A dyslexic freak show

[Pattaya One]

I wandered into the H*S*A*M go-go in Soi LK Metro on Halloween night. Although properly known as M*A*S*H, if you approach it from the Soi Buakhow end the sign reads like a dyslexic jumble. It’s as if the people who own the joint only paid for one half of a sign, or the signmaker ran out of the bulbs and tubes and things he needed to finish the job. “Next week,” he told the owners. That was six months ago.

In keeping with the Halloween theme, bars all over Fun Town had damsels who had spent a lot of time putting on the kind of makeup usually associated with Hammer Horror films starring Vincent Price, or raided the set of the 60’s TV series The Munsters and carted off all of Yvonne de Carlo’s wax-like face goo. In some cases I had the impression there were damsels didn’t have to apply that much in the way of ghoulish warpaint to look sufficiently scary.

It was the first time I have been into M*A*S*H and thought they were almost adhering to the ‘theme’. With the way the girls were made up it looked like they’d engaged half the North Korean army in hand-to-hand combat and were now in need of a few surgical procedures to stitch up their wounds.

The atmosphere was fun, even if the 20 or so chrome pole molesters were more interested in entertaining themselves than bothering with the majority of the smattering of customers. There were two or three who looked pretty good to my jaundiced eyes, while a few others were lathered in Halloween makeup and really looked like something out of Nightmare on Elm Street. I suspect their looks don’t improve once the makeup comes off.

Since I was, happily I might add, left to my own devices, a serving damsel came over to me armed with a box full of Snickers chocolate bars and lollipops. She proffered the box and beckoned me to take something. I guessed this was the ‘treat’ part of the Halloween night. It was pretty obvious I wasn’t going to get a ‘trick’, even if there was a Corporal Klinger lurking in the shadows in fishnet stockings and a three-day growth.

Draft amber fluid is 60 baht, with bottled froth 65 baht, during the happy hours which run from 7:00 until 9:00pm. Music is standard car alarm, although far from the worst, just the usual unimaginative stuff played by your garden variety legend in his own turntable. I just wish the owners would play more on the ostensible theme of the den. Then again, they’re not alone in having a joint where the ‘theme’ is in name only.

©Duncan Stearn

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