What regular visitor to the gay gogo bars of Thailand has not fantasied about moving there and opening their own bar? Not being Thai and doing so with Western sensibilities and business know-how, we all know it could be done better. The allure of enveloping yourself in a world populated by hot naked guys and large profits is a fantasy hard to resist. Even Shamelessmack once posted his well thought out ideal gay gogo bar, complete with a detailed floor plan. Not that it would stop that fantasy, but you do have to realize to do so would mean you would not just be the owner of a night club, but also – or more so – a pimp. That little bit of truth probably stops a lot of guys from moving from fantasy into reality. Even before Hustle & Flow, we all knew it’s hard out there for a pimp.

In a fantasy world that ignores all of the downside that being a pimp, or bar owner to be more polite, entails in Thailand, the steady stream of hot young men – of which the shape, size, age, and degree of nudity or dress that excites you the most would rule – is one of the biggest draws. That may be a fantasy with flesh appeal, or it may be a sick and twisted one where the bar owner has his way with his staff against their will as in the recent blog post Boo Hoo published, a fake and demented tale about a poor Issan boy forced to work in a bar in Pattaya who is abused by customers and raped nightly by the bar owner until he is saved by The Saint (so that’d be two fantasies in one). Most have a more healthy mental state though, and it’s a combination of opening the best and most perfect bar Thailand has ever seen and the accompanying profits that goads those thoughts. Of course, if all opening a bar in Thailand took was a dream and some cash every 7/11 in the Kingdom would have been transformed into a gogo bar by now.

In reality, the quickest way to lose your money and perhaps your life would be to try to muzzle in on Bangkok’s commercial sex industry. You could probably avoid the latter by going into business with a Thai already involved in the business. Even then you’d have to have racked up major karma points in several of your previous lives to avoid the former. But then even if you lived through the experience and made money too, you’d probably be condemning yourself to a life as a bar boy the next pass through. That’s the bitch about karma, it works like that.

Anyone with half a brain who really wanted to move to Thailand and open a bar would do so in Pattaya, not Bangkok. In fact, I’m pretty sure having only half a brain is a requirement for any farang who opens a bar in Pattaya. You’d still have to wade through the deadly morass of graft, greed, and crime, but the bucks aren’t as big in the cesspool by the sea and the locals are not quite as non-forgiving about a farang cutting into their business. Even then, that road to success is littered with the mangled bodies and reputations of those who have gone before. And you’d never get rich. Pattaya attracts the cheapest bastards on the planet. Good luck making a satang off that lot.

Ignoring the peril to life and limb, I’ve always thought the way to go with a new gogo bar in Bangkok would be to take all of the advice that has been put forth on the subject on the gay Thailand Message boards and do the exact opposite. Most of that advice comes from the people who you’d not want as your customers. Recently they’ve been bitching that Dream Boys has raised their cover charge to $11.00. In my fantasy bar you wouldn’t be allowed in for less than $25. And that admission ticket into my world wouldn’t come with a free drink either.

Extremely hot guys, lots of flesh, no screeching mamasans, no fucking acts that involve aerial acrobatics, clean toilets, and non-offable hosts whose job it would be to help newbies understand bar world procedures would all be part of the recipe for success. And I’d man the door with a bouncer instead of a group of barkers. His job would be to keep disgruntled and angry looking farang out of the bar. That wouldn’t necessarily lead to success, but it’s my fantasy and I don’t want a bunch of pissed off, mad at the world, unhappy old farts who hate their very existence ruining my dreams. Farangs with a sense of humor and a positive outlook on life (that’d be my regular readers) would all get passed inside quickly through the VIP line.

Thinking about the gay gogo club you’d open in Bangkok is a pleasant daydream. In the real world, I’d never consider such a thing. At least not unless Noom, my bar boy friend and current love of my life, excitedly presented that opportunity, the millions of baht he’d make as a club owner gleaming in his greedy little eyes. Thanks to a bad habit I have of making financial decisions based on a whim with no other thought than, “What the hell, why not? It’s not that much money” I came that close. Ooops, sorry we came that close.

We’d hit Dick’s early for dinner, dropped into Noom’s club so he could earn brownie points for bringing in a cash paying customer, and then wandered down Suriwong to check if Tawan was still planning on holding their anniversary party the following night. It was at the time of the floods and while the central part of the city was still high and dry the word was out to expect everything to soon be underwater. Businesses were barricading their property with sandbags, many had closed up shop and moved to higher ground. Tourists were busy cancelling their holidays in fear of an event that never transpired. And bidness was slow.

Attending Tawan’s annual celebration is one of Noom and my traditions. For lovers of muscle hunks, it’s probably the worst night of the year to visit Tawan. The regular studs are thinly scattered throughout the club and the stage is instead filled with handsome boy contestants, non-working guys who’ve entered the contest and who fail to flash much skin. I think the lack of offable muscle meat is the reason Noom thinks that’s the best night for us to go. This night, Noom also wanted to check out the massage parlor Tawan had recently opened next door. He’d heard they were offering free foot massages if you bought two drinks at the club. ‘Free’ is a heady idea to Thais. Simple math is not as interesting. A 250 baht foot massage up against 500 baht for two drinks doesn’t stand a chance when it could be mean the massage would then be free.

I made a halfhearted attempt at explaining the deal would mean not two but four drinks for the two of us, but all Noom could hear was the free part. So with both the party and massage we came up craps. They’d moved the party date off to a non-specified, but assumedly drier, date. And big surprise, yes we’d both have to buy two drinks each to get free massages. Not that enamored with the idea of having my feet rubbed by a twink – for some reason the Bangkok muscle palace went with the opposite physique in their massage business – I shelled out an extra 250 baht for a second bottle of water for Noom so he could have his free massage. Sometimes it’s just easier to go with the flow and cough up the cash than try to explain simple logic. Or basic addition.

We stepped outside of the club, chatted with Tawan’s owner for a few minutes, and then hung around idly watching life on the soi. Which, thanks to the floods was more of a still life. Carrying on a conversation for the sake of conversation, we started talking about a massage place across the soi whose business was completely dead. And agreed since the local attraction was muscle, they (and Tawan’s massage efforts) might be better served by offering more muscular masseurs. That led to the idea that a beer bar with muscle hosts might be a good addition to the soi. And that led to a ‘what if’ which focused on an empty storefront directly across from Tawan that had a For Rent sign posted outside.

“How much you think they want for that place?” I asked Noom with no real interest in the answer.

“I ask him,” Noom replied exhibiting a greater degree of interest in the subject than I as he scurried over to Tawan’s manager and immediately delved into a protracted conversation of excited Thai.

When Noom finally came back, he had a big smile on his face. “He say he ask too mut,” he reported. “Now you have massage.”

“Me? I though you wanted a foot massage?”

“No. You have massage,” Noom informed me, having to share his change in plans. “I talk bidness.”

Time for money to be made, kinda, sorta, though the piper had already been paid. The manager came over and asked in his best mamasan voice, “What boy you like?”

Ah, what the hell. Noom was excited to be playing businessman and a foot massage after a day of wandering Bangkok’s streets is never a bad idea. “Whichever boy really knows how to give a massage,” I told him. Being there with Noom meant no happy ending was in the works, so if I was going to have a massage I wanted relief of a more traditional kind. The manager nodded once affirmatively, the gods laughed and fucked with me again, and the twinkiest femmest boy of the lot stood up to guide me inside to a massage chair.

The massage was excellent, the twink actually knew what he was doing. And with an obvious connection to his boss in play took extra time to work my entire legs. The promotion Tawan was running fooled other customers into ordering extra drinks too, and several farang joined me in the front room, while two others took a pass on the free foot work, came in, picked out a boy, and disappeared into the back for a more fulfilling experience. Which satisfied my curiosity about exactly which services Tawan’s massage parlor offered.

Fortunately for the guy massaging me, he was just finishing up when the whirlwind known as Noom came in, eyes wide, nostrils flared, showing a level of excitement I could only wish he’d demonstrate in bed. Waving his hand in a gesture to add urgency to his exigency, he hurried the massage guy along with, “Come. We go!”

Normally Noom’s not that insistent about going anywhere unless he has to pee. It was good to see him so excited about something, not so good when I considered the conversation he’d just been having.

Part of the massage service evidently includes slipping your feet back into your footwear. That’d be a more simple task if everyone’s shoes were not piled in a bunch. You could ask the customer which shoes were his, but my guy took a different tack and tried slipping on a progression of other people’s shoes onto my feet. After the third try, Noom had had enough, grabbed my shoes and handed them to the boy. Reclad, tip given with an insincere wai in return, we headed back out onto the soi.

As excited as Noom was about the prospect, he calmed himself down and considered his best approach as we walked toward Silom to catch a taxi back to the hotel. Finally, he came out with it.

“He say only 600,000 baht,” Noom announced, quite pleased that he’d been able to strike such a fortuitous deal.

“600,000 baht for a foot massage is a bit pricey,” I replied stupidly going for the cheap joke that I knew Noom would never catch.

“No!” he shot back, leaving out the ‘you stupid fuck’ that was obviously implied. “600,000 one point for me.”

Huh. That sounded like a lot of money, even in baht. And I hadn’t a clue how we’d gone from the rental price on a vacant property to points in a massage business for Noom. Regardless, that amount of cash coupled with Noom’s excitement meant I needed to tread carefully. I gently coaxed a few minor points out of him. Namely the details.

The deal the manager and Noom had cooked up was a buy-in to Tawan’s massage business. The 600,000 baht investment would earn a return of one point of the profits. I have to assume a point in Thailand is the same 1% a point is in the U.S., though since it is Thailand you can never quite be sure. If so, from a ROI perspective, that’s a hell of a lot of massages before a profit would be seen. And Thai bookkeeping when a farang’s money is involved would be creative, I’m sure. But then practical details were not on my mind. Avoidance was.

“I’d need a calculator to figure out how much that is,” I told Noom, happy that for once I hadn’t been carrying my universal language translator with me.

“That twenty thousand dollar,” he quickly replied. Usually, Noom puts his hand out for my calculator to compute the value of a hundred baht. And generally gets it wrong. I’d always thought he sucked at math. Turns out his math skills are only bad when the number is not a significant one.

We strolled along discussing the details of his business proposition, quite seriously from where he stood, as idle chitchat from my perspective. It wasn’t the fantasy of my owning a gogo bar in Thailand, but Noom’s fantasy of being a successful businessman. Thanks to my investment. But I actually considered it. For a minute.

$20K is not an insignificant amount of money. But then it really isn’t a lot either. Noom’s future, and happiness – to steal MasterCard’s line – is priceless. We spent the rest of the night discussing the deal. And his future, a subject we’ve talked about more and more of recent. Fortunately for my wallet, he eventually nixed the idea. My initial investment didn’t play much of a part in his decision, nor did the idea that that investment would have to be payed back or that part of the profits would have to flow to my pocket (neither of which I’m sure ever made it into his consciousness). But he calculated the typical number of massages that could be expected monthly, and what kind of happy ending that would result in his bank account. He massaged his numbers more than any customer would ever get from Tawan, but couldn’t get them to come to a sum that would give him the future he envisions for himself. By the time he was finished with the idea he was disgusted with the deal. And with Tawan’s manager.

“He know me!” Noom complained incensed that the deal presented to him had been as big of a rip-off as what would be suggested to some unknown farang (which would be me).

Bar boy or farang, the idea of coming out on top in opening up a business in Thailand’s commercial sex industry is a fantasy. The dream involved may be different, but the results will always be the same. You can get screwed for a lot less by just offing a guy for the night. With a much higher chance of having a happy ending. I still daydream about opening a gogo bar in Bangkok. But I’ve learned that that is not one of my fantasies that I should ever share with Noom.

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