Sukhumvit: 2am

It’s just before 2am in Bangkok. The sidewalks on Sukhumvit are busier now than they were at 2pm, and everyone is concerned with the order of the hour. Beet-nosed expats slough on down a side soi toward their homes. Sweaty tourists with bleary eyes and sweat dribbling down their necks laugh at each other and hit high-fives. Local shopkeepers are trying to hustle those same tourists, placing cheap t-shirts in front of them with wide smiles and well-used one-liners. The working girls make eye contact, predatory and demure all in one glance. They can read a man instantly and I merit no more than a blink before they pass on to more hopeful prospects. They can see that I have a purpose, that I’m looking for something, but it’s not them and they have no time to waste – 2am is the witching hour, and soon they will know whether they will make money tonight or not.

The noise is incredible. Sukhumvit is three lanes in each direction, and red taillights stare from both sides as far as one can see. Scooters nuzzle up to huge tractor-trailers in a bid to gain a few more centimeters of progress. Taxi drivers call out to potential fares. A policeman’s shrill whistle pushes back on the din and attempts to draw some order on the chaos. I look over at the officer and notice that while he is waving his arms and making a show at moving traffic, his eyes never leave the row of women selling themselves. He almost certainly gets a cut.

At one stall, a lady-boy is busy shuffling bottles around. She looks up at me and smiles, inviting me to sit for a drink. She’s beautifully made-up, and her words and actions are cute and playful – the perfect bar hostess. She has a top on that reveals just enough cleavage that you can see that she has at least started the physical transformation into whatever it is she wants to become. I smile back and wave her off – No more drinking tonight.

The smells are a complicated mixture of old and new. Sweet strawberry and apple scents from the hookahs on Soi 5 mix with the smells of garlic, prik kee noo chilies, and nam plah fish sauce from the ever-present food carts. Diesel fumes jar against the smoke from cheap incense sold at one of the tourist stalls. The older Caucasian gentleman walking in front of me smells distinctly of too much Old Spice, while the overweight Middle Eastern man in flowing bisht I just edged past reeks of masala and sweat.

At the corner is what I’ve been looking for. Food stalls are everywhere, but I’ve been coming to this one for years. Two pots simmer away, and I point to the lighter colored one and then the yellow noodles. The lady nods and gestures to a line of cheap plastic tables and stools near the curb. As I sit, I notice that under the stall lies a dog, fat as a pig and with teats stretching out from her belly like stubby octopus arms. She’s oblivious to the chaos around her in the way of city strays across the world. She’s safe under her aluminum and plastic shell, free from the possibility of a crushing step or well-placed kick. Like all of us, she knows that the night in Bangkok is the best part of the day and she’s making the most a dog can of it.

My noodles arrive. I pay my 30 baht and add dried chilies, pickled chilies, and chopped peanuts in almost equal amounts, followed by a small spoonful of sugar. A quick swirl to distribute them through the liquid and I take the first sip from a cheap stamped-metal Asian-style spoon. The liquid is OMG hot, and as I choke it down I manage to get a big chunk of chili tucked up just under where my sinuses drain into my throat. No choice but to push forward at this point, so I grab a tangle of noodles and noisily slurp them up. They clear the chili, and as they slide into my gut I sit back and take what feels like the first real breath I’ve had all day. I notice that the old lady who tends the stall is looking at me and smiling. I give her the thumbs-up sign and we both laugh.

I get back to work. The soup is amazing as always. It is pork-based, with that rich umami that comes from pork bones boiled for oh-so-long. The noodles are fairly typical egg noodles, and their purpose is really just to add some body to the soup and small pile of toppings added just before serving. The toppings consist of a couple of thin slices of red-stained pork, another small pile of what I think is sliced bits from the pig’s heart, and an assortment of fish balls with two or three bright green leaves of something fresh laid on top to blanch in the soup’s heat as the bowl is carried to the table.

I’m almost half-way through the soup when I look up and see an overweight white woman looking at me with an odd mixture of fascination and disgust. From the looks of it she’s in her mid-fifties, and I imagine that two things disturb her. First, I’m eating at a street stall while a few meters away a pile of garbage is rustling with long-tailed rats grabbing juicy bits of things that people like me left earlier in the evening. Her bright pink, red, turquoise, and yellow muumuu might as well be a giant blinking neon sign floating over her head that says “AMERICAN TOURIST ON FIRST TRIP TO ASIA”, so I’m guessing that she arrived late that night and came out from one of the four or five-star hotels nearby for a quick look around before going in to shower and sleep. She’s appears to be in shock at the overall scene, and I am sure that a thousand dollars couldn’t convince her to try a sip of this incredible soup.

More likely, however, her fascination with me is not so much what I’m eating, but how I’m eating. I’m deep in the bowl, hunched over and sucking up the noodles and soup in equal and loud measure. You have to do it this way – Hold the noodles in your battered pink plastic chopsticks too long and the delicious soup drains away leaving you with a mouthful of bland starch. Try to eat too fast and all the next day your tongue will be able to play with flaps of skin hanging off of the roof of your mouth.

The trick is to slurp hard and mix air in with the soup as you eat. The air cools the liquid to a merely painful, as opposed to dangerous, level, and it helps aromatize the chili, garlic, and other spices, allowing you to get a deeper and more rounded flavor from them. So you slurp, you slosh, you get your face down into the bowl, and you assume the intense demeanor of someone with an important and difficult task to accomplish. Your eyes narrow to slits against chili and steam. Lips pucker out to gingerly grab the top strands of blisteringly hot noodles. Your chest heaves with each influx of heat and air, and sweat blossoms from every pore in your body as you make small grunting noises. It’s as close to heaven as I’ve even been in public, but for this lady looking at me I am something she cannot understand and perhaps even the topic of a postcard she will write to her church group tomorrow while sitting in Starbucks after the morning group tour.

In the few seconds we are staring at each other, my mouth hits the jackpot. There are always two or three in each bowl, and this is the first one tonight. My eyes roll back in my head a little bit as I lift away from the bowl. There is a rivulet of liquid running down my chin, soup or sweat I don’t know or care. I chew again and get another burst of flavor before the pea-sized source of my pleasure dissolves and I swallow. I’m not sure what this is, but it’s why I come back to this same stall every time – sometimes multiple times – I am in Bangkok.

I know that it is deep-fried, and the closest I can come to describing it from a western vocabulary is a small piece of crispy pork fat, but that doesn’t do it justice at all. There’s definitely pork and shrimp in it.  And salt, and maybe garlic, and most likely other things that I can’t even guess at. It arrives in your mouth still crispy, and I swear that even before you bite into it you know that it’s there. When you do bite into it, it crunches once in a single staccato counterpoint to all the soft noodles and then immediately dissolves into an intense burst of rich flavor that caresses your mouth for an instant before you double down and renew your efforts in the bowl, trying to find that next Nirvanic morsel. That’s what I do, and I don’t look up again until the bowl is empty except for a few chili flakes stuck to the bottom. When I do look up, the lady is gone, but Sukhumvit is exactly the same.

I wipe my nose and mouth from the roll of toilet paper sitting on the table, stand up, and am lucky enough to immediately catch the light so that I can cross the street and walk back to my hotel. My back is now plastered with sweat and I’m thankful for the short haircut I got that afternoon. The heat from the soup and the chilies has stood every hair on end and opened every pore on my body. I feel like a live antenna, and I am blinking a quick Morse code to keep sweat out of my eyes. Ten minutes later I’m in the ice-cold hotel room and stripping off clothes to shower. I leave the water at a cool temperature and stand there for a few minutes. I’m very alive, the world is very good, and I’m going to sleep very, very well.