The T-shirt Game In Thailand

*January 3, 2006

Warning: Relatives - this post is on the topic of sex, but again, not about me actually having it. Again, quite the opposite. Please remember the topic is all in good fun, and again, it's funny.

Why pay for a hooker when you can have a pretty white girl for free?

As I wandered around the streets of Hua Hin last weekend I realized this was the perfect t-shirt phrase for the occasion. Man, I am funny, I thought, and laughed out loud.

A few months before I left home my friend J and I started playing the ‘t-shirt game’. It involves two people vying to think of the funnier phrase to have pasted across their chest. Sometimes the ideas involved inside jokes about drunk escapades, sometimes they were reflections of whatever was happening in our lives at the time, sometimes they were just plain stupid. Above all they were grossly sarcastic.

Whenever we were having lunch or drinks and happened to get bored I’d whip out my little black book of t-shirt sayings so we could add to the list.

If we came up with something really, really good we’d actually get the shirt made, but more often than not we didn’t have the balls to wear our words. Other times, though, the game evolved and the goal was who would wear the more outrageous t-shirt. In that department, J always won.

Suddenly single, together, we went through a phase where the best phrase was the one that hinted, without being too slutty, that we were, well, single. It was an open invitation to get hit on and it was a guarantee there would be good stories to tell the next day.

Just before a trip to Vegas J had her t-shirt picks narrowed down to three choices: 1) Single and ready to mingle, 2) On the rebound and 3) Canadians put out. She went with choice No. 2. If a player in the t-shirt game collected points for every time a guy used the shirt as a pick-up line, J definitely was doing laps around the board the night we hit the strip.

“So, you’re, uh, on the rebound,” each of her southern suitors would say, each with a different accent, each with the same lack of originality. Each, followed with the offer of a drink. Personalized t-shirts weren’t just witty, they were wallet-savers.

Her tactic wasn’t just in the words, it was in the wearing. On a white wife-beater style tank top the phrase was printed in big black letters that stretched across her DD chest.
Three words must have brought forth thirty men, thirty drink offers.

But my 15-word phrase, which would’ve cost $68 ($1/letter plus $15 for the shirt) would have, in fact, brought me nothing and cost far too much for a joke only I would find humour in. No men, no drinks, probably not even a laugh.

Even in this beautiful, upper-scale beach city where the King resides, old white men with women of negotiable affections are everywhere. I’m fairly certain I could walk down the road completely naked, never mind wearing a shirt advertising myself, and go entirely unnoticed.

It would be really, really sad if it wasn’t really, really funny. Perhaps I was getting delirious from being in the sun for so long.

So I started to think of shirts for the jerks to wear.

Farangs prefer to pay

I’m dumb, fat and loaded: Who wants me?

Back home I couldn't get laid, so I came here and paid

She’s cheaper than a cane

Yes, it was definitely time to get out of the sun.