The Trouble with Uno
Bangkok before dawn is turgid and murky like canal water, the taxis and scooters churning in place at stoplight eddies beneath the BTS Skytrain, but on this relatively cool morning Uno is buzzing like pink neon in a discharge tube.
Uno, which is neither his real name nor anything close to his chosen one, is a 26-year-old Bangkok kid with a high forehead and round glasses that make him look like Arthur, the cartoon aardvark. He is meeting us for the first time at this bitch of an hour, dressed in a fresh-looking T-shirt and pressed shorts, no-show socks pulled up above Converse camo low-tops, smiling and pray-hands bowing, sawasdee krab, sawasdee kraab, sawasdee kraaaaab, just after 5 a.m. out front of our hotel.
The us is a random-looking entourage from California: James, a chef with a Michelin star; Manny, James’s quiet and elaborately inked-up chef de cuisine; James’s cousin Eric, decent speaker of Thai and taker of zero shit; other Eric (photographer); and me, a writer, eyes stinging from a paucity of sleep. We’re mid-trip in a month-long eating research project through Thailand, and Uno—his fingers now forking a freshly lit Marlboro, pacing behind the van we’ll climb into as soon as everybody’s down in the elevator, smile faded, talking into the iPhone mic on earbuds that for the next 10 days will almost never leave his head—is our guide on this new leg.
Uno works for a Thai consumer superbrand. An executive there (Uno’s boss) offered to guide James, and Uno was assigned to take us north. This morning we fly to Ubon Rathchathani in northeast Thailand, Isan country, and for the next 10 days Uno will escort us, first through Ubon, then onto Khon Kaen, to Chiang Mai, and on up to Chiang Rai. When we’re done he’ll fly us back to Bangkok.
He is our road manager, clutching everybody’s airline tickets. He will ride shotgun, next to the driver, in our 11-seater van, through cities and on open road, slurping the same noodles as us, stopping where James wants to stop, finding places where we’ll want to eat, waiting—Marlboro in fingers, pacing, talking into his earbud mic—while we piss out beer and whiskey at a highway stop.
And he is also, I assume, our minder, reporting back to his boss in Bangkok through his earphone, in the quick, never-ending thrum of Thai he voices in the front seat, off into the digital invisible.
I find out later he has an elegant first name, and an aristocratic family one, granted to his ancestors by King Rama IV. His real nickname—Nung—means “one” (he’s first-born), only most of us can’t pronounce it with the right cascading tonality and nasal dissolve, so instead we call him Number One. After ten minutes on the way to Suvarnabhumi Airport this has already morphed into Numero Uno and now, as the van pulls up to the drop-off, is now simply Uno.
Uno speaks graceful Thai into his iPhone mic, with inflections that rise smoothly and linger, then fade or drop, but in English he sounds world-weary. Instead of “yes,” he says “sure-sure,” slightly dipping his head slightly, as if he’d realized some sad and inescapable truth.
“We having breakfast when we get to Ubon? Is that the plan?”
“Sure-sure Mr. John, breakfast in Ubon” he says, dropping his head before turning back to his iPhone mic, thin smile dissolving, picking up again in Thai. There’s a dolorousness hanging over Uno that I can’t put my finger on.
Up north, he changes. Now he’s our fixer, our fresh-faced pimp. Somebody randomly mentions pizza in the van, on our way out of Ubon, Uno stops talking into his iPhone mic, turns around from his seat up front.
“You want pizza?”
(We do not.)
Later, one night after we’ve all been drinking, Uno calls out, “You want a prostitute? Two hundred baht.” We do not want a prostitute any more than we want a pizza, but it’s Uno’s job to get us the things we came for. He’s diligent.
“You want to go to a strip club?”
(We do not.)
I get the feeling Uno is used to escorting businessmen from Sydney or Hong Kong, groups who would actually want these things, not weirdos like us, seeking congealed pork blood in cheap noodle shops or bile-stained water-buffalo laab at sleepy riverside places. One night the van pulls up to what looks like a blond sandstone mansion, we tumble out and realize we’re in a sushi palace, buffed floors, visible wine cage, hostesses with fixed smiles, in tight sheath dresses and tumbling hair.
“Fuck no,” James says, and Uno’s head dips. He huddles with the driver, talks into his phone. We end up at a sprawling dark and rickety outdoor place, eating sticky jackfruit salad and blistered, tannic jungle curry. A cockroach falls onto the table from an overhang and I jump. It gives us something to laugh about. Uno recovered, re-adjusted his settings. He came through.
One night, he gets us into this huge open-air bar where foreigners aren’t supposed to go. “Sawasdee kaab,” Uno says to the bouncer, who has a small straw fedora, a single ear gauge the size of a watch face, and a sleeve tattoo. Uno’s showing respect, doing the pray-hands bow thing extra high, talking in his elegant Thai. The bouncer lets us in, though we have to sit at a table up front. Uno keeps smiling, sawasdee-kaabing whenever he catches the bouncer’s eye.
“He seems pretty cool,” Manny says. “Bouncers back home are usually assholes.”
“Actually,” Uno says, still smiling, “he’s an asshole. But I have to be polite so he lets us stay.” Soon, asshole sends us a plastic pitcher of Thai whiskey and Red Bull, ice cubes sloshing. He poses for pictures with the Erics and James, compares tattoos with Manny. Uno knows how things work, where things figure in the reckoning of status and respect.
But Uno, it turns out, is in deep shit. Somewhere on the road out of Ubon Rathchathani, he was ditching us more, spending more time in his hotel rooms. Manny got the real story. Showing groups of tourists around Thailand was an offshoot of Uno’s job. His main gig was organizing concerts in northern cities, shows the superbrand would heavily market and promote.
The next concert, a big outdoor show with 10 bands, was a week away, and the owner of the venue—the city’s mayor—was suddenly refusing to take down the 30 light poles like he’d promised. Basically, everybody who bought a ticket would have an obstructed view of the stage, which would look like a huge fuck-up for Uno’s company, and get him, Uno, fired. He’s going to have to find a new venue as close to the old one as possible, in days, after everything was already set. He’s freaking out, on the phone constantly now, talking louder into the mic, pacing even harder, sparking Marlboro after Marlboro.
Late one night, sitting outside a bar in Khon Kaen (besides an elderly Australian gentleman and his teen companion, it was completely empty; the bar’s owner brought us free drinks when it looked like we were getting ready to leave), Uno starts to loosen up. The mayor had fucked Uno—bad. Now he’s offering to help find a new venue. “You want to help me?” Uno says he told him. “YOU WANT TO HELP ME?? GIVE ME A GUN SO I CAN SHOOT MYSELF!”
We’re on our own in Chiang Mai.
Maybe every concert Uno organizes is like this: politicians—like bar bouncers—that have to be finessed in the right way, last-minute fuck-ups that have to be solved entirely over the phone, from a moving van full of Californians looking for a very particular kind of cheap food. For a kid with ambitions to move up the superbrand’s ladder, these are tests—figuring out how to get what you need from a corrupt small-time mayor isn’t all that different from getting what the corporation needs from some government official in Myanmar. Our last day in Chiang Rai, headed to the airport, I ask Uno if he found a new venue for the concert.
“Sure-sure,” he says, with the dip of his head. “Everything’s okay.” He’s flying with us back to Bangkok, then he’ll turn around, drive back north for the concert.
A few nights previously, after the beers and whiskies, Uno lowers his guard, says he’s giving his job another year. Turns out he has this dream—and it’s still pretty much a secret—to write a food guide to northern Thailand. Organizing concerts in the north, he’s fallen in love with Isan food, eats it in Bangkok whenever he can.
I tell him he should do it. “Fuck your job! I’d love to read your book. You found some amazing places for us—you have the gift.”
He shakes his head: There’s no money in writing about food. “How will I live, Mr. John?”