High season in Pattaya begins a little before Christmas. The bars are filled by rookies and trouble-makers from all over the world. Guys are younger. Your side-squeezes or geeks don’t answer your phone calls. Your mia noi or small wife tells you she has to take care of her sick buffalo. You can’t get a seat at the go-gos. The girls want twice what they did in November. If you don’t barfine them early, then the good ones are gone. And beautiful girls last as long as a drop of water in a frying pan. Sizzle sizzle sizzle. Traffic gets deadlier. Prices are upped. You spent a lot of time with your wife. It seems like it will last forever.

Then Songkran comes. Rains follow. The newcomers’ credit cards are maxxed. Their banks are wiped out. Few survive the slaughter of every night out with a different girl. The go-go girls have triumphed once again over the stupid farangs, but then the high tide recedes like a balding forehead.

No one has saved for the rainy season.

Full timers re-appear on Walking Street. It is officially low season. They greet each other like survivors of a plague.

I can tell when low season starts, because for the first ime in months a girl on Soi 6 will say, “Hey, sexy man.”

Soon afterwards my mia noi will call and say, “Darling you miss me. Buffalo okay now.”

A plea for money soon follows.

And then a phone call will come from geeks. They have time for you now. They too were tending to sick buffaloes. 

My good friend and I refer to this time as when we metamorphorsize from slugs to Brad Pitt and Bruce Willis. My weight is less in the eyes of women. They tell me I’m handsome. They laugh at my jokes. It’s almost like taking ten years off your age as long as you don’t look in the mirror and few people in Pattaya do. 

Another aspect of low season is that the age disparity between men and women increases to near obscene levels.

It’s not uncommon to see a fabulous looking girl with a 70 year old man. She is decked in gold and pretending no one sees her. Other girls are jealous and gossip about the septagenarians, wishing they were this girl.

Ah, the beauty of low season. if only it could last all year around.