| Lifeboat |
| A Story
From Phuket, Thailand |
| by Steve Rosse |
| June 2005
In his pre-Phuket
life Murray was a Wall street investment banker, with a designer label
wife, an athletic sixteen-year-old son in prep school and an anorexic
fourteen-year-old daughter in therapy. He was good at his job; the Reagan
years were good to him, and by his fortieth birthday he was quite wealthy.
On that day he drove his wife up to Newport to show her a birthday present
he'd bought himself. It was a 51 foot Jeanneau yacht named Fixed
Interest, and Murray said he was ready to retire and show his wife
the world. She said she was ready to see the world, but she wanted to see
it with Andre, her physical trainer. |
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| New York
is a community property state and in order to give his wife the 50% of
his assets required by law, Murray had to liquidate. He sold the brownstone
on Park Avenue and he sold the refurbished farmhouse in the Hamptons; he
sold the Cadillacs and the Marc Chagalls; he sold the tanning salon in
California and the fish cannery in Alaska; he gave his Armani suits to
the costume department of an Off-Broadway theater and his collection of
first editions to the public library.
When the great
fire sale was over he put half the proceeds into a trust fund for his kids
and wrote his wife a check for the rest.
Before he
left his office for the last time he emptied his wall safe into his briefcase,
taking a few things that the lawyers hadn't known about: a stack of
Krugerands and Gold Eagles, a block of hundred year old Guyanese 1-penny
stamps and a bearer bond or two. On the way to the train station he had
the taxi stop on Fifth Avenue long enough to drop his wedding ring into
a beggar's tin cup in front of Rockefeller Center. He set sail on the fourth
of July 1985. He carried on the boat a year's supply of liquor and a grudge
against women. Both lawyers and the judge in his divorce had been female. |
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| By late
November of 1986 Murray was making his way up the Malaysian coast,
on his way to Madras and Sri Lanka. The Fixed Interest
was listing to port and her sails were stained and torn, and Murray had
an ingrown nail on his left foot that made his big toe the color and size
of a ripe plum. He was sick of the sea and of his own company.
His liquor
supply was down to one duty free bottle of Southern Comfort and half a
case of Tiger Beer. He dropped anchor in Nai Harn Bay, checked into the
Yacht Club and had his toe attended to. As he sat on the balcony of the
Club with his throbbing foot up on the railing, watching the early arrivals
for the first King's Cup Regatta fill the bay around Fixed Interest,
he had no desire ever to board her again. He was also in fairly serious
financial straits; there hadn't been all that many Krugerands in the office
safe. |
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Offshore Resources Gallery
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| But with all
the high rollers at the regatta, selling his yacht was not too difficult,
and Murray checked out of the Club and into a house in a nice middle class
neighborhood, with a tidy nest egg in the Thai Military Bank. He
had enough to sit and think about what he wanted to do for a few years,
anyway.
He liked Nai
Harn Bay very much, and bought himself a bicycle so he could ride over
and swim. He became a daily fixture on Chao Fah Road, sunburned darker
than any Thai, pumping along with legs thicker than a rickshaw puller's.
As the years went by he grew mellow, talking little but always willing
to listen. The staff at the Yacht Club all knew him, from the General Manager
to the guy who sweeps the driveway, and after lunch on most days
you could find him on the verandah, nursing a beer and charging his battery
for the ride home. He never put his feet up on the railing anymore, he'd
been here long enough to know better.
A year ago
Murray started dating Ning, the fortyish woman who runs the Poste Restante
window at the Post Office. Most evenings she could be seen cooking
his dinner on his Weber grill, the only thing he brought from the house
in the Hamptons. |
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| She arranged
maid service for him and got the house looking livable instead of lived
in by gypsies, and without any fanfare or local gossip one day she just
moved her things in.
These days
Murray skippers other people's yachts, either in the Regatta or running
charters down to Singapore. He's acted as agent on a couple of boat sales,
and is known as the man to see if you want to know the truth about a bit
of real estate in Nai Harn.
He speaks the
Southern Thai dialect and he's had a cup of coffee with the headman
of every village between Nai Harn and Chalong. He and Ning take a red envelope
full of money to a wedding or funeral or ordination ceremony in those villages
at least once a week. He's kept his eyes open and he's seen property values
around there go up 1,500% in eleven years. |
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Offshore
Resources Gallery
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| The money
from his old life is long gone, but between Ning's salary and his little
deals they do quite well. Every few months something new appears in the
house, a new refrigerator or stereo, a laser disc machine or satellite
dish. Ning has traded in her old pick-up truck on this year's Mazda 626,
and Murray is pedaling a bike imported from Germany.
These days
Murray can often be found in the local stock market office, sitting in
the plush seats before the big board, a copy of the Asian Wall Street
Journal or Far Eastern Economic Review open on his lap.
Last week, when the kid across the street was born Murray gave him a hundred
shares of Amalgamated Thai Plastics, and the next morning everybody in
the neighborhood was downtown buying Amalgamated.
To contact
Steve Click Here
The following
is Steve's first story for the magazine:
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Article
Index ~ Thailand
Index ~ |
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