Pattaya Old Boy’s Life Advice Hangs Precariously Between Timeless Wisdom and Beer-Soaked Nonsense
By JOHAN YIVES JOHANOPOLIS, EDITOR-AT-LARGE
PATTAYA, THAILAND — Every afternoon around 3:17 p.m., as the sun begins to thicken the air and the ice in his Leo dwindles into oblivion, Mikey Malone — longtime bar owner, amateur philosopher, and man with the haunted eyes of someone who once tried to import golf carts duty-free — delivers his daily sermon from the corner stool of Mikey’s R&R Saloon, a bar that smells like regret, deep-fried peanuts, and waylaid second chances.
He’s been in Pattaya since the Clinton administration and has been giving advice no one asked for almost as long. What begins as small talk — typically on the subject of climatic humidity or back pain — soon spirals into a kind of lager-soaked koan.
With my own eyes, I watched a youthful backpacker from Brussels politely ask Mikey how long he’s lived in Thailand. The padawan was rewarded with a seven-minute story involving a Finnish backpacker, a Burmese border run, and a mango allergy that “nearly changed the course of Southeast Asian history.”
“You never really own anything in Thailand,” Mikey intoned Thursday, eyes fixed on the middle distance. “You just rent it... emotionally.”
He then paused, scratched his stomach, and called the waitress “darlin’,” before launching into a lengthy anecdote about a time he bribed a Cambodian border guard with a copy of Reader’s Digest.
To the untrained ear, Mikey’s advice sounds like nonsense. To the semi-trained ear, it sounds like nonsense with cadence. But to those who have lingered long enough in the bar’s wobbly orbit, his sayings have a strange, lingering resonance.
“You come here with a plan, you leave with a tab,” he said last week. “But if you stay long enough, the tab becomes the plan.”
“He’s either a genius or totally pickled,” said Steve, 61, who’s been “living on and off” in Thailand since 2004. “But he said one thing once that changed my life. I just can’t remember what it was.”
When asked what the best piece of advice he ever gave was, Mikey scratched his chin and said: “Don’t marry the first bargirl who remembers your name. Wait for the second.”