Dashiell Hammett rides again

I have been the doctor, and am now walking normally again. That was a dramatic opener, wasn't it?

Still, it's true. My groin rash had become so bad last night that I was hobbling about the place, stooped over like a mossy old man. 'Go the doctor!' Maiyuu implored.

At 7.30pm, I dressed myself, slowly and laboriously. Even doing up the buttons on my shirt was a chore.

Maiyuu kicked me out the door, so I had no choice but to limp out to find a motorcycle guy. I felt like a detective hero in a corny crime novel - a lone guy struggling against a windswept, hostile universe.

I had planned to visit the doctor when his clinic opened at 6pm, but then the savage rains came. I waited until they had abated, then staggered out into the unfriendly night.

Oops, there I go again. I really must stop this gay man's tendency to over-dramatise the simplest of things.

On the back of the motorbike, I held up my small portable umbrella to give us cover from the rain. We were going too fast for the poor thing, which turned inside out against the force of the wind.

I folded it up and tucked it under my arm instead, then thought of myself: I am like that helpless umbrella.

At the medical clinic - an outreach centre run by my old friends at Chulalongkorn Hospital, in a slum area close to where I live, I waited with nervous anticipation until my name was called.

Relief! The sole doctor on duty was a man, who had treated me on one previous occasion, for a grisly eye growth.

Okay, I exaggerate. From memory, it was a mere skin tag. On the same eyelid, I had also developed a cyst, caused by an infected sweat gland. He plunged a needle into my eyelid, and the problem went away.

Normally, young women doctors staff the place. While they are always pleasant company, I did not fancy taking off my pants to show a woman my groin rash. Call me old fashioned, but I prefer to strip for a man.

'Give me a look?' said the doctor, a chirpy man in his 30s who despite his youth had greying teeth.

I showed him my horror rash. Red, angry, and swollen, it had spread beyond my groin and was now climbing up my legs like a rodent up a drainpipe in Bubonic-plague era Europe.

'It's a fungal infection,' he declared cheerfully, while writing me a lengthy prescription of skin pills, ointment, and shampoo.

Hammett

'Is it diet-related, or perhaps an allergic reaction to chlorine from the condo pool?' I asked anxiously.

The doctor tapped his brown, stumpy teeth. 'Chlorine? The stuff on our teeth?'

No, I thought. The doctor's question brought me crashing back down to earth. Gone were the fanciful thoughts that I was stuck in some hardboiled detective novel set in 19th century England, or even one in mystery writer Dashiell Hammett's era, 1930s America (I read him as a kid). This could only be one place.

Only in Thailand, the cynic in me thought, could a doctor mistake fluoride for chlorine.

No matter. A day after starting my treatment regime, the rash is much better, the stoop is gone, and I am walking almost normally again.

Now I will have to find some new problem to fret about. Global warming? The sorry state of the blogosphere?

Bring it on. I'm ready for anything, sir. Just let me fetch my dirty trench coat and fedora.