked toward Fare Guy's little booth doing my irate-Farang-demanding-her-change-now routine. He summarily told us to get in the car and move over to the side of the expressway next to the office, effectively putting three lanes of slowly moving vehicles between him and us. I immediately sent the very sweet and patient taxi driver back to the tollbooth for an update. After waiting patiently for five minutes, the driver returned telling me to "jai yen" (keep a cool heart).

After 15 years in Thailand, I know absolutely that staying calm is the only viable option in these sorts of powerless situations. However a cool heart is also the LAST think I tend to keep at these moments. Fortunately just then Fare Guy emerged from his booth, holding a plastic basket under one arm and crossed carefully over three lanes. He walked silently past without looking at me and went into the office. Not pleased about being left on the hot and noisy roadside, I trailed after him.

Thai officialdom specializes in constructing large spaces wherein a couple of government employees languish in air conditioned comfort behind closed doors, while a lower-grade functionary or two sit outside at a desk and pretend to care who enters inside. I barge past them into the "office." (No Thai would ever act in this manner but since I'm definitely not Thai, nobody's particularly surprised.)

Fare Guy was laboriously counting the contents of his plastic basket, shoving bundles of 500, 100, 50, and 20 baht into an automatic money counter and jotting numbers in columns on a form. He counted the loose change and the tollway vouchers. He muttered something to the other person in the room who was adding numbers on a calculator. Then Fare Guy repeated the entire process, this time changing amounts in the margins. "How much longer will this take?" I asked impatiently. "I have a plane to catch." That was a big lie but it hardly mattered because I might as well be wrapped in Harry Potter's Invisibility Cloak for all the attention it netted me. I just knew Fare Guy was trying to fritter away enough time so I'd storm out and leave him 4oo baht richer. I wasn't having it.

Finally, some 25 minutes after I first passed the 500 baht note to the taxi driver, Fare Guy put his palms together and raised his hands in front of his face in an incredibly half-hearted "wai." He muttered a barely audible "sorry" under his breath and shoved four 100-baht notes at me. I grabbed them and stormed out. He'd been guilty from the git go and deserved no thanks for not ripping me off. I've talked to about this to many taxi drivers since and none have ever seen or heard of such a blatantly dishonest tollbooth scam.

I'm Too Sexy for Tiesto, Too Sexy for Tiesto

The minute I arrived at Sathorn Pier, I knew I'd picked the absolutely wrong event to attend for the second social sortie of my Thursday evening. For the first one I chose Chris Phongphit's photo exhibition at Nospace Gallery on Soi 71. I loved how he blocked the entrance gate to gallery with a green baht bus he somehow managed to commandeer for three hours (complete with the driver cum ticket taker and his very curious little son). The public entered through the front door of the bus, paid the 7-baht fare and exited out the back into the gallery courtyard. Christian's concept of standing on pedestrian overpasses and photographing the colorful and rusted rooftops of the Bangkok buses whizzing by underneath was also a first.

For the next event of the night I'd originally planned to check out Happy Monday on Ekamai 10, a bar/hangout run by the same hip and socially conscious group of artists, writers and musicians who created the fun-while-it-lasted Gig Grocery. But after a really funky Songkran (as in I was in a funk) I decided a Major Event offered potentially better mood altering opportunities.

A sweet friend kindly offered me his spare hottest-ticket-in-town so I could check out Tiesto, the hottest-DJ-in-town (or in-the-world if you believe local PR). He was performing his The Element of Life world tour at The River Promenade, the hottest-venue-in-town (at least for this week).

The glass-fronted two-storey River Promenade located on the Thonburi side of the Chao Phraya opposite the Shangrila Hotel is actually a gussied up sales office for a ritzy riverside condo by developer Raimon Land. Scheduled for completion by 2012, two-towered The River promises to be even more obscenely over the top than the myriad other condos shooting up on tiny sois around town....But that's for another rant.

Back to Tiesto. Up until I stepped onto the riverside hotel pier at Sathorn Pier for the two-minute ferry ride across the Chao Phraya, I knew zilch about either Tiesto or The River Promenade. Apparently, the former does trance; the latter does events that promote condos to rich clients and attract whichever local press, sycophants and acolytes can score an invite. Me? I'm in the Curious-Onlooker-With-Free-Ticket category.

A steady stream of Beautiful People (i.e. anyone with a coveted free ticket) arrives in attire ranging from working girl slinky (sycophant or girlfriend) to designer jeans and t-shirts (hip acolyte) and boring business suits (client). I look OK in my black ruffled Nathalie Joubert shirt and Rai Van Buren's Sexy Little Beach orange silk skirt. But schlepping a daypack while every other female dangles a teensy reticule or nothing at all is a serious fashion faux pas on my part. The one guy carrying a briefcase massively gets teased for bringing work to a party. He calls his girlfriend, who's already at the party to ensure he can ditching it in her car trunk the minute we arrive. If indeed we ever do.

It's 8:30 pm and we've already waited 20 minutes with no sign of the 18-meter River Boat, an elegant launch cruiser powered by two Volvo Penta engines. Of all the shuttle boats operated by the various five-star hotels and condos along the river, it's the only one with air-conditioning and Italian leather seating. It's also the only one that apparently never picks up its waiting passengers.

We party animals are becoming restive and by now there are way too many of us to fit into an 18-meter vessel. The organizers are frantically mobile phoning to the other side to see what's happened to the transportation. From our vantage point so near and yet so far away, we can see The Promenade ablaze in colored neon and searchlights

Eventually a longboat pulls up. No cruiser this, it's more like a gussied up tourist boat. The paint is fresh white instead of peeling blue and the comfy padded seats, arranged in pairs along the both sides, are upholstered in beige vinyl. We all settle in for the more proletariat than expected non-airconditioned journey.

Getting across the river takes two minutes but docking is more problematic because the pier access is blocked by the very same River Boat that couldn't be bothered to pick us up. Not only won't the unsmiling black-attired pier boat minions let us tie up, but they're actually waving at us to move off! Don't they know some of us (not me of course) are important guests? Don't they care that some of us (not me of course) have serious image building and partying on our minds?

Stuck in riverine limbo, my friend and I content ourselves with listening to Tata Young blaring her warmup set across the night and looking at her dancing image projected onto the gigantic screens surrounding the stage. Her set ends as we continue to tread water (or whatever idling boats do). Our hearts skip a beat as an obviously Important Person in a black suit was escorted onto the River Boat. NOW! we think. But then he walks back up the ramp to retrieve something he'd left ashore. Eventually Mr. Who-Cares-How-Many-People-I-Inconvenience reembarked and I believed our Docking Moment was nigh.

But no, Mr. W-C-H-M-P-I-I is as much dust in the wind as we are compared to Tata Young and her entourage who turn out to be the real reason for the inordinate delay and frosty welcome reception. After they've all been regally shepherded into the climate-controlled comfort of the River Boat, our comparatively tacky craft FINALLY pulls up to its destination.

It's now 9 p.m. and I'm hot, starving and immediately overwhelmed by the onslaught of people and noise. Surely an event of this caliber will provide a few sugar-free, meat-free hors d'oeuvres for its guests. But before any nourishment needs can be met, I must be thoroughly vetted at the entrance. Though I hold a "gold" ticket, it counts for naught in River Promenade hierarchy, or at least naught as much as a "VIP" ticket. An unsmiling black-attired female minion attaches a small band to my wrist and points me toward the crush of humanity packed onto the sweltering terrace.

"Can't I go inside the building?" I ask querulously, gazing through the huge plate glass windows to the spacious interior where people are milling around, dishes of munchies in hand. Nope. Like the River Boat, the climate-controlled interior of River Promenade is reserved for the upper echelons of Bangkok society like Tata Young and local VIPs. Beautiful People though some of us terrace proles may be, we're entitled to free drinks only. (I don't even drink alcohol.)

We second-tier Beautiful People can't even pee stylishly, but are relegated to the row of Porta Potties outside the main entrance. It's all very mean spirited and arbitrary. Like giving me a free ticket to the Kodak Theatre and then making me watch the Academy Awards on outside monitors near some side entrance.

Of course had this been the Academy Awards I would have swallowed my wounded pride, shrugged off the unfriendly treatment and hung around for the show (after running to the nearest loo). But to linger for two hot and hungry hours claustrophobically surrounded by people who have no desire to meet me (and vice versa) so I can listen to some DJ I've never heard of anyhow....Nah, I think not.

The most satisfying aspect of the Tiesto concert at River Promenade was leaving it. I don't have to wait a millisecond for the ferry boat which is already moored at the pier. A trio of minions smilingly usher me aboard. As I sail off into the hot night toward Thaksin Pier, the sole passenger on the large vessel, I experience my own Tata Young moment.