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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.  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.

Nai Harn Bay

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. 

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. 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. 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. 

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. 

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The following is Steve's first story for the magazine:

Risky Business ~ A Story Phuket, Thailand
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