We’re talking about street crime here: the violent, bloody stuff you can see. Not the uptown kind, like fiscal years and large purchases being timed according to retirement dates.
Unsolved crime is fashionable in the Slaughterhouse, or Rong Mu. The rape of a thirteen-year-old girl a few months back, for example. They haven’t found the bad guys. The lost-and-found game is usually based on finance—the financial status of the victim’s family or friends vs. the credit rating of the perp.
If the victim’s family has a “losd” name, we say, or has money in the bank rather than a simple one-baht-weight gold chain, then the bad guys get found. Otherwise, they usually stay lost. And the unreported crimes. You can’t do anything if it’s not written down in a day ledger somewhere, and then it all depends on how it’s written down in the ledger. Just reporting an incident or filing a complaint means nothing. It has to be in writing, and it’s best if the story gets into the newspapers too. But that doesn’t happen very often. Crime in the slums? A yawn is a typical response.
Then there is the little stuff—little to the uptown folks and the authorities—the “Three Ks,” so called for the KKK brand of rubber cement, which is sold in small green cans. You pour the liquid contents into a sturdy plastic bag and then place the bag over your nose and mouth and breathe deeply. The long timers don’t “track” too well, even in the best of circumstances.
Then there’s “Snake,” or paint thinner, and the biggest of them all, the “Horse,” an amphetamine called ya ma, or yaa-baa. For someone new to ya ma, a quarter of a pill or one kha—one “leg”—keeps you bright-eyed and brain-dead for eight to ten hours, and gives the illusion of strength to work more hours, kill more pigs, drive your truck longer, or keep your drinking going without sleep. The real crazies eat eight full pills in twenty-four hours. That way, it only takes four or five weeks to fry your brains.
Here’s something else small that nobody pays any attention to: moneylenders slapping around someone late with their debt payment, plus the loud verbal abuse. A moneylender in the slums is all mouth, no ear. No listening to woeful tales of why the poor souls cannot pay.
You don’t have protection in the slums. Nowhere to turn. No one to help you. Some say that’s how those folks in Italy began a long time ago: providing protection at a cost, but at a lower price than the alternative.
“To ride on the back of the tiger,” as we say in Thai; to stay on is lethal, but to jump off is suicidal. So the individual slum dweller sits and moans and wrings his or her hands and takes no responsibility, no position. Or, more accurately, the stand is not to take one. Just give the bad guys money and everything will be all right. That means you can go on doing what you are doing and live in peace, and no one will bother you.
You see, I was taught that to steal, for example, is wrong in itself, no matter whether someone sees you or not, no matter whether you get away with it or not. It was one of those “thou shalt nots.” People stole, but everyone knew it was wrong. And people went to jail for it.
There are different rules in the Slaughterhouse. Law in the slums, crime in the Slaughterhouse, and the consequent payback, is based not on legal codes, but “face.”
After any incident in the slums, when someone gets caught with his or her hand in the cookie jar, it’s not that this is wrong, but getting caught and who snitched, who blew the whistle, and the guilty party may shoot the fink who told, with no remorse or guilt about committing a theft or consequent murder. Guilt, it seems, is a Western way of looking at things.
Westerners have their guilt and Easterners have their shame. Some think we need a benevolent mafia in the Slaughterhouse, a good guy’s gang, because the strong here now are the takers and the users. But isn’t that wrong as well? Just a variation of “might equals right,” except this time, it’s my might. History shows that it’s just a matter of time before the good guys become the bad guys and we have to go and find another set of good guys.
And the authorities are the same. They don’t go out to catch bad guys because they are bad, but simply because if they don’t, it makes the authorities look bad and lose face.
So the Slaughterhouse lives day to day and survives on the unwritten laws. Laws that no one uptown really knows about or wants to know about. If you wrote them down, they’d say it wasn’t true. It does not—and cannot—happen that way.
Like Lek, the thirteen-year-old rape victim. Tied up and raped in the water buffalo section of the Slaughterhouse. Lek is wild and out of control and her mother’s doing long years of hard time because she’s already been caught three times. And grandma isn’t the lovey-dovey, sweet and cuddly type. Grandma isn’t a nice person.
She yells a lot and rants constantly at Lek, telling her she’s no damned good, just like her mother. In fact, she says Lek is even worse because her mom was stupid but Lek is in the third grade. Anyway, some neighbors got bombed crazy on booze and ya ma and abused this little girl. Never mind what they did. Imagine the worst and you haven’t come close.
Even grandma was upset, going to the police four or five times, but things became a bit muddled as the topic of discussion somehow changed from the rape of her granddaughter and why nothing was being done about apprehending the bad guys, to something about the policeman’s parentage and masculinity. We never did get the whole story, but grandma is about as welcome at the police station as a hand grenade in a bowl of noodles.
This is crime in the Slaughterhouse. Two months later and the bad guys are still loose. We even asked a respected law firm for free advice and a high-class lawyer who knows how to win went to the police to show that grandma had a bit of clout.
But money makes a louder sound than even an uptown lawyer can, and grandma is poor. We’re waiting to see if these guys gave Lek the ultimate “jackpot”—HIV. All tests so far show she’s okay.
Lots of taxi drivers are still afraid to drive into the Rong Mu. That’s just pure reputation. I don’t think there has been a taxi driver robbed or abused there in twenty years or so. At least not that anyone talks about. But we in the Slaughterhouse feel a bit of mystique is always good. Keep the curious away.
Violence is a way of life. You just walk with your head down and don’t look people in the eye. If someone talks to you, you hurry on by without answering, and if it’s a curt remark or a curse, you step up your pace without a peep.
Some of the most vulnerable in the Slaughterhouse are the young widows, usually with two or three small children, trying to make it on their own. I call them “widows” because there’s no man around. He’s gone. Disappeared. Sometimes because the man has found someone else (younger, prettier, without children) but usually to escape his debt—and the wife he left behind pays or she loses the house. If the children are older, the moneylenders suggest sending any daughters to find some men.
These women have no money to start a business and no skills to speak of anyway. About all they can do is sell food. There are a lot of small food stalls here and the Slaughterhouse never sleeps, so there are always customers.
Profits are not great and if it rains, no one comes. Our Slaughterhouse restaurants are one-table affairs. The real profit is in the booze, especially the local equivalent of Red Eye—bootleg booze, no tax. They don’t call it Red Eye. They call it “Twenty-eight” for its twenty-eight per cent alcohol content. But most of the women can’t sell alcohol. To sell booze, you need to be established, a community leader, or have enough capital to extend credit to your customers.
Slaughterhouse credit usually goes to the Northeasterners. The single men. They buy booze, Red Eye and Red Bull elixir before they go to work in the early evening, and pay back at two in the morning when they finish killing the pigs. That calls for an investment that most women simply do not have.
The anger over insults sometimes explodes days later, over a bottle of whisky and talk among peers and fellow boozers. That’s when the hurt begins, and the booze and talk are like salt in the wound. Usually it takes four or five all-night sessions to bring action.
Here’s another rule: a Northeasterner would never take on a local man, someone established here. He would be afraid to do that, no matter how drunk. He would only trash his peers.
These are some of the Slaughterhouse rules and laws. To break them is costly, even fatal. The women, especially the unprotected, matter-of-factly bow their head, avoid eye contact, and suffer in silence, usually in front of their kids. That hurts. To take all that abuse and lose all that dignity in front of your children and neighbors. More shame. Another loss of face.
I can’t think of a single violent act in the Slaughterhouse that hasn’t happened without booze or ya ma as the cause—except for a hired killing now and then, or a case of someone stealing from a heroin drop. That’s another rule and it’s suicidal to ignore it.
As for the Uniforms, they’re not the same as the ones I knew in the West where I grew up. Here the Uniforms are dealers in the game, and the rules are strict. The Uniforms are efficient in the slums. Nothing goes on without their knowledge, so they simply get in on some of the action. The rules are simple: don’t disturb the big boys uptown. Keep them happy, and keep the area quiet.
Any notion of a crime-free Slaughterhouse is a joke and not part of the equation. “Keep it all quiet and tidy” is the basic rule. Everyone wins, no one loses, everyone is cool. Except for the Uniforms. They are the wild cards. They control all.
And they keep things quiet. But sometimes, not often, it gets too stifling and there’s a crackdown. The crackdowns are also jokes. Because to crack down, you need the locals to identify the locals—but the locals feed and nourish the locals. These Uniforms are funny. They are hungry. They seem to simply stay hungry.
Here in the slums, real crimes simply do not get solved. But we go on—we survive.