The Walking Street. Pattaya, Thailand
There was a young girl. Well, there were lots of young girls. Most dressed with very seductive clothing holding signs, dancing or grabbing at customers to pay them for sex. The young girl that I would like to explain however, was much younger than most, in fact she was about two. She was wearing a little white dress wandering the street alone.
She caught my eye when I saw her walk through a crowd of people seeking pleasures of their own. She stopped and looked up at one of the prostitutes. Nobody seemed to see her or pay her any mind. She just stood their staring straight up at the high heeled mistress in front of her.
All I saw was a short snippet of the little girl in the dirty white dress before the chaos of the street overwhelmed her from my vision. After that, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Was that lady she was staring up at her mother? Could her mom not hold her or acknowledge her because it was bad for business? Did the little girl have any friends to play with? Will she grow up to remember this place for all the evil that it encompasses or will she be completely numb to it?
I imagined her wandering up and down the walking street.
She slid beneath the men who were abruptly shoving laminated pornography into customers’ faces. She slithered through the crowd as more guys hand out menus to sexual fantasies that the customers may purchase according to their desire.
I imagined her being trampled by the hazy-eyed foreigners. They bobbled around as alcohol pumped throughout their veins. They blinked hard and attempted to focus as they scoped out the sexual options around them.
I wondered if she knew any of the tall Russian girls, separated from the dozens of Thai prostitutes on the street. Maybe they knew her name and acknowledged her in the daytime. I pictured her looking up at the Russian girls dancing in their glass boxes in the sky, as if they were to preform some sort of magic trick for onlookers below.
I saw her walk past one of the common drug dealers who sold his white pouch of cocaine to some white tourists.
I saw her look up and giggle at the flashing red lights of “Lucifer’s Bar” where girls dance on poles with solemn faces because it’s early and business is slow.
She looks up at the sad old lady who sells roses. The flower that plays the face of love, proving that sex has become a substitute for what it means to feel loved. She desires a rose so that she can feel love in the midst of her fast-paced life.
She dances and sways her little body back and forth to the music outside of a strip club, where guys take their currency of choice inside to score a lap dance and a strip tease to start the night out right.
She smells cooked meat on a large toothpick and looks up at the smiling street vendor. He’s making his profit selling food to the large amount of tourists who come from all over the world to see the hype, as if the street were a historical piece of art.
She gets frightened and backs up when some female tourists laugh loudly and talk about how cute she is in a language that she doesn’t understand.
She gets curious and thinks of smiling when she sees the lady boys confidently attempting to tickle the men passing by. She gets confused when they make eye contact due to their artificial colored contact lenses, making them seem like human street cats looking for prey.
She’s getting bored and she sees a glimpse of me when she turns her head. But the onlookers overwhelm her from my view and I never see the little girl again.
