If Bangkok's bar girls were able to legitimately monetize their Connect Four skills — start a league and travel around the world, perhaps — there would be no need for them to ever sleep with an octogenarian again. They are without a doubt the shrewdest, quickest draws the game has ever seen. One minute they're all giggles and demurely lowered eyes, the next you've lost 500 baht. That we can be lured into brothels by children's games shows how little technology has really advanced us as a species. If you are like me, you will be unable to resist the deliciously perspiring bottles of beer, and you will be mesmerized by the satisfying click of hard plastic discs. You will sit down on a stool and order a Chang beer. Next to you an old white man in a floral short-sleeved shirt and orthopedic sandals will lose to a woman who has been simultaneously texting on a Hello Kitty cell phone. As a bartender named Rat hands you your beer in a foam coozie you will think, I bet I can win at this. If you are a man, this is the first of many stupid ideas you will have during the course of the evening.  

I started going regularly to the bars lining the side streets of Patpong, thinking I would make the girls and boys and transvestites working there into my photography project. For a few days I did just that, and then Rat, always looking out for my best interest, told me, "I like photo, but they will give you bad time. Maybe you get hurt." The look she gave me suggested that she was not referring to an emotional kind of pain. That effectively ended my documentary project. I may have been the lone white girl — and looking around, the lone white person under the age of thirty — hanging out in a place where women wore numbers, but I wasn't asking for any trouble. I looked around the bar smiling brightly as if to say See how I only look, no touch. No photo, just wiping the lens off. See! No break my kneecaps please.

I put my camera away, but kept going to the clubs and bars. I was fascinated. From my perch at the bar I watched the men sidle up and play a game I liked to call "Let's pretend this bar girl is really not a prostitute but a nice young lady and that I have the charm of Fred Astaire, who incidentally was born in the same year as I was. I am now going to use my masculine charms to pick up this classy woman in this fine establishment." These were actually the nicer, if much more deluded, subset of men who at least treated the women well. Others walked in already drunk off their tits and touched everything in sight, feeling the girls up as though the lights had gone out and they were trying to find their way to a switch. They said disgusting things. The whole experience played out like To Catch A Predator except nobody ever popped up from behind the bar and said, "What do you think you're doing?" It unfolded like bad reality TV, when in fact it was just bad reality for everyone involved.  

Pae, meanwhile, had moved on and up to another job, which was down a much busier side street. His new uniform involved a tight T-shirt, with his name printed prominently across the front in white English letters, and perpetual jazz hands. With the career move, Pae had decided he was not just gay but flaming. When I stopped by on the first night, he had transformed himself into a character somewhere between Miss Teen USA and Tootsie. He wiggled seductively in front of the bar's outdoor café-style tables for crowds of Western men who winked and whistled appreciatively. His frosted lips parted to display a beauty-pageant smile and his hand made small, tight-fingered waves appropriate for the queen he had become. He was no longer hustling — he was performing.  

With all of the sashaying and the groups of western trannies in glittery headdresses, the atmosphere was definitely more festive in the gay Soi than a few blocks away in the hetero-dominated bars around Patpong, which made it easy to forget that some of what was going on was actually just as sleazy. 

One night, Pae texted me to come visit him at work. It was late when I arrived, and appreciative men at the tables had already bought him many drinks. He wobbled toward me when he saw me round the corner, and took my hands in his. In front of the men he showed me the walk that I would be doing all of the time if I were better at being a woman. The balls of my feet, he explained, should leave the ground as though I were wearing invisible high heels, and then move in front of one another. This was to be augmented by swinging my hips from side to side and looking down and up through my eyelashes in a seductive manner. We had made it from one side of the bar to the other in this fashion when a large bald man in a cotton tank approached Pae and touched his waist. The man smiled to expose a row of crooked teeth, and whispered something in his ear. Pae hesitated and then pressed a hand on the man's waxy-looking chest and smiled through his eyelashes. He didn't look back at me at all when he followed the man up the alley. I stood watching them for a moment, then turned and walked on flat feet to my empty apartment. 

I sat on my balcony for a long time. I was lucky, I realized. I would never be in a position that required me to sell myself. Below, migrant workers returned to their temporary home of tarps and pavement and shared dinner, passing food to one another, their crouched bodies lit by the bluish flicker of the television they kept running from a generator. Sitting alone, high above them, I felt a huge emptiness pass through me and out into the humid night.