MangoZeen - Thailand, Bangkok, Pattaya to USA, NewYork, Brooklyn, the webzine of Peter Smith
From 2016
I loved the old Times Square.
Now it’s a tourist trap waiting the rebirth of a generation of vicious Fagins, the criminal kingpin of Charles Dickens’ OLIVER TWIST.
I have more respect more respect for the ruthless thieves of the 70s than the XXXXL tourists stuffing their faces with fast food on the ruins of Forty-Deuce.
Now the Times Square Association complains about the near-nude buskers such as Ms. 48D Long as eyesores.
I love her.
And I hate squares.
And so does the past.
Published 2008
Rough diamonds are predominantly mined from volcanic vents in Africa, Australia, Russia, and Canada. After that process separated into parcels for the London sight-holders, who have the stones cut in Antwerp, Israel, or India. The finished products are divvied out to various diamond brokers and then brought over to various diamond markets across the world. Over 80% of the diamonds sold in the USA pass through Manhattan’s West 47th Street, making the block between Fifth and Sixth Avenues a crossroads of the world for jewelry.
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Sapphires and rubies from the Orient are transported here from Hong Kong and Thailand, while Israelis brave the dangers of Columbia for precious emeralds. Having handled jewelry for over ten years, I sometimes act as if I were dealing with chopped liver at a deli counter. We are, however, occasionally blessed with something to get excited about, an opportunity to deal with truly valuable gems.
Several years back my boss and good friend, Richie Boy, was introduced to a big player from the West Coast. A CEO of several companies, this man had expressed interest in purchasing a Christmas gift for his mistress, a blonde from Palm Beach who was married to another millionaire. Botox preserved her beauty, although her eyes told her age.
The call was for a very rare ruby. It had to be over five carats, a natural from Burma, internal perfect, and the color of the blood seeping from a pigeon’s nose. The vein, not the artery. In his own way he was a bit of a poet.
Richie Boy phoned several dealers and within a day came up with a stone. It wasn’t cheap. The dealer flatly told us, “875,000 dollars and I don’t want to hear any bitching about the price.”
The dealer bought the stone down. It was not big, but the color was a sublime blood red hue, and clean. Not a single flaw. Richie Boy asked me, “What do you think?”
“It doesn’t look like a house in Montauk with a beach view, but what do I know?”
Richie Boy agreed and decided to get two diamond necklaces for back-up. He then called the client, who said he was interested, but wanted us to meet him at his tenth floor suite at the St. Regis Hotel.
Richie Boy’s father was from Brownsville, very old school, and he immediately announced that we were being set up. Neither of us disagreed, since we would be carrying over a million dollars in jewelry into a hotel room to meet people we didn’t really know.
His father wanted to kabosh the entire deal. Richie Boy, however, loaded his 9mm. I told him to put it away. Richie hadn’t shot the weapon in years.
“You pull a gun and you have to use it. You don’t, then the robbers will.”
“You carry it.” Richie offered me the 9mm.
“No weapons.” I put the gun back in the safe.
“The goy is right. The merchandise is insured. If we get robbed it counts as a sale.” Manny was right, then again he was 100% right about 7% of the time
I rolled a newspaper.
“You’re bringing reading material.” Manny shook his head.
“No, it’s a weapon.”
“Yes.” Richie had seen me break someone’s nose at the Underground disco with a magazine. “He knows how to use it.”
“My heroes. Try and sell something.”
Richie stuck the jewelry inside his suit coat. “How do I look?”
“Like one boobs is bigger than the other.”
His father swore we were crazy. He was right, but said, “Sie gesund.”
With his blessing we set off for the St. Regis Hotel. We arrived at the hotel without incident. Two guests tried to get on the elevator with us, but both Richie Boy and I glared a warning for them to take the next car up. He pressed the button for the seventeenth floor.
There Richie and I walked down the corridor like we were being set up. All senses on 10. reaching the customer’s room, Richie rang the bell. A woman laughed inside and several seconds later the door opened. Both of us stared, because the blonde wasn’t wearing any clothes. Her boyfriend was on the couch, in a bathrobe.
“Lady, could you move away from the door,” I asked in a low voice, gesturing with the NY Times.
The tanned middle-aged man frowned, “Who are you?”
People like him weren’t used to taking orders.
“No offense.” Richie took the two diamond necklaces from his jacket. “He’s the protection for these.”
He draped the diamonds on the woman’s bare neck and she went over to the man’s side. Even though they weren’t dressed I still didn’t trust them, but by the end of an hour Richie had sold one of the necklaces. We took a cashier’s check for more money than either of us could earn in several years, but Richie wasn’t happy, because he hadn’t sold the ruby.
“There was no way you were going to sell that stone,” I said.
“And why not?”
“Because no man, and I don’t care how rich he is, will buy a million-dollar gift for another man’s wife,” I said.
“Don’t be so negative,” he said. “You never know.”
And that is the truth.
Last weekend early in the morning a lone gunman in a hoodie walked up to Brian Johnson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, America’s largest health proxy, outside a Manhattan Marriott hotel and shot the chief executive three times with a pistol. All chest shots. The assailant jumped on an Ebike and fled into Central Park. Mr. Johnson was declared DOA at Mount Sinai Hospital. Elon Musk was outraged by this attack on a corporate leader and according to Wikipeida public officials, which included Minnesota governor and former Democratic vice president nominee Tim Walz and Senator Amy Klobuchar, expressed dismay and offered condolences to Thompson’s family.
In contrast, many social media users shared their contempt for Thompson, UnitedHealthcare, and the American health insurance system. The Washington Post said that many people mocked Thompson’s death and others felt satisfaction Luigi Mangione came from a well-connected family and graduated from U Penn in 2020. A member of the upper class unlike his victim, however according to the BBC he spent time in a co-living surfing community in Hawaii called Surfbreak. Sarah Nehemiah, who knew him then, told CBS he left due to his back injury which had worsened from surfing and hiking pointing to a possible denial of treatment by his health insurer.
Denials by the ‘health care’ companies resulted in 68,000 deaths last year. Not murder, but a culling of the working class. Of course Universal Health Care threatens the USA with godless socialism as opposed to the capitalist brutalism of UnitedHealthcare. Thankfully I have Medicare and Medicaid thanks to LBJ, who we will never forgive for buying into the Brightest and Best’s Domino Theory that convinced him that we needed to fight the Commies in Vietnam, so the CIA and Mafia could control the heroin trade.
Brina Thompson was not a member of the upper-class.
Luigi Mangione shot a capitalist lackey rather than a member of the generational wealth class. His father was a grain elevator worker. His family lives in an upper class town in Minnesota. NOt the Hamptons or Palm Beach. Brian Thompson was strictly following orders for his overlords, pushing up denials from 9% in 2019 to almost 22% in 2023 leading to a good portion of the deaths of 68,000 Americans denied health care by the insurance companies. Yekaterinburg is the only course of redressing inequality. Of course everyone succumbs to the lure of ‘Who wants to be a billionaire?’
Many of my liberal freinds are critical of this young man striking at the hear t of the health care. The same people who istened to the Beatles sing in revolution # 9, “If you are talking about destruction, then leave me out.”
And these same people wonder why the working class has deserted the Democratic Party.
William Hazlitt “Hypocrisy is not a way of getting back to the moral high ground.”
Personally I see Yekaterinburg 1917 as the only solution to the Ultra Rich, unless they opt to redress their sins by spending all their wealth.
This shooting is not the revolution, just a long gunman striking their target.
ps Luigi Mangione is not related to the trumpeter Chuck Mangione.
Today from a European time zone a friend Serge Kruger, famed Paris bon vivant, mused on Facebook, “Luckily I like to do nothing.”
Je suis avec lui 100%.
According to Wikipedia the English borrowed ennui from French in the 1660s. Ennui came from an Old French word meaning “displeasure.” Ennui was also related to the word annoy, but it really is just a wistful listlessness.
Ennui was adopted as the esprit total of the ancien regime whose lives as oppressors over the people of France had become meaningless after Louis XIV
Moi, j’adore de faire rien. Une vrai plaisir
Walter Richard Sicker – Ennui c.1914
To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself. – Henry Miller
Of course we are all a bundle of contradictions and Miller wrote in Tropic of Canceer, ““In Europe one gets used to doing nothing. You sit on your ass and whine all day. You get contaminated. You rot.”
Definitions of ennui – pathetic, careless, dull, inattentive, indifferent, lackadaisical, lethargic, passive, sleepy, tired, and weary.
I would addd Slothful, except I consider Sloth a blessing and no longer one of the Seven Deadly Sin.
Published 2013
The Thai people pride themselves in the purity of their language. Few English words have infiltrated the common lexicon. Dtam-ruaat is the word for police. The diphonic annunciation can confuse most farangs. I thought for years that Dtam-ruaat meant ‘make blood’, however make blood is spelled Dtam-leuuat with a falling accent on the last syllable.
Thai culture remains strong, however beer is beer in Thai as is pizza pizza, so foreigners don’t starve to death in the hinterlands. 1150 is telephone number for Pizza. Pay the gas and the motorcycle delivery boy will drive to the most distant reaches of ban-nok ie the sticks.
Other commonly shared words are whiskey, taxi, sex, and WC for ‘water closet’, which along with pizza cover most human needs.
Two years ago I returned to New York from Bangkok via Narita Airport.
Twenty-seven hours from Soi 12 in Jomtien to Fort Greene in Brooklyn.
Most people would have taken several days to recover from such a trip. I needed money and showed up at work 10 hours after passing through customs at JFK.
I was exhausted from the trip, yet couldn’t sleep and tried to explain to my son’s mother why I couldn’t sleep. My Thai was rudimentary and Mam was getting increasingly frustrated by my ignorance of her native language.
“You stay here many years. Why you not speak Thai good?”
“Because I’m a farang.”
“I know that.” She sounded like she was saying ‘farang kee-nok’. I know we aren’t as good as them, because I have lived in France and the Thais are the French of the Orient.
Their chauvinistic love for their country’s traditions, food, and culture border on fanaticism and after residing in Thailand I have to admit that they aren’t half-wrong. The only problem was that I had to move back to America.
New York to be exact.
It was where my job was.
The other side of the world and this week my body clock was off by twelve hours.
Day is night and night is day.
“I can’t sleep,” I explained to Mam over Skype.
“Go sleep.”
“Khan Lak Ter. Last night I had a dream about staying in a house with no walls. It was in the middle of a rice paddy. Very beautiful. Made out of wood. You slept in bed and I held Fenway.”
Fenway was our son. He was two years old. Every night his body spun on the bed like a clock. I slept like a stone with him.
“Good dream?” Mam was a firm believer in beauty sleep, however children steal sleep from their parents like a CIA rendition torturer. The theft gave them control. Fenway was no different from the rest of the young in their preparation to usurp the strength of their mothers and fathers.
“Not a good dream. I see men in the dark. They attack us. I wake up screaming.” I live alone in the top floor apartment of a Fort Greene brownstone. The walls were thick. No one heard my terror. “A nightmare.”
“Fan raai.” A nightmare was scary in every language.
“Yes.”
“Are you thuuk-phee-am?” Mam was horrified at the possibility that I had been possessed by an evil spirit or ‘phee’.
“Not at all.” I never scoffed the Thai belief in ghosts. I had been to the house of a ‘maih moht’. Magic existed in the heart and soul of her country, however my dream was the harvest of several sleepless nights. My next attempt to clarify the reason for my insomnia pierce the language barrier.
“You mean ‘jet lag’?”
“Yes, jet lag.” The word was the same for Mam as it was for me.
“Can not sleep?”
“No.”
“I understand now.” She had never traveled outside of Thailand, so the effects of jet lag were a mystery.
“I can’t sleep. Four nights now.” The CIA used sleep deprivation to persuade secret prisoners to tell the truth. I had slept maybe ten hours since Tuesday.
“‘Oht nawn’ not good for old man.” Mam was twenty-six. I was more than twice her age. Youth had a mission to take over the world. No one lived forever or not sleep forever.
“I’ll fall asleep soon.” I couldn’t say when, but Mam cared about my health.
“Nom dee.” She wanted me to reach a hundred years old. Thais hated being alone.
And at the tender age of close to sixty, so do I.
We have a couple of words for loneliness in English.
“Never want to say good-bye.” Barry White sang those words.
And I feel the same way too.
Like a man without a soul.