They’ve closed the slaughterhouse for almost two months now. Why should that be news? Because when they mess with the bowels of the city, it affects us all. The Slaughterhouse slum serves as a barometer: tell me what’s happening in the Rong Mu, and I’ll give you a “tea leaf” reading of the city, accurate enough to choose a lottery ticket.
No more pigs in the Klong Toey Slaughterhouse.
Some forty years ago, they moved here from the canal near Hua Lamphong Railway Station. They say you shouldn’t mix people and pigs. Probably correct. So they moved here to Klong Toey. The Catholics who butcher the pigs followed with their families. Our first chapel was under the bridge. Glorious halcyon days before AIDS and amphetamines or yaa-baa, a new name coined by the health minister in 1996 for what had been called ya ma. Opium was confined to smoking halls and our elephants didn’t die of pesticide poisoning. Now they’ve moved the pigs again, but it’s harder for the Catholics to move nowadays. Times have changed. There’s no land. People have settled in. It’s a community. This is their home.
So where are they killing the pigs now? Clandestinely. Wherever you can obtain a blurry, but certified ink chop. They moved to Klong Toey when Bangkok streets ended at the Klong Toey Market. Pig, cattle and water buffalo pens made good sense at the edge of town. [Oops, guess I wasn’t supposed to say “water buffalo,” but since they did and still do, we won’t delete it.]
Also, it was down river from the city sprawl—at least the business center part. The offal and water run-off would simply drain into the canal and into the river. We weren’t environmentally conscious then. It’s better now. We have a BMA governor who tries.
It’s a “hygienic” move. That’s a given—like, does the alligator swim? But when you go from here, you have to go there. Thus the “there” should include “being hygienic”—a grammatical form meaning an action begun in the past, continuing into the present and not yet completed. Or maybe a “perfect state” which we have not yet achieved.
What this leads to, according to those who dress the pigs, is that the new killing fields are much worse. “Being hygienic” means a blurry ink chop, and the good vets haven’t been given a road map. Without a road map, they simply can’t find the new killing fields.
Why all this talk of pigs? Distasteful to most. Why? Because it affects us all. You say, good, they don’t have to kill pigs. Let them work in the port. That’s cool, but the ships haven’t been told of our “economic solution by decision” and they don’t visit us much anymore. Less work. Hungry kids. Less honest ways to earn food money.
That makes my job as a priest a bit more difficult. It’s easy to be virtuous when you’ve got a secure job. But hungry, a wink or a nod is all the same to a blind pig. No certifying ink chop from the vet in the Klong Toey Slaughterhouse. This was the official slaughterhouse.
The closing was a bit frenetic for a couple of weeks, with policemen confiscating truckloads of pigs on the hoof and freshly slaughtered pork. Pigs in front of the police station, while the drivers negotiated the financial penalty. The hygienic people were adamant: “You can’t leave a truckload of pigs overnight at the station.” The police said: “We have our standing orders.” It was all jolly fun.
So now, Klong Toey Rong Mu folks, with the women who wash the innards, travel nightly to various clandestine slaughterhouses with blurred chops, away from prying eyes.
It seems that the object of the exercise is the ink chop. Thus, those who control the ink chops, blurry or otherwise, control the game. And to mix metaphors: it certainly is not a level-playing field or a perfectly circular pig pen. In this game of musical pigs, one wonders about clarity and lucidity—and safe pork for the citizens of Gotham City, Bangkok. And the mom and pop stores now have to sell more illicit booze to survive. The biggest profit margin comes from illicit booze. Even the amphetamine business is slow because of the tenacity of the authorities here in the Slaughterhouse. The agents are quiet. They say the market is seasonal.
Everyone knows who sells them. Ask any six-year-old. Last week they caught one of the moms with seventy pills. She started with “one leg” (one quarter of a pill) to slim down. It worked—thin in three weeks with no appetite. Her husband, although a good guy, began complaining about their kids always being hungry, and she began selling.
At least she swallowed pills, not smoked or injected.
That rots your brain in a forced march fashion. My neighbor’s son was hitting five full pills a day for nine months and he’s a basket case. But luckily he’s got a good mom. Now—two years later—he’s sedated; grins a lot and she can’t let him out of her sight. But it’s better than being on the evening news holding a knife at someone’s throat. We’ve lost two Catholic kids already this year from the stuff. They were six-pill-a-day men. Heavy duty.
But back to the mom who got caught. She’s twenty-seven years old with three kids: third and second grade and kindergarten. She will do maybe seven years and the kids will have no mom. She’s terrified. Terribly afraid her agent will find her even in prison. So she reveals no names.
The unwritten rules are: Little fish—the ones who know of these matters—would keep mum, will never say anything, never be witnesses, so that the big fish gets to break out of the nets. When you do catch one, the cleaning is particularly difficult.
The mom stashed the seventy pills in the pockets of her kids’ dirty clothes. Her husband now understands why she didn’t like to wash clothes and the kids often went to school in dirty clothes.
The canned coffee merchants and those who manufacture the drink in the brown ten-baht bottles that keeps you awake are having a field day. Among the working poor, it seems that sleep is not allowed—at least if you want to keep a job. Ask your favorite samlor or city bus driver which is the bottle or can of preference. Some brands keep you awake longer than others.
Living in the Slaughterhouse beats you up daily. Life is precious, but not very well protected.