Today's Blind Items - Bangkok Part One

On Sunday night I was surfing the internet and saw an article about Bangkok.. Specifically a hotel in Bangkok that was undergoing a renovation. I remembered staying in that hotel like it happened yesterday, but is getting on towards a decade. I have always wanted to write about what happened that trip but I don't think I am a good enough writer to convey all that was going on around me during that trip. It is one thing to describe the action, which I will do, but the heat and humidity soaking through clothes after just a few minutes or the massive case of food poisoning that made one 24 hour window a foggy haze of trips between an unforgiving to small couch and the cold tile floors of the bathroom.

I had never been to Thailand before and have never been back since. This all happened shortly after the whole traipsing through Europe thing looking for the director. My job this time was a little different. I didn't have to find anyone, because I knew where they were, but I had to see if the actor needed to be replaced before things got too far along. The actor was a mess of drugs and booze and Thailand was not helping things.

I was sitting at home getting ready to go to work. I got a call and was told to pack a suitcase and bring my passport to the office. Originally I was told I was going to be gone for a week which is pretty fast when you are traveling halfway across the world. In reality it ended up being about half that amount of time.

I get to the office and am introduced to an actor. You all know him. Good looking. Short. Chain smoker. Has a lot of sex with actresses (now Instagram models) and makes generally bad movies. His last name is almost a slur. Probably will be someday. He was supposed to go on this trip with me. Let us call him JM. The last time I saw JM on that trip was in an airport bar getting hammered with a group of flight attendants who had their trip canceled because the airplane that was going to take them back to Poland had been grounded back in Poland. Yeah, I asked him about that a few years later and he barely remembered it. I think parties like that happen to him frequently. Presumably JM was going with me in case the actor in question was just too far gone to even work any longer. Two totally different looking actors. You can tell this was a really high quality project. This ended up being straight to DVD. Somehow, over time they have sold over 250,000 DVD's of this movie. I know. Crazy. I never saw any of it.

The gist of what I am doing is told to me in the office and by 11 in the morning I'm at LAX and by 1130 I am abandoned by JM. Because this was last minute and the producers were cheap, I was thrown on a flight that connected through Taiwan. Lovely airport Taiwan. never saw anything else. That was a 13 hour flight and then the layover and then another 3 or 4 hour flight. I get picked up at the airport around midnight local time. Did I tell you about the middle seat I had on the 13 hour flight? I think I may have mentioned I am a large person. The people on either side of me may have been larger. They also enjoyed their meals loudly while talking around me both front and back. Good times.

I was picked up at the airport and was dropped off at the hotel which I spoke about before. American chain. From the outside it looked the same as any other of their hotels. Inside? Even though it was past midnight, the inside was packed. The entire lobby was filled with an AARP convention's worth of men and their 18 year old girlfriends. The lobby bar and restaurant were filled with these couples. I have never seen so much grab ass in my life. When we were driving in the car the final few blocks to the hotel  saw the occasional couple, but this was full on in your face. The noise was deafening. The guys were all talking to each other while the women were talking to each other and the only interruptions occurred when one of the old guys would shove his grizzled tongue down the throat of one of the teens while fondling her beneath her barely there clothes.

You know, I don't judge and am open to just about anything, but it was just so in your face. It is like someone dry humping in an elevator or a Starbucks line. I don't care if you are dry humping in public, but when you have 12 inches of space between you and a person you don't know, maybe you should wait a minute or two or go someplace where you don't have to worry about hitting someone else with the follow through on your thrusting.

Part Two is more lobby fun and we meet the actor I am there to see and another actor who is not as prim and proper as he likes to pretend to the world.