Hearing from Noom, my bar boy friend and current love of my life, when I’m not in Bangkok always brightens my day. When I do, it’s seldom for any specific reason, it’s more of a ‘thinking of you’ occasion than one with purpose. Those usually come via email, occasionally by text message, and tend to follow the same format. Which is how he’s doing, how good or bad bidness is, and how good or bad the weather is. No problemo. It’s not like we’re an old married couple who discuss every bit of minutia of the day. Biz is good suffices. I sucked off three farang yesterday is more than I need to know.

How those bits of communication come in depends on the message and why it’s being sent. Routine notes to keep in touch get emailed. When a reply is needed sooner than whenever the other guy gets around to it, we use text. Major emergencies get phoned in. You’d think money requests would rate a phone call, but those usually come via text too. And they take the same format as text messages tend to: abbreviated.

At one time money requests included details. There was some explanation of circumstances, the request itself, the hoped for amount, and then a flurry of messages sent back in reply to answer my questions. Now those come in short and to the point. Me: 10,000 baht. You: Next month. Noom knows I will always send him money when needed. Within reason. But he also knows it is always a loan. The ‘you’ part of his text message is about when he’ll repay me. It’s never a large amount and I’d just as soon give him the cash but he established long ago that money he needed would be borrowed with an expectation of being returned. And he has never failed to repay me. Once, in person, I mentioned the idea of interest. He laughed. And then told me, “You not jai dee.” An old joke between us that like all of his favorite jokes regardless of how many times told before end up with him rolling on the ground with laughter. Literally.

I called him once, just to say hi. We did the how we were doing, how bidness was, and how the weather is thingy for a few minutes before he interrupted. “But why you call me?” he asked. That there was no specific reason, no weighty news to break, no major emergency that needed addressing, didn’t sit well with him. It was too unexpected, too unusual. And too hard to believe. Our forms of communication follow function. And his OCD thingy do not like changes to routine.

But Noom is as big on obligations as he is on keeping his world in perfect order. Once I’d resorted to the phone just to keep in touch, a few week later he called me to do the same. It was an one-off response to my calling him, not a change in tradition. We did the how we were doing, how bidness was, and how the weather is thingy for a few minutes before I interrupted him. “You suck at this,” I laughed. He chuckled in agreement. And then hung up the phone.

Noom, like a lot of bar boys, understands less English than he’s willing to admit to. In person, he can hold his own in a conversation. But that’s a lot about reading facial expressions and body language. The English he’s hearing is a lot of gibberish to his ear. On the phone there’s lot of silence while he tries to interpret what I just said. And then tries even harder to come up with a response in English. If you consider a grunt English. Understanding him on the phone can be just a difficult for me. Which is why most of our communication takes a digital format.

Text messages (i.e. money requests) are short, sweet, and bidness-like. Which is only right because Noom considers those to be about business. Interest levied or not. They don’t require a lot of thought on his part, the English is simple and how much he needs he’s already carefully considered before putting thumb to phonepad. For routine email messages, rather than come up with the proper English yet again, he cuts and pastes from old messages, inserting “good” or “bad” where appropriate. And that’s fine with me. I don’t have to decipher what he’s trying to say then either.

When he’s in doubt, emoticons always work. I hadn’t realized how important those strings of smilies and other assorted minute graphics were until after I’d ignored them and then heard back from him. Evidently the hearts and roses had a meaning. “Why I tell you I love you you not same me?” came shooting back over the web the next day. Oooops. I’ve since become adept at speaking emoticon.

When Noom needs to say something more than the usual, and it is important to him, he’ll have the English teacher at SWING translate for him. The message in an English-perfect message is that it matters. When it’s not that important, he turns to Google for the assist. And if you’ve ever used Google Translate, you know how disastrous that can be. It’s a good thing that whatever he had Google say for him isn’t important. Because I can never make heads or tails out of their version of Thai to English.

Once the message was so garbled I had no choice but to email him back and ask what he’d been trying to say. I never got an answer to that email. Not even in emoticon. Whatever it was, it was not important enough to not use Google, so it certainly wasn’t important enough to take a second stab at. Now I just ignore what makes no sense. If it matters, I know he’ll ask why I ignored it. Still, I’m often stumped. And I really would like to know what Google thinks the English word ‘garage’ is equivalent to in Thai.

He’s used ‘garage’ four times now, never in a complete enough thought to be decipherable. The last was, “I know you now now I have garage.” Huh. I got that the second ‘now’ was supposed to be a second ‘know’. No wonder native English speakers have so much trouble with their own language. What ‘garage’ is supposed to represent is beyond me. I think I have an idea. Maybe. But I’ll throw it out there and see if any readers who speak more Thai than I do know the real translation. Now.

I’d email Noom and ask him. But he’d use Google to translate garage into Thai and that’d just further confuse the issue. I could try to use the same word back in a message to him and see what he does with it. But that could end up with nothing more than both of us scratching our heads in puzzlement. And as much as I love how his forehead scrunches up when he’s puzzled or confused, not being there to see it makes the effort not worth the while. Besides, Valentine’s Day is just two days away. And I don’t want to confuse him while he’s trying to compose his Valentine’s Day message to me. Which too is a tradition. I wonder how many heart and rose emoticons I’ll get this year?

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