Little Pattaya Thailand Beach Angel

Stretched out on the beach in Pattaya Thailand, I'm passed out drunk when I'm awakened by the little Pattaya  Beach Angel

by Jack Corbett

It’s a long story but I think it’s a good one about a very odd and very recent event putting me in close proximity to a Thai non-bar girl. I’ll call it, “The Little Beach Angel.”

Somehow I had managed to lose both the outdoor entrance key to the guesthouse I’m staying at and my cell phone. This meant that if I stayed out after 3:00 a.m. when the guest house closed and locked its outside doors, I couldn’t get back in. And although one of my closest friends was staying at the guesthouse I couldn’t call either him or the guesthouse owner.

I was having drinks in a nearby bar I frequent often–no, I was having a lot of drinks, when one of the bar girls informed me that it was after 3 a.m. The girl and I both knew I was locked out. I could have stayed in an upstairs room at low cost, but felt I wouldn’t be able to sleep well if at all, so I took the path of least resistance and just kept drinking. After all the bar girls went upstairs I still continued to sip my beer while talking to the mamas an.

By now it must have been after 5 a.m. so I decided to take a long walk  hoping that I would find a restaurant. I had not eaten dinner for one thing and I could drink coffee to come to my senses. So I walked down to Beach Road, and that’s when I lost track of what happened next.

I found myself sprawled out on a lawn chair down on the beach. The first thing I saw was an attractive face staring down at me belonging to a woman kneeling beside me. The girl was small and slender. She looked as if she belonged to the beach recalling movie scenes from the past depicting island girls meeting the first European visitors in “Mutiny and the Bounty” and similar movies I had first seen in my childhood. Only this was very real and it was happening to me. The girl was wearing little or no makeup. She wore loose fitting pants and top, neither of which were expensively made. And she had piled up next to me a small quantity of seas shells she had been collecting.

I don’t know if she had called out to me and that had woken me up or if I just came to at the right moment, as her eyes met mine. But the next thing I noticed was my right contact lens that I had obviously pulled from my eye. I wear one lens, for distance, in just this one eye. My left eye is uncorrected. The fingers of my right hand were grasping this single lens which I had been holding on top of my right thigh. Although the soft lens had dried out, I had miraculously not lost or damaged it.

Just imagine how I must have looked to this little angel who had found me sprawled out on that lawn chair, my mouth no doubt hanging open, probably snoring, while grasping that contact lens.

I cannot remember the exact sequence of events that happened next, whether she pulled out that little Thai-English phrase book right away or later, after she got me to take another lawn chair a few feet back of where she found me underneath the umbrellas and out of the sun. She saw a vendor close by and pointed at him as if to ask me if I wanted something to drink. So I gave her a little money and told her the Thai word for water. She came back to me with a bottle of water.

She had with her a magazine that was in Thai and showed me a picture of two Thai women, indicating that she was one of the two girls in the pictures, girls being an apt description as one of the girls appeared to be only 14 or 15 while the other was two or three years older. She was the older girl. It was hard to believe this woman now sitting next to me was one of the very cute girls in the magazine but after looking at her teeth and comparing them to the teeth of the magazine model, I knew that it was really her.

She managed to ask me what I was doing later in the day. But she did this just as she asked me other questions by looking up a phrase in her little book. I already had a date lined up for six p.m. with a bar girl. She indicated she was free at 4 p.m. but I told her I couldn’t meet her until the next day. She then pointed at the number seven on my watch which suggested she could meet me then. I pointed at the sand around me and said: “Here.” Then I made a circular motion with my hand while pointing at close by objects indicating we should meet in close proximity to where we already were. We then walked to Beach Road where we crossed the street together. There another girl stood waiting for her. The two women then walked off together.

Later, that afternoon and the next morning Big Daddy, PlONe and I chatted in the Lost Angels chat room on my web site about the strange events of that morning and how I had opened my eyes to find a little angel kneeling next to me. “Where did the girl work? What did she do? Why was she on the beach at 8 a.m.? Was she a freelancer looking for some early morning business.  But she wasn’t dressed for freelancing. Not wearing any makeup or nice clothes this last possibility seemed out of the question.

*****

There is a restaurant close to where I’m staying. Working for this restaurant is a cute little waitress who seems to be shyer than most of the other girls–except for when it comes to me. She will hang back waiting for one of the others to take a customer’s order or to wait on him. It is almost as if she’s still in training under the other more experienced waitresses. She spends a lot of her time standing just outside the restaurant's front entrance. PlOne and I both think she’s great eye candy and worth her weight in gold as a draw because she’s got a cute look of her own that makes her stand out from most other Thai women.

But while the other waitresses will take our orders and wait on us, she will often come straight over to our table just to say hello to me. And two doors away from the restaurant is the bar I hang around at a lot. I will often walk all the way to Soi 16 in Naklua, then run all the way back along the beach–a distance I’d estimate at about 2 miles. And then I’ll have soda water at the bar. On two occasions the little waitress will walk into the beer bar behind me just to say hello to me.

It was around four p.m. when PlOne and I walked past the restaurant. We also passed the little waitress who was standing just inside its entrance. And as we passed the girl said something to me, so we went back to talk with her. Her English is very bad, but somehow she was able to tell us that she had been the little angel who had found me passed out on the beach lawn chair.

Obviously we had a misunderstanding as to “our date” at seven. They changed the shifts at four p.m. at the restaurant which meant that the little waitress had started at four and couldn’t possibly meet me at 7:00 p.m. down on the beach.

Around six p.m. PlOne, another good friend, and I went back to the restaurant for dinner. This time the little waitress waited on us. There was by this time no doubt that our date was off and that the whole thing was a big misunderstanding. I still had not replaced the key to the guest house’s front entrance and I still didn’t have a key ring. So I was keeping the room key in an unzippered pocket in my wallet. When it came time to pay the bill, I opened my wallet with a flick of my wrist, and got out the amount of money I needed. Then my two friends and I went seventy-five feet down the street to the bar I had been frequenting.

One of the bar girls was shoving my first Heineken over towards me at the bar when suddenly I heard someone come storming up behind me. I turned around to see who it was. It was the little waitress with a furious look on her face.

The slapped my room key angrily down on the counter in front of me, then stalked angrily back to the restaurant.

One of my friends raised his eyebrows and gave me this look like: “What was all that about?”

After having one drink there, the three of us went on the prowl savoring Walking Street’s go-go bars. Later PlOne and I wound up back at the bar close to the guest house. After about an hour I heard someone yelling out my first name. A street vendor had pulled his kart up alongside the curb between the restaurant and the bar selling food. A number of girls from the bar and the shop between the bar and restaurant had gathered about his cart ordering food. The waitress stood among the girls. I went up to her and she asked me for twenty baht so that she could get something to eat.

I cannot begin to describe this girl’s behavior. During the next couple of days she would often look over at me as I sat and ate with my friends. She then either quit or got fired from her restaurant job. On her last day she wasn’t her usual self.

I have a great camera, a Nikon D-1 X, top of the line, a professional camera that’s meant for some very serious use that’s built like a tank and that must weight with flash something like six pounds. The night before, I had taken a few shots of the waitress around the restaurant entrance she had hanging around. I now had my laptop at my table with me so I showed her the pictures. I then indicated that I wanted to take more pictures of her down on the beach just as the sun was setting. But she didn’t seem to understand a word I was saying to her so she brought one of the other waitresses over whose English language skills were pretty good.

Through this other waitress she managed to convey to me that she would meet me at the bar the next day at six p.m. And then I’d take more pictures of her as the sun started to disappear beneath the horizon. But she didn’t show.

Two days later, the waitress whose English language skills were pretty good, stopped me as I was passing by the restaurant. I had gone to Big C to have three four by sixes printed for the cute waitress along with one eight by ten. The little waitress had told the older woman to tell me that she would be stopping by the restaurant at 11 p.m. and that she hoped to get the printouts I had promised her. The older woman then told me I could give them to her and that she would be sure to give them to my little beach angel. Which I promptly did, then I went out for the evening with my friends.

The next night found me once again at what had become my favorite drinking bar. I was busy cutting up with the bar girls there when suddenly the little waitress came up behind me from out of nowhere. She started talking to me about pictures but I could understand little about what she was talking about. So I took her back to the guest house lobby where the night girl, who by this time I had gotten to know pretty well, could act as translator.

With the help of the night girl, I managed to set up a lunch meeting for 1:00 p.m. today after which I’d shoot pictures of her down at the beach. She had gotten another job and had to report for work at four so shooting the pictures of her in the setting sun was out. And that must have been the reason why she didn’t meet me at six at the bar. She was at a new job, she didn’t have my phone number, and she couldn’t leave in the middle of work.

But today it poured down rain. Although it stopped raining by 1:00 p.m. the skies remained overcast so I left my camera behind. She was right no time–in fact waiting for me just outside the restaurant. Inside we ordered our meals and then with the help of a Thai English dictionary, pen and paper I explained that I wanted to have another go at the photography hopefully with much clearer skies.

She will get a 20 by 30 inch printout from me. Just a little gift to show my appreciation for her being a little guardian angel that morning I had passed out on the beach. It will be fun showing her a slide show of all the pictures I will have taken of her and having her pick out with me the best ones. And of course she will have a few blemishes showing up in those pictures which I will have outputted at 10.3 mega pixels. A little work on those in a graphics arts program on my laptop will also be a lot of fun.