Red light. That’s my cue. Here, let me give the windshield of your shiny new Mercedes a few apathetic strokes with my wadded-up copy of yesterday’s Thai Rath. Sorry, but I lost my washcloth to a soi dog the other day. It happens when you share a bed with semi-feral street animals. Anyway, the newspaper does just as well in streaking this watery fluid of dubious origin that I’ve already applied. Already waving me away, are you? Oh, your car was just washed, you’re trying to say? Don’t want me touching your precious symbol of class superiority?
Yeah, well, I don’t give a f**k if your windshield is already clean.
You heard me. I. Don’t. Care. What do I look like, some goddamned uniformed minimum-wage earner at Caltex? I wish. Those guys have proper squeegees, and ammonia in their spray bottles. They make ฿191 baht a day. I make nothing, because every satang I can squeeze out of you privileged pricks gets collected by my boss, who has had complete possession of my life since my parents sold me when I was 4. Can’t blame them entirely, though. Mom’s been a migrant worker her whole life, Dad was an alcoholic farm hand. Selling me was the biggest payday of their life. If I ever have kids, I’ll sell them too. What difference does it make?
Not that I’m ever going to have kids. Not a lot dating opportunities out here on the corner of Asoke and Sukhumvit, if you know what I mean. Occasionally some drunken foreigner with a bent for illegally young flesh will leer at me and say something incomprehensible while stumbling on the crosswalk, but that never leads anywhere. He’ll have to go through Win, my boss, just like everyone else who wants to run their hands over my numb, apathetic body. We have a system here. This is where you pretend to be shocked.
Oh, now you’re doing the windshield-wiper thing. How clever. What, you can’t even bother to swat me away with your own fat, manicured hand? Of course not — that would require you getting out of your air-con bubble of glass and steel, and I know that’s off the table. Yeah, I heard you lock the door when I came up to your car. I can detect that little click every time, almost like a sub-auditory ripple through my soul. Think I’m gonna snatch your Vuitton purse, lady? That’s not my gig. Smash-and-grab takes initiative, which takes a sense of self. That was mostly beaten out of me years ago. The fumes from cars killed the rest. But I get it. I’m a scary, dirty, low-class 10-year old girl. You need protection from me. You piece of cowardly s**t.
And don’t give me that economics lecture I heard you spouting at your passenger last time, that sanctimonious crapola about how people like me would make more money if we’d just pick cars that actually had dirty windows. As if my real problems could somehow be traced back to poor management or the lack of focused, quality customer service. I know it makes you feel clever to parrot back the Keynesian soundbites from that MBA program you took at Ohio State, but this isn’t capitalism. This is brutal class apartheid, and I will uselessly and hopelessly wipe whatever vehicle I choose.
Nice car, by the way. Is that the new C-Class? Ooh, the Avante Gard model, full-import CBU. I read the review in Matichon’s auto section last month just before crumpling it up and using it for a pillow. A real bargain at just ฿4,750,000. With the ฿20 I hide away every day, I’m hoping to get one of these babies too — in about 650 years. You think they’ll still have the Black Opal ones in stock? I’m not a big fan of Brilliant Silver, though it looks great on you.
Say, you look tense. In the shoulders especially, the way they bunch up as you stare straight ahead into space, like you’re about to compete in some Formula 1 race. Must be awfully stressful, avoiding my eyes, trying to blot me out of your upper-class existence. Your knuckles are turning white. Don’t chip a nail – that would be tragic. I see you’ve got one of those amulets. Buddhist, are ya? Believe in karma and reincarnation, do ya? It really shows. Love the crisp yellow shirt, too. I was just saying to my brother, now that woman is a shining example of the words of both the Lord Buddha and His Majesty. Really.
Oops –green light. Saved by the bell, again. I can see your shoulders relaxing already. That’s your cue to gun that fine-tuned Kompressor engine and burn up some more fossil fuels. I’m sure your “I’m not a paper bag” canvas tote will cancel out the carbon somehow. Go on, run. Flee. Forget. Back to your media-hypnotized dreamscape of state-controlled radio news and focus-group tested advertising, free from me and my inconvenient reminder of widespread endemic poverty, of the dark skin and empty wallets and faded hopes that define the very country you claim such empty patriotism for.
I won’t chase you. I can’t catch you. The revolution hasn’t come. Yet.
