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dragon lady

Oops! Is my horn showing again?

“You eat.”

Yikes! Okay, so it wasn’t a kind thought. But this is the Dragon Lady of Khaosan Road I’m talking about. That I looked around for the pile of dog shit she was going to force me to munch on . . . well, you’ll have to forgive me. But, come, on: the Dragon Lady? Who knew what diabolical scheme was behind the greeting; what nefarious purpose was behind that command? The regal utterance was unusual in itself. My arrival in her domain was usually met with indifference at best, a command to go away far more common.

The door to her shop was a good twenty feet behind me. Too far away to make a clean escape. Besides, her devil spawn posing as employees were blocking my way. God knows what gruesome tactics she’d trained them to employ in attack fleeing customers. Flee, fight, or freeze seemed to be my options; instead I tried a tentative smile. Even though I knew that would obviously be a foreign language to the Dragon Lady.

The Dragon Lady and my relationship was a business one. At least in my mind. She undoubtedly viewed it more as a supplicant coming to make cash offerings to the altar of her highness. As with most regal deities, the presence of minor folk was hardly noticed. Unless you committed a worship faux pas and pissed the goddess off. Not that I ever saw the Dragon Lady actually get mad; when those below you matter not, it’s hard to become irate over their foolish little behavior.

The Dragon Lady’s domain was a small wholesale silver shop on Khaosan Road; a warren of shelves stacked high with plastic containers displaying her riches. Wandering her store was more like making your way through a hedge maze, both designed to invoke the fear of getting lost, never to be found. Her throne was in a dark murky corner tucked away at the far end of her store where she perched regally behind an ancient desk piled high with years of invoices, a testament to those who’d come in supplication on bent knee before. There is no record of how many survived the ordeal.

dragon lady

Of Chinese/Thai decent with her Chinese blood obviously taking precedence, the eons spent building her wealth were mapped on the Dragon Lady’s face. It wasn’t a case of X marking the spot so much as that the lines in her face were deep enough to bury hidden treasure in. Her heavily dyed, jet-black hair was styled in a massive bouffant from a day long gone that added height to her girth. The pockets under her eyes came in layers of three, doubling over themselves and affording a good place to store loose change.

While Botox was obviously not one of the Dragon Lady’s vices, she still managed that shell-shocked look thanks to her practice of penciling in eyebrows a good foot higher than the gods had ever intended, a small mole from the same manufacturer perched at the corner of her mouth seemed to have a will of its own. A will that expressed itself as the exclamation point to a moue, a frequent form her face found itself in. They say fifty is the new forty; in the Dragon Lady’s case it was the new eighty.

Though my smile as a reply to her imperious demand of “You eat,” may have been a foreign tongue to the Dragon Lady, my acquiescence to her will was a familiar given in her world. “We go,” she announced, clapping her hands together to signal to the other deities in the pantheon that her countenance was on the move. She maneuvered her bulk from behind her desk, headed for the door – and me – while her minions bowed in reverence, no doubt in awe that her highness was abandoning her station.

A bull in a china shop may be disastrous, her passage through the tight confines of her lair was of no less consequence; debris that had once been displays of silver trailed in her wake, quickly made right again by her quivering servants.

Not sure if hers was a full frontal attack on my being, or if the gods were indifferent to my fate and had only placed me in her way, and that any injury I suffered would be second to her purpose, I threw wide the door to her dungeon through which she regally swept, catching my arm in one claw as she passed and pulling me behind her as she made her appearance on Khaosan Road.

khaosan dreadlocks

Stupid Touri Trick #326: Getting dreadlocks on Khaosan Road.

Instantly I regretted the years of battling with her under the guise of business transactions, sure that her payback would be some form of public humiliation meted out in the middle of Khaosan. But then if you’ve ever been to Khaosan Road, you’ll know there are few more humiliating experiences than getting rasta-weave hair extensions roadside, a popular form of sadomasochism among the neighborhood’s visitors. So, possibly my fate would not yet be met.

Unsure of what was expected of me I followed her bulk down the sidewalk, those denizens of Khaosan whose brains had not been completely fried from too often indulging in the evil weed quickly made way, while the less fortunate fell prey, pushed aside by her bulk and lucky to have escaped being trampled under her pudgy feet.

Our journey was a short one. One of the area’s infamous bad-food-worse-service restaurants blocked the sidewalk and the Dragon Lady collapsed into a chair turned rickety by her mass. She made a curt nod at the chair across from hers, then immediately lit a cigarette, smoking it with those loud, liquid smacks that make you never want to smoke. Flicking the ash in the vicinity of an overflowing ashtray on a table nearby, she belched out a cloud of second hand smoke, and realizing she was obviously dealing with a simpleton translated her nod with the command, “Sit!”

What was this? An invitation? Was it possible that we were to engage in . . . gasp . . . a business lunch? Or was I merely being afforded the singular opportunity of watching as she devoured her prey? Finding an empty table at one of Khaosan’s eateries is not a difficult chore. Finding a menu or a waitress to take your order, on the other hand, is a herculean task. Unless you are the Dragon Lady. She didn’t bother with either and instead merely waved two fingers above her head. The effect was immediate, the sound of the cooks scurrying in the kitchen to obey her command was swift. I considered that perhaps I’d overestimated my involvement in the lunch, no consideration was made to my choice of food. But I’d got the business portion of the meal right it seemed

“Bidness bad,” the Dragon Lady proclaimed.

She speaks!
In bar boy English no less.

“All over world. Bidness bad,” she belched, waving her arms in an all encompassing circle which either delineated the extent of the problem or was the beginning move of an incantation.

khaosan road

Khaosan Road is Bangkok’s backpacker ghetto, and for some odd reason the home to a mass of wholesale silver shops.

I made no reply but braced myself for what was to come, assuming her statement was not one of empathy or sympathy but a lead-in to how badly she planned on raping me on any purchase I planned on making that day. But then finding prices doubled due to slow business was not just a Dragon Lady business scheme. It’s the go-to mode of operation for all businesses in Thailand. When profits are down, your best move is to recoup your losses on the next customer who walks through the door.

But I was wrong again. It wasn’t about the Dragon Lady’s dwindling pile of bullion. “I tink bidness good for you,” she said. And then beamed what could only have been a approximation of a smile at me.

Okay, so it was more of a grimace than a smile, but the ends of her ruby red, month’s worth of lipstick caked lips definitely curved in an upward direction, the result fitting her like panty hose on a mastiff. But the worse was yet to come: she leaned over and gave me a playful swat. All the bad karma I’d amassed in the past came rushing together for a major blow of payback: the Dragon Lady of Khaosan Road was flirting with me.

Khaosan Road

Perhaps the bible thumpers who come out at night on Khaosan Road are there to counteract the evil influence of the Dragon Lady.

I thanked the gods I’d not ordered food. And quickly tried to throw her off my scent. “Um, no, my business is down too,” I lied while realizing I’d have to diminish the amount of stock I’d planned on buying from her to lend credence to my plea of poverty.

Dragon Lady giggled while wagging her finger at me, not buying my claim for a second. “No, you come Thailand again. Other customer not come Thailand now.”

Damn. Busted. Knowing when to cut my losses, I switched the conversation over to how much of my blood she was going to demand in payment.

Dragon Lady paused, squinting in concentration while she debated over an acceptable price that would add sufficiently to her accumulated wealth. Finally she named a figure more on the level with a purchase of gold than of silver.

I spread my arms in a gesture that said, “Sorry, but what can I do?” Then sadly shook my head and pulled out some of the Thai I’ve learned during my numerous trips to The Kingdom. “Can not,” I said. “Silver finit, bidness bad.”

The vision of a new Mercedes fading, Dragon Lady was not a happy camper. We began haggling over the price – a more familiar interaction between us – with the Dragon Lady begrudgingly lowering her asking price in tiny increments while I held fast to the best bargaining ploy you can use: too much, too high, I walk away. We finally reached agreement, a price neither of us was happy with but that would not negatively impact either of our bottom lines. I was satisfied. The Dragon Lady, well, at least I no longer had to deal with that awful attempt at a smile.

Buttering me up by allowing me to watch her feed had not done the trick she’d hoped for. I hated to think what her minions back at the shop would go through upon her return. That there would be fewer of them on my next visit was a given. The lack of hitting paydirt put the Dragon Lady off her feed, the success of squeezing but a few extra satang out of me returned her face to its normal state of disapproval with all things human. She concluded our business and our lunch in a quintessential Dragon Lady manner. Raising her bulk from its place of rest, she looked down her nose at me and announced as she stomped away, “You pay.”

dragon lady

Because you can never get enough of sexy Ruifang.

I got off cheaply. My life had been spared. And I lived to do battle with the Dragon Lady of Khaosan Road another day.

[No, the pix are not of the real Dragon Lady. You thought I’d be stupid enough to actually point my expensive camera in her direction? Possibly though, these are of her cousin. The photos are of Zhang Ruifang, a 100-year old woman, from China’s Hunan Province, The strange horn coming out of the left side of her forehead made its debut when she hit the century mark last year. Sexy, huh?]

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