Ball's long walk home

This blog's fourth anniversary is coming up. To mark BOTM's birthday last year, I named my favourite Thai-based blog with a gay theme. It was Kawadjan's blog, which you can find here.

This year I want to carry on as I started last time, and name the blog I enjoyed reading most over the last 12 months.

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I dropped in to see Ball, who is still enthusiastic about his job as a security guard in Silom.

It is a do-little job – he sits beside the lift in an inner-city building for 12 hours a day.

He might punch the lift button for visitors, and takes a note of people who come and goes, but there is not much more to it than that.

On the plus side, he can take two days off a week like any other worker – Ball claims most security guards are lucky to enjoy any time off from work at all, unless they swap shifts with colleagues – and while he is at work, can sit in air-conditioned comfort.

On the minus side, buying lunch in the Silom business district is expensive, as I discovered when I took Ball for an interview there last week.

We grabbed a quick meal on Soi Convent. The food was dull, but they charged us twice as much as we’d pay in our part of town, in a slummy/industrial district just 10 minutes away.

‘I go looking for food, and it can take me 10 minutes to find something which looks tasty and which doesn’t cost too much. I might also buy a newspaper or a magazine to read,’ he says.

Mum gives him B60-B70 a day. He will get through most of that on food alone.

Ball’s younger brother takes him to work, and picks him up again – when he remembers.

On Friday, Ball’s second day at work, his younger brother forgot to pick him up. Or maybe he was busy somewhere else. No one knows these things, because no one bothers to ask.

Ball had just B20 left in his pocket, so had to walk back, a journey which took more than one hour. At Suan Phlu market, about 10 minutes from home, he asked a motorcycle taxi how much he would charge to take him the rest of the way.

‘Forty baht,’ he said.

‘Never mind...I will walk,’ said Ball sadly.

The motorcycle taxi guy took pity on Mr Ball, looking sweaty and bedraggled in his security guard’s uniform, so took him home for B20.

Ball and I drank a few beers in his mother’s bedroom. His ailing girlfriend Jay, Ball’s elder sister, her toddler son, the family’s adopted daughter, and a visitor in her 50s were squeezed in with us.

The visitor, a friend of Mum’s, asked me irritating questions about where I worked, and how much I am paid.

‘I bet you are paid at least B100,000,’ she said in an asinine, oily voice.

‘No...he gets just B300,’ said Ball, making a joke at the nosy woman’s expense.

Ball has ostensibly quit drinking ya dong, but took a small shot-glass of the stuff when he visited carer R the other night.

‘I told him I had stopped drinking, so he wouldn’t see me much at his stand any more. He understood. Now that I have a job, I have to go to bed early,’ he said.

‘In a couple of months, Jay and I might have enough money to put a deposit down on a motorcycle.

'I can’t leave it at the building where I work, as the company provides no car-parks for security guards. But it would be better than having to rely on family for transport,’ said Ball.

I took heart from this remark, as it shows that Ball is thinking about his future, and intends staying in the job for the long-term.

Jay, who has flu, stirred from under a duvet cover he had dropped unceremoniously on her sleeping body a moment before.

For the most part, Ball fusses over her like a devoted husband. Good, I thought. Perhaps he won’t mind if I slowly withdraw from the scene.

Mr Ball has come a long way since the early days of our relationship, shortly after New Year, when he spent hours at the ya dong stand every night.

Increasingly, I feel as if I am no longer needed, except as a drinking friend who can spring for the odd bottle of beer.

The romantic part of me, which feels sorry for Ball, wants me to supplement the B70 his Mum gives him every day, at least until he gets his own motorbike. If I topped it up to, say, B120, he would have enough to get a motorcycle taxi home should his brother forget to pick him up.

The practical, self-interested part of me says such generosity is unnecessary, as he will probably spend the money on something else anyway.

I am not sure what else I can do here. Perhaps my job is done.