I know, because one bit me. The anti-rabies injections cost 3,000 baht, the dog's still alive and worth about a dollar and lies waiting for me in a fake siesta by the abandoned popcorn stand. But there's another, extraordinary world here hidden among the cracked and faded concrete down the eastern side of the cinema. Spread over three nondescript bars called the Silver Dollar, Texas Lonestar and the Wild Country is an enclave of America that I always thought existed, but only in other people's imaginations. On the surface, this compact environment is a world of country-western, loud voices, bad vowels, the good, the bad and the facially challenged.
Local reality seems to have escaped their notice and Thailand's another country somewhere else.
They have no interest in the culture other than a lifestyle that offers available women, a little business and cheap rent in a decadent exile. While many have married Thai women, you never see them. It's a place where gossip is ripe and truth a fluid concept, where intelligence appears to hum along at a redneck pace slightly below room temperature. It's a bonfire of profanities. To these men, Vivaldi is not a composer, he's a gay bartender in Patpong.