Free Rotting in the Bangkok Hilton: The Gruesome True Story of a Man Who Survived Thailand's Deadliest Prison by T. M. Hoy Page B

four Thai often save their baht and buy onions, chilies, and garlic. They take turns queuing for prison food. Others carefully sift the prison rice and strain the soup. This is then re-cooked with the new spices and vegetables added in. By such stratagems, and others like them, the prison food is made edible, and the poor survive.
    At the very bottom of the economic ladder are rural peasants who behave no better than farm animals, and those Thai are completely insane. They wait outside the restaurants and root in the slimy garbage for tidbits in the pile where cooks throw their trash. You see them at mealtime picking bones and gristle out of gutters, blithely ignoring people pissing ‘upstream’of them into the same gutter a few feet away. Other Thai are revolted by this behavior and treat them with contempt.
    After lunch, shade can be found on the far side of the dorms, where most either take a nap in their houses or relax on a bamboo mat on the ground.
    Although the Thai are very nonchalant about sitting or sleeping on the ground, all farangs use lawn chairs or buy a house. This is a reaction to the poisonous millipedes and centipedes (two fingers thick), which are all too common and give nasty, venomous bites. These insectile menaces, along with scorpions, spiders, wasps, and other creatures, make sleeping both in the dorms and outside a dangerous act.
    At 2:00 PM, one of the guards is awakened by a blue boy, and unlocks the gate to the fenced-in water troughs for showering. Opposite and parallel to the factories are the long, waist-high, concrete troughs holding river water, ostensibly for bathing. The water is opaque, a deep dirty brown-gray, with a thick residue of scummy oil floating on the surface. There are always bits of algae, trash, and other unidentifiable objects that swirl about at shower time: a reminder of the sorry state of the Chao Phaya River, from whence the water is pumped.
    Depending on the factory owner’s mood, the factories shut down close to 3:00 PM, giving workers time to bathe and get drinking water before being locked down for the night. Six days a week, a boisterous crowd takes their showers, splashing each other playfully and making a racket.
    Farangs, being much more sensitive to the local bacteria, too often get bad skin infections from the dead things rotting in the free prison water, opt to pay for clean bath water. Enterprising Thai with connections to whatever guard controls the water tower (unused except by this bunch), charge about four dollars a month for clean water. They set up large plastic garbage cans purchased for this reason and provide a full can twice a day to customers. Farangs and wealthy Asians bathe together near the toilets where these watermerchants put the cans. As with most things, the farang junkies live without any of these ‘amenities.’ As they spend every penny on drugs, farang heroin addicts live no differently from the poorest Thai peasant.
    At 3:30 or 4:00 PM, varying with the guards’ energy level, people gather their belongings and prepare to go into the dorms for the night. Those with ‘houses’ put most of their stuff away under lock and key in cupboards. The majority of prisoners have to use cement and wood lockers, built in a row against a factory wall. The lockers cost about ten dollars. Foreigners normally have one or two apiece, whereas Thai band together to buy and share one as a group.
    Before being marched into the dorm, the Thai have to gather in the square in front and to one side of the dorm. Grouped together by cell, they file by two rows of blue boys, who leisurely peek in and poke at their bags, looking for drugs or contraband.
    Farangs are exempt from the roll call and can join the line whenever they feel like it. In practice, this means any time before 4:00 PM lockdown. They still have to run the gauntlet of the blue boys. Usually, the blue boys check out the farangs’ bags more thoroughly than their inspection of Thai bags. This can