Nowadays, when people say they’re from Klong Toey, they get a funny look, like they’ve just stepped on something smelly and tracked it on someone’s nice, clean rug. The fast food chicken and pizza joints won’t deliver here after five o’clock anymore. As for taxi drivers, forget about them. Their policy hasn’t changed for over thirty years. No fares into Klong Toey after nightfall. The legend of our neighborhood lives on.
And now our reputation is growing, especially after the Slaughterhouse shootout a few weeks ago.
It all started with a fistfight. Now, a fistfight breaks the Slaughterhouse code of conduct. (We do the occasional kickboxing but no fistfights!) There are also routine whiskey-fueled fights, but these skirmishes are more of a pushing match, really. A gent falls down, and one of them asks the other, “And what were we fighting about?” And they continue drinking.
The fistfight broke out on the parking lot for the convoys of trucks coming into the nearby port, on the land where they used to butcher the pigs before the pens were torn down. It wasn’t a fair fight. Everyone knew who would win. The big guy pummeled the little guy and when the little guy went down, the big guy stepped on his head and pushed his face into the cement with the bottom of his foot, which is an incredibly egregious affront in Thai etiquette.
It was all about drugs, of course. The big guy told the little guy not to mess with his customers, to go somewhere else and find his own.
The little guy then got up and ran in a whimper down the wooden catwalks between the shacks to his older brother’s home only a few minutes away. The older brother was a tough guy, a rogue like his father was called before him—a rogue both in the gangster sense and in the sense of an out-of-control elephant or cop.
Meanwhile, a mutual friend of the combatants who was present at the fight—let’s call him the Peacemaker—talked to the big guy, told him to calm down, to be reasonable, that fighting is bad for business. When there’s peace, he reasoned, everyone makes money.
While the Peacemaker was trying to persuade the big guy to say he’s sorry, the little guy’s brother jumped on a motorcycle, rode out to the big guy’s house in another part of the slum and proceeded to trash his house. Trashed his new stereo, his new DVD player and his big, new TV.
Here, things got out of control.
The big guy came home, saw the carnage, grabbed his .357 magnum out of a hiding place, loaded it and left.
Folks say it was an hour-long gun battle running down the wooden catwalks in the back of the old Slaughterhouse. Five guns were blazing: one .357 magnum, three eleven millimeter pistols, and one gun “nondescript, locally made, unlicensed” as identified by police from the shell casings. The neighborhood kids helped them collect the spent cartridges. They found thirty in all, plus the “nondescript” gun.
At the end of the battle, one victim lay dead—the Peacemaker, who took a bullet in the neck. There were no witnesses, of course. Nobody saw anything, but everyone knew who was in the shootout.
The police arrested the older brother on reasonable cause. His mom and rogue dad arranged 200,000 baht bail (over $4,500) and he was out in fifteen days.
Forensics proved that the bullet that killed the Peacemaker didn’t come from the older brother’s gun. He would have gotten out sooner except that the Peacemaker was from a family of rumored local mafia who had asked the police to slow the case down.
Nobody knows the outcome on the case. Most likely, it will be forgotten, like so much else that happens in Thailand nowadays—lost in the sheaves of yesterday’s newspapers.
The eviction notice for our neighborhood came in 2000. Two years have passed with no action taken, so the village leader, whose term of office has expired, has not yet been replaced. That means nothing gets done. No trash is picked up. Nobody seems to care.
What’s still left of the Slaughterhouse might well be destroyed by drugs even before the bulldozers arrive. Many of the original residents are gone, moving for work in less hygienic and unlicensed abattoirs on the city outskirts. Of those families that have remained—numbering about half of the original 200 families—very few are free of the drug problem. Almost every family has someone selling, addicted to, jailed for or dead from drugs.
Making matters worse, many of the new resident homeowners are loan sharks who thrive on the debts connected to the drug trade. The dealers themselves—most of whom still live in the neighborhood to stay close to their customers—have remodeled their slum shacks and inserted expensive fixtures and furnishings. Plus the ubiquitous rooftop satellite dish.
Somebody recently asked me if the Slaughterhouse was worse now than fifty years ago. All I can say is that the codes here are changing. Local myna birds now imitate the sounds of a ten-wheeler’s air brakes.
I hear these birds singing every night about a community in a state of collapse. Last week, a Catholic man died and his family moved his body to a church outside the Slaughterhouse for the wake.
His wife said, “There is nobody left in the Slaughterhouse to come and pray.”