Thinking Drinking H3
The Fabled Origin of the TDH3
| HOW IT ALL BEGAN by Tinker Back in the good old days, before AIDS, and while the Harriettes still had natural hair color, on occasion we used to go to Hua Hin during the Queen’s Birthday Holiday. This was three days more or less around the twelfth of August. Every year we’d get a group of about 30 - 40 pulled together from “The” Bangkok Monday Hash and the Wednesday Harriettes, sometimes augmented by members from the now-defunct Bangkok Hash House Horrors. We’d usually take the train, as the highway ride was a long, hot, and sometimes dangerous trip. We may have called it an outstation run, although I’m not sure that either the Monday or Wednesday Hashes listed it as an official outstation. Clannish as ever, the BH3 stuck to Bangkok on Saturdays and thought they were having a good time. While we had good connections with Pak, she’d talk her granny into letting us borrow her huge Victorian-era gingerbread beach house. Then she married Big Dick and may have decided that family came before hash. Whatever, we lost beach house privileges. But in a happy moment, Thitiya remembered that the Bangkok nurses had a large bungalow (two buildings actually) near Hua Hin, and with their permission, we transferred the Hash HQ there the next year. On occasion, a gentlemen or two from the all-male Hong Kong South Side Hash would also join us. (In an act of British defiance before the sun set on Hong Kong in 1997, they renamed it the “Royal South Side Hash”, but that’s another story.) The South Side Hash and the Harriettes had somehow become brother-sister hashes. We’d fly to Hong Kong for runs on the island, or in Macau, or the New Territories, or even cruise up the Pearl River to Guanzhou (Canton) for a run with the Guanzhou Hash. They’d join us for special runs in Thailand. (It was on the slow boat to China where early one groggy morning Blobbs added the phrase “Mai Chow!!” to the Thai language. But I digress again.) On the Hua Hin Outstation I’m thinking of, some of the South Side had become such regulars that they were known as the “Toy Boys”. Hymen Hacker was one of them. On the particular night I’m thinking of, Hymen was feeling mellow with satisfaction from a good run, the on-on-on, and plenty of cheap piss (and mighty pleased with himself because he’d also got Blobbs into trouble with the bottle police). He decided to watch the stars on the balcony of the Nurses Bungalow before he wandered off to someone’s bed. I joined him on the balcony. It was a lovely night. The surf washed gently on the beach, night birds sang their distant songs, jasmine and frangipani scented the tropical air, the breeze was warm and the beer was cold. We talked and watched the moon slowly making it’s silvery way through the silhouetted fronds of the coconut palms. It was a night for drinking beer and making great plans. “I have ......... a plan,” said Hymen. “This is a good time for a plan. It’s about 4 in the morning. How about a plan for sleep?” “No, listen to me. I like this sitting, and thinking, and drinking,” Hymen mused to the stars. “It’s almost as good as shagging 12-year olds. We should do this more often. Without the running.” “With the shagging?” “Of course. We usually come to these outstations on the train, right?” “Uh-huh. On a Friday night....” “So, next time, we hold a Friday pre-outstation ‘run’ on the train, T-shirts, beer, circle, On-On-On, everything but the running bit. We book an entire second-class sleeper, so we have it all to ourselves. And it’s the ‘Bangkok Friday Thinking Drinking Hash’. The only requirement is that you either must be capable of thinking, or drinking. If you can think while you drink, it’s a bonus.” “Great idea. You got any more beer?” That must have been January, 1991. Somehow, the drinking that night didn’t wipe out all the thinking. The 20% remaining of the thought was enough for Wichanee and Blobbs to see the genius in the idea, seize the moment, and organize the first TDH3 on the train to Chumporn on March 8th, 1991. And on that first TDH3, the charter members were: Amanda Levenson, Barry Whittaker, Bill Hobbs, Bruce Marks, Bruce Miller, Chek Dhanasiri, Dale Fosnight, Deepak Vaid, Don LaVoie, Eric Summers, Franz Boehm, John Lukens, John Moushall, Malinee Kanchanapop, Malee Panchasap, Mark LaVoie, Narest Rattanapanchai, Ole Jorgensen, Ole Pedersen, Pete Boswick, Pe Chanthong, Stuart Primrose, Thitiya Srikitjakarn, Tim Daly, Trygve Windingstad, Martin Lutterjohann, Wanna Whittaker, Wichanee Charuthas, and David Ivory. |