The first time I listened to the Awkward Apocalypse podcast, I was distracted by watching a dead hooker’s blood flow across the floor.
This was about a year ago out in Pattaya, Thailand, a beachfront resort town/tourist trap. I was on a group trip with a couple dozen of other friends and friends-of-friends who managed to scrape together enough cash to tour various parts of southeast Asia together. It was an eclectic bunch and I only knew half of them to any degree - some like Jenny for sure, but Greg was from a different group and aside from some head nods and a couple shared drinks, we really hadn’t hung out together much.
The night I’m speaking about was hot. Ridiculously hot, as one might expect given the region, making the scheduled event of our resort’s awesome sunset beachside banquet only somewhat bearable. We had chosen that dinner to be our group’s “dress-up night”, meaning we all finally got to break out our long-packed tuxes and fancy dresses. Well, while the food was fantastic, the heat and the company compelled all of us to drink these amazing iced tropical cocktails. Between their deliciousness and the spiciness in seemingly every food course, we all were pounding these things like they contained the antidode. To this day, I still don’t know what was in them but they were cold and delightful and potent. Before we even got to the dessert course, our crowd was lit up overall and, truth be told, I was feeling pretty fine myself.
As we planned on going out of the hotel’s domain to enjoy a little town nightlife, people drifted off to their rooms to change into more clubby gear - outfits that could tolerate some dancing and whatnot in these tropics. I made my way back to my room with a little stagger in my step and fell across my bed, relishing the feel of the cool, soft sheets against my face as though it were a welcome caress from a lover. My breathing slowed and while a small voice in my head told me that I should get up, it was a louder, soothing voice that was telling me to lie there and enjoy every sensation. Well, loud won the day and I slowly sank into a light slumber, periodically rising into semiconsciousness like a flat stone skipping across a lake of blissful void-like serenity.
It was the sound of a muffled crash and thump that pulled me away from my drifting sleep limbo. I wasn’t even sure if what I had heard was real or some dream memory fragment that popped me into awareness, but a glance at the clock alarm made me I realize that I had been out for over 5 hours! That alone startled me as though I had overslept a test in school, so between that and my curiosity about the sound, I rose to check to see who, if anyone, was still around and awake and if they knew what had happened. I walked out of my room and went to where I thought I had heard the commotion originate and saw that it came form one of “our” rooms - the one shared by Jenny and Greg.
The door was slightly ajar, the lock bracket flung over preventing the door from closing and so I pushed it open. In contrast to the cooled air I had enjoyed in my room and even in the hall, I was immediately bathed in a wave of thick tropical heat. The room was similar to my own except they had no lights on - in fact, it was only lit by two varieties of sources - a series of candles that seemed to be placed nearly everywhere and a slash of a bright light originating form the security lights on the pool deck outside. That light was intruding into the room between a hand-wide gap in the heavy curtains leading to their private patio. It was that light that revealed to me how bad off things were in the room, as it illuminated the pool of blood that was still expanding across the floor. Where that ribbon of light hit the blood, it brightened into its full crimson. Contrasted to the white tiled floor, the effect was not unlike watching mercury rising in a thermometer after it has been placed in a pot of boiling water.
I followed the blood to the source and saw the same strip of light cross most of the face of who I later learned was a local prostitute. It was immediately evident that she had clearly been beautiful and that she was clearly dead. Her eyes were open wide in surprise but they had already gone glassy. She was lying clumsily in the middle of a framework of the modern art coffee table legs that all our rooms had, except in this case, the glass tabletop here was surrounding her in ugly shards. The glass, having mostly taken the color of the surrounding blood, gave a surreal view to any overhead observer, making her seem as though she had almost escaped an horrible vicious gaping maw packed with crystal teeth…almost escaped, anyway, as the bite that had been inflicted upon her back had drained out the blood her body needed for life in mere seconds.
Long story short, eventually we got everything “cleaned up” in all respects. Once it was explained and verified by the local authorities that what happened was truly an accident due to an unfortunate combination of the hotel’s slippery tile floors and that poor girl’s ridiculous platform shoes, nobody wanted to make a big deal of this event - not the tourist town cops, not the hotel, and certainly not us. Still, we had to “pay the piper” as one must do in this situations, so we passed the hat and that’s how I learned that around 75,000 bhat makes a lot of problems evaporate in Thailand. None of the group really talked about the incident for the rest of the trip but I will always remember that scene in the hotel room, which also included one of the early Awkward Apocalypse episodes that was softly playing in the background. The show was pretty good so I keep listening.
