Jatupon

“ Jatupon spoke firmly. “You are a pathetic bully-a fucking ape—and it is the end of it for me. It is the end of it!” Manhood’s conviction and effrontery reeked from his mouth like foul breath and Kazem, who already wanted to wreak havoc on his impudence, flipped him over with the elastic of his underwear like a pancake. ”

“ Jatupon thought about his basic nature. He had lived for 14 years in Thailand but still he did not feel particularly Thai. He wished that he had been born in some other place like America with a nice American family. As he was falling asleep he heard the counterparts:
—What will happen to him on that bench?
—I can’t imagine anything good happening from it. He could apply for a job but instead he plays with his kite and sits on the bench. He wants to be an aristocrat.
—You don’t say.
—Yes, it is true. He thinks that all whores, laborers, and professionals are slaves. ”

“ Free to contemplate the unequal plight of man (or woman as it was in his case) , to see color in forms and feelings and thought, to mix with forms by allowing licentious whims to twist around the kite in accordance with natural mandates to reign in those turbulent skies, he basked in others perceptions of him as handsome, successful, and affluent. Like juicy fruit on the stem, his days in the sun, as an elated appetite of women and an envy of men—at least for those who knew something about contemporary Thai art—were embarrassing and awkward to the modest Jatupon that he was ”

“ He was a rotting organism there to be trodden on like any insect. He sat on a bench and reread the earlier part of his Laotian poem: the queens’ prayers; the youngest queen’s pregnancy; the oldest queen’s plot foiled by reality stranger than the plot; the birth of the bird; the exile; the growth as a boy in the shape of a bird; the growing independent striving of the boy-bird and the longer flights away from home; the princess who saw the bird and wanted it...
“Who are you?” asked a girl who was around his age. Jatupon felt nonplused. Beauty and truth were extracted from him. ”

“ As he heard the knocking he imagined that Jatupon was lying beside him and listening to his scurrying feet move toward the door. So many years they had slept in the same room. They had slept side by side until a few years ago. Did he love his brother so much that he would wake up with him skirting around in his dreams? Maybe he did since the habit of being with him was long. The youngest sibling was so much of his past and he had been accustomed to him without major aversion. The habit of being with someone without major repugnance was indeed the only thing that constituted fraternal love ”

“ It was a grassy fringe that went behind the wall and gate that enclosed the actual park. The sprinkling of rain was falling onto him and he could smell the stink of his damp shirt as if the metamorphosis to manhood had made him into the fetid one. Behind the wall he heard the squeaking chains of empty swings being moved slowly in the wind. Cars that infrequently passed the park were unreal and eerie as descending ghosts. No sooner had he awakened than a middle-aged woman in a red jacket rode up beside him on her bicycle. “Fortune teller?” she asked.
“No,” said Jatupon. ”

“ Jatupon felt that he was bleeding and so he went to the toilet and sat on the stool feeling beneath him from time to time to see if there was blood. There wasn’t any. He sat and sat virtually thoughtless until the idea returned that he could kill him. He wanted to kill him veritably. He could take one of the new television sets that Kazem had purchased for he and Suthep and smash his head while he was sleeping. He could spray paint the walls with air freshener and light a match. The whole room could be set ablaze like a funeral pyre. ”

“ Strangely, the world was a dreamy place and from the modest display of fireworks being shot over the canal there was a dreamy idea of connectedness and fraternity in the psyches of these young men although such ideals varied from moment to moment based upon their interpretations of the environment. Lagging behind in serpentine movements of dreaminess but eager for connectedness, Jatupon hurriedly caught up to his brothers only to lag behind them again. ”

“ It had materialized in action and now it had lethal consequences.
“Don’t play so hard, boys” said Kumpee. In Jatupon’s perspective the stink of his smoke-ridden clothes and the beer of his breath gave an acrid and fetid cloud which was miraculously saving him.
Kazem lowered his arms. “Where the hell have you been?” he asked. He put the television on the floor relieved at having escaped the worst passion that can fulminate in a man and lose him in the deepest abyss of regret. Sweat poured from Kazem’s forehead and his face became a deep red in chagrin. ”

“ His interest was of a man who sees continuum of what he is or a rejuvenation of what he was. Both reactions were selfish ones but this was the planet Earth where most good actions were dictated by egocentric realms.
Vanont yelled that one of the buildings was imploding and the senator got up from the table. “Continue eating,” he said as he exited the room. Jatupon looked out of the window. Thai thunder crackled the skies like an empty bag of potato chips. Lightning streaked across the Thai skies naked and ominous. ”

“ As someone who had known him in adolescence as Jatupon, and had seen JatuPORN, as the fraternity called him, weep in the museum of preserved corpses for the wish to be as deceased as they, she knew the poverty that he was. He knew that she would assume the stacks of underwear to be a repudiation of what he was. He knew that she would not mention this, as indeed she did not, and he loved her all the more for it.
"What do you want?" he asked an enormous gecko that was staring at him, distracting him from inhaling a new cloud of smoke after exhaling the previous one. ”

“ A solitary person usually needed to invent a commiserating individual out there even if that person did not really care; but he did not know anyone with whom to fool himself and he saw that despite the Noppawan Doctrine against pettiness, he was securing a petty life for himself like everyone else and the exhilaration from his independence was waning.
As Vanont slipped 40 baht through the hole of the window, Jatupon changed it, attempting to keep his eyes steady in a marginally sunken poise of professionalism without any special recognition of the customer wanting the change. ”

“ Jatupon didn’t know who the Hara Krishnas were or what a Country Club was but these items didn’t detract from his positive impression of her opposition to sententious punctilio. He smiled. This was certainly better than talking to a mosquito.
“Tell me another.”
“Another? All right. I can keep firing them all day. I can’t see how they can claim that King Phraya Taksin was really insane. I mean the man created military strategies that were successful at getting the Burmese out of the country, or at least removed to Chaing Mai. Then he decided to control the church as well as the politics. ”

“ It always seemed to him that the craving for women was merely for a spark to stimulate fire in the vacuity of the brain so as to liberate it from catatonic list, the result of boredom, and thus orgasm was merely for oneself even if by chasing illusions of "love" a real child materialized along the way. Thinking it now, it was nothing new for him, for to him, Jatupon, who was once in love with his brother and scrutinized the validity of human emotions thereafter as Nawin, feelings were gossamer threads of chemicals prompting puppet man to breed and breed elsewhere. ”

“ It has a morose facade but in such a somber demeanor like that of Jatupon it has its own splendor
—What splendor can be had in such a pointless and austere profession?
—Well for one, a given monk might put on some military clothes and go off to the local masseuse for a Thai massage of the most dissolute dimensions. It is an easy thing for a young monk to do: just take the expense for the whore out of the monastery coffer
—When Buddha was born in Lumpini Park in Nepal was it so that men might engage in the recidivism of their animalistic natures? ”

“ That would have hurt the brothers and the memory of the woman.
—And as the brothers drink beer together, do the younger ones notice that this somewhat expensive trinket that Kazem had heretofore claimed as his own and had worn around his neck is now missing.
—The more perceptive one called Jatupon notices this and infers that he really did give a gift to the senator and it was probably the necklace.
—They do play their games of trying to affect future outcomes. They’d be better being as insentient as cows. ”

“ The man will be thinking to himself, while engaging in small talk, that he’ll put twenty dollars into Jatupon’s underwear when they are alone in his apartment. He will not have any doubts about being able to buy him.
—Just for the feel of human flesh?
—For a human that feel is indispensable. They are gadabouts and they expend themselves in motion as a defense mechanism by which to avoid their own thoughts. It is the same for feeling the silk of other skin.
It breaks them from isolation. They find their thoughts such a prison.
He and Porn had an American style apartment. ”

“ You don’t want to sound like a dummy when you talk to me.”
“No, I mean it literally, Ajarn,” said Jatupon. Ajarn meant “respected teacher.” “I went to the area outside of the Grand Palace in Sanam Luang. In front of the golden and pointed domes of the entrance there is an oval football field of dirt. The radio mentioned that hundreds of boys and girls were flying kites there. I was planning to buy a kite and fly mine with the hundreds that were soaring next to each other but there was no one my age doing that.”
“Neither a boy nor a man: what an awkward state to be in. ”

“ This second was, however, enough for me to give him six inches of cold steel, and he pulled round and rode off, dropping his sword, and swinging from side to side in his saddle like a drunken man. The man who had fallen from his horse was nowhere to be seen. Indeed I did not look for him, but rushed back to the assistance of Jacopo, and this time, having opportunity for observing, if only for a twinkling, saw his opponent was my friend, the sham monk. ”

“ THE SPRING LOVER AND THE AUTUMN LOVER
This is a story of the youth of Yamato, when the gods still walked upon the Land of the Reed Plains and took pleasure in the fresh and waving rice-ears of the country-side.
There was a lady having in her something of earth and something of heaven. She was a king’s daughter. She was augustly radiant and renowned. She was called the Dear Delight of the World, the Greatly Desired, the Fairest of the Fair. She was slender and strong, at once mysterious and gay, fickle yet faithful, gentle yet hard to please. The gods loved her, but men worshipped her. ”

“ THE SINGLE LANTERN OF YAMATO
There was a poor woman in Yamato who was very good. She prayed daily at the graves of her parents, although she was very old. Daily she placed there some grains of rice, although she was very, very poor. She went to the temple whenever she was able, and prayed much. She was kind to the poor and gave always to the hungry, so that often she went hungry herself.
“It is better to be hungry than to grow hard of heart,” she said.
Now they made a grand temple in Yamato and all the people were proud and gave to it many yen. ”

“ Chikpitpa, young weasel; Jahtaneno, a kind of shell creature; Metsi, coyote; Ichpul, frog; Sukónia, a name of pine martin, whose ordinary name is Demauna; Tsoré Jowá, a kind of eagle.
OLD Jahtaneno had a great many daughters, and all but two of these were married.
At that time Sukonia was a great chief in this country about us. He had a large sweat-house, and many people to serve him.
One day Jahtaneno called his daughters and said: “My girls, I want you to go to Sukonia’s house. I have heard that he is very rich; go and see him. He has no wife yet; he may marry you. ”

“ The number eight is often met with in Japanese myth. It would be a mistake, however, to regard it as in any way sacred. The primary meaning of yatsu is "many," and it might be better to translate it so in this passage.
The central pillar of a house (corresponding to our king-post) is at the present day an object of honour in Japan as in many other countries. In the case of Shinto shrines, it is called the Nakago no mibashira (central august pillar) , and in ordinary houses the Daikoku-bashira. The circumambulation of the central post by Izanagi and Izanami reminds us of the Hindu pradakchina. ”

“ So Father Sturt tramped back to the Jago, and to the strain and struggle that ceased not for one moment of his life, though it left never a mark of success behind it. For the Jago was much as ever. Were the lump once leavened by the advent of any denizen a little less base than the rest, were a native once ridiculed and persuaded into a spell of work and clean living, then must Father Sturt hasten to drive him from the Jago ere its influence suck him under forever; leaving for his own community none but the entirely vicious. ”

“ Dicky looked to see this man beaten down, kicked and stripped. But a well-dressed stranger was so new a thing in the Jago, this one had dropped among them so suddenly, and had withal so bold a confidence, that the Jagos stood irresolute. A toff was not a person to be attacked without due consideration. ”

“ In the Játakas, or parables attributed to Gautama, we have irrefragable witness of the teaching current from a very early period in Buddhist history. They are apologues, most of them probably of much older date, which have acquired sacredness by being fitted to alleged events in the ministry of the Buddha. The Master is represented as taking occasion, from some remark made by his disciples upon a passing occurrence, to declare that in a former birth the same things had happened to them; and in illustration of his statement he tells the tale. ”