Robe unbutton

Although I often wonder what my Thai language skills will get me (besides $48k toward my tuition) I was reminded of its usefulness when I unearthed this e-mail from my first trip to Bangkok. It was 2001 and I was staying on Khao San Road, a place which has changed so drastically in the past seven years I didn’t even recognize it when I saw it again last year. Gone are the marijuana-leaf pharmacy signs and Thai guys in fake dreadlocks, replaced by over-priced, family-friendly hotels and tourist bars masquerading as "sophisticated nightlife." It’s kind of sad, but I’m betting you can at least buy Robitussin if you need it.

Whining to my friend Dan about the dearth of e-mails in my inbox, he suggested a group e-mail might generate some responses. I’m hoping he’s right and my friends will be forced out of sheer guilt to reply and then I’ll have lots and lots of messages waiting for me. Ha, ha, ha...total world domination.

In case you couldn’t tell, I’m completely high from a mysterious cold pill I bought from the pharmacy and took about an hour ago. Some might say that this is not the best of times to send large amounts of e-mail to an unspecified number of addresses, but I beg to differ. Why, some of the most profound things I’ve ever said have been on telephone calls in the middle of the night to ex-boyfriends, sobbing and as inebriated as half a martini will get me.

Right now I’m holed up in a room in Bangkok with one of those miserable drippy colds that make you feel unloved and unlovable for at least a week. After sniffling all night and coughing until the person in the room next to me pounded on the wall to shut up, I swung by the pharmacy to pick up some cold tabs.

A trip to a Bangkok pharmacy is a sketchy venture at best. Everything from Vicodan to Viagra is available over the counter, and if you need a pharmacy in a heavily-touristed area, you just look for the big red and green signs with Jamaican flags and marijuana leaves on the outside. Not very auspicious if you’re just looking for Robitussin.

The other problem is that the labels are written in Thai, a language that looks like bird droppings strained through a sieve then thrown at a ceiling fan. The generic drug name is written under the Thai, but unless you have a Ph.D. in pharmacology this is about as helpful as Chinese Mandarin. Gringos like me are forced to beg help from the “pharmacist,” a guy in a white lab coat with dreadlocks and a red-and-green knitted rasta hat who emerges out of a back room in a blue haze of pot smoke.

The best idea is to phrase your question as simply as possible. “I have a cold. What can you give me?”

But even this sometimes backfires: “You don’t seem so bold to me, missy. I give you lifty. What you want? Red lifty? Blue lifty?” What might he mean by lifty? I don’t want to know.

My agonizing conversation this evening went something like this:

“No, no lifty please. I have a COLD and I can’t sleep.”

“Oh baby, I think you very sweet. Oh...sleep. You no sleep? Here, this good, this very guuuuud.” Hands me what even I can decipher is Vicodan.

“No, I don’t want Vicodan. Do you have Sudafed?”

“Oh lady, yes I have Sudafed for you. Do I have Sudafed for you!”

“No, what is this? Percocet! Do you know what you’re doing?”

“Mon, I go school many year for this. And I never hear of Robe-unbutton. You want Viagra? It make robe unbutton.”

“Oh you are so funny. Do you have Robitussin or not?”

In the end I emerged with something that had a picture of a nose on the front. Either it’s cold medicine or I was actually supposed to put it up my nose. I took my chances and swallowed one. An hour later my sniffles have stopped, although the pink bunnies I keep seeing in my peripheral vision may or may not be the real thing.

I’d like to take full advantage of this state of mind and write terribly pithy things for which I will win the 2002 Pulitzer Prize, but I’m finding it difficult to concentrate. This could be due to either the dubious drugs I just took or the fact that internet cafes here all have telephones where people go to make overseas calls. None of the phones have booths or walls around them and it’s hard to work while listening to Brits and Aussies yell their private lives out over staticky telephone lines. How do you express your deepest thoughts while someone is sitting next to you screaming about their latest yeast infection and how difficult it is to find a good pharmacy in Bangkok? You tell it, sister.