Expatriates.
You see them in back-street bars of Bangkok, Manila,
Guadalajara, along third-world waterfronts, in up-country
Thailand, anywhere living is cheap and rules scarce.
Some
are old guys in their sixties and seventies with fading tattoos
from other lives, lives that also fade into fewer and fewer
living memories. Some are in their thirties and run little
businesses, often legitimate. They are a bit rough-looking or
maybe just eccentric, congenitally what they are and not
concerned about what you think of them. You find them heisting a
brewski in out-of-the-way spots, chaffing with the barmaids who
maybe or may not have a sideline. They are the dropouts of the
earth-the interesting expats, not the middle-management retirees
who really belong in some dismal retirement colony in Florida.
They
are a breed overlooked by the world, which suits them fine. Some
have pasts. You see jailhouse tattoos. A few are drunks waiting
to die spitting blood--poor miserable sods who just couldn't get
it together after the contract ran out on the oil rig and the
wife ran with the kids, probably for good reason. Most are solid
enough. They drop by the bars because that's where the social
life is. Some own bars. Many have local wives and families. Some
did once back in the States and figure they'll pass this time
around.
They
are men with stories, many of which wouldn't be believed in the
upholstered countries of the earth. On the other hand, expats
generally don't talk to upholstered people. You meet a lot of
retired pilots, maybe for United and maybe for spook outfits
like Air America, or maybe the personal pilot of some oil-sheikh
out of Arabia. Some did things they don't talk about during the
American lunge into Asia in the Sixties; after the war, the golf
course just didn't appeal to them. Golfers don't always
understand about Lucy's Tiger Den, the Grey House, the Blue Fox
in TJ.
Their
defining trait is that they don't fit in and don't want to. The
bond broker for example who wondered, "What am I doing this
for?" and stopped. He opened a dive shop in Mexico and
never looked back. There are drug dealers who got smart in time;
men who don't seem to have last names, or not the same one
twice; guys who scout trinkets for the US import market. You
bump into freelance writers living by their wits, credentialed
by obscure publications which sometimes exist. Military men who
retired on twenty and didn't want to work in the NAPA outlet;
the former bouncer at a strip joint in Florida who somehow
drifted abroad and saw no reason to go back.
The
waters of anarchy run wide and fast through expatriate realm,
though they don't gather up everybody. Some of the Americans are
deeply attached to the memory of the US they left. For a few,
patriotism has replaced religion as the psychic buoy for the
otherwise unmoored.
Others
are profoundly, by conviction or inattention, citizens of
nowhere, loyal to no country. Maybe they've lived in so many
places that whatever bonds they may have had have worn through;
borders are to them just places where you get your bags
inspected. Maybe they wearied of the socialism of Canada, the
regimentation of the United States, and bailed. Some are angry
that their countries haven't lived up to their desires. Others
are bored with the question.
The
world does not approve of deliberate statelessness. These men
wouldn't care. There's not too much they do care about.
A
few expats are bad-voodoo muck-skulkers. The Federales in Guad
recently snatched a candyman on the lam out of Spokane:
something like forty counts of homosexual child molestation. (He
seemed like a nice guy.) But it's rare. More commonly men marry
and play Leave It To Beaver, have kids or adopt the wife's, live
happily and make sure she gets the Social Security when they
die.
Almost
universal among them is a profound desire not to be part of
somebody else's parade. They want to be left alone. In the
semi-developed countries favored by expats, governments usually
don't care about you unless you break the law. Sometimes they
don't care even if you do break the law, depending on the law.
The big North American governments never stop supervising,
admonishing, collecting data, requiring forms. Those who dislike
it enough end up somewhere else.
The
uncharitable in America bruit the notion that men expatriate
because they want to enjoy sex with lovely young lovelies.
That's part of it. For a man of fifty, a sloe-eyed sweetie of
twenty-five beats hell out of an angry menopausing gringa with a
law degree. Maybe it shouldn't be that way, but it is that way.
But
much more than sex is involved. Women in the backwaters are
often just plain agreeable. After the divorce back home, men
learn. Some do.
There
are interpretations and interpretations of the prostitution and
semi-prostitution that one finds abroad. Hooking, an expat might
tell you, if he cared, which is unlikely, gets a bad rap. Bar
girls usually aren't bad people. The cynical among the
expatriates, which is about all of them, say that hooking
differs from other approaches to sex chiefly in that the latter
cost more.
Deep
down, a lot of men just don't want the admin overhead of the
usual relationship: the breakup, the shrieking, the agony, and
let's-get-counseling, and everyone feels like dirt. Relations
between the sexes, they say, are always fundamentally
commercial. Women trade sex for whatever they want, and men
trade whatever they have for sex. In the US, when the whole mess
becomes horribly boring, the husband insists that he's still in
love to avoid admitting that he'd give anything to be in
Bangkok. The woman eats bon-bons.
Remember
that the expat lives there, unlike the crypto-sadistic Japanese
sex tourist. He knows the girls in the bar, laughs with them,
takes one home here and again. For her, it beats being sweated
in a running-shoe factory. Most countries don't have the Puritan
background America does.
I
know lots of men who have married either bar girls or
non-hooking local women. (Some don't know they have married bar
girls.) Often it works well. The woman gets what she wants: a
decent life, and a husband who doesn't knock her around. He gets
what he wants: a pretty and pleasant young wife, food on the
table, and a good mother if they have kids. He probably actually
loves her because, praise God, she's not congenitally angry or
in a law firm. They're happy. It's their business.
