A week later she went from New York to San Fransisco; San Fransisco to Tokyo; and then Tokyo to Bangkok. She took in temples and Buddhas via the river boat bus, the Chao Phraya Express. She saw opulent skyscrapers and she meandered through labyrinths of tackey tin and wooden cobbled shacks along the river. She saw two young boys with Butch haircuts in dark blue shorts and light blue shirts embracing each other as they walked closer than lovers, emaciated and fur-lost dogs beaten with sticks and then shoved into large racket and burlap bag instruments like butterfly nets. She watched the dog catchers dump the hounds into wooden crates, uniformed teenagers in sidewalk restaurants enjoying the process, coconut tonic vendors putting straws in the cut cocunut shells and fruit on a stick salesmen pushing their glass ice and fruit carts. She spent most of her time downtown. On the sidewalk she saw men's underwear sprawled on a table top that was balanced by one of those plastic stools used as chairs at sidewalk restaurants or those for tired sidewalk salesmen. "I wish I had the man in the undies" she said aloud to her amusement. Then she passed containers of raw fish on ice next to the sharkfin restaurant. A young man who gained a commission from bringing in the masses into the restaurant said, "Fish! good!" He was so palpable and so much in her reach. She turned toward him and stopped. She put her hand on his chest and slid it down to his waist. "Fish good, you say?" she asked and then giggled like an embarrassed school girl for she was embarrassed by her own temerity. "Fish very good!" said the google and glaze eyed fish salesmen. He put his fingers into the waste line of his pants and jiggled them in a couple seductive bounces. Outside of the fomenting of her own sensuality, she felt the imagined spirit of Buddha permeating everything like a warm wind. After three days here she went from Bangkok to Rome. Her world was that other world, that etheral world consisting of the highest apogee of man, that which was least in his making and yet here it was manifest in tangible objects from one museum to another. This was her idea of heaven: to be fully in that small realm of one's mind where true beauty existed and within a city where others, some living and most dead, had also engaged in that area of the brain and produced objects so splendid. At a Burger King a block away from such a museum she bought a couple vegie-burgers, an apple pie turnover, and a chocolate shake. When they were deposited on her tray she turned and walked to an empty table. Near it she stopped with mouth agape. There at an adjacent table were Rick and his father, MF. Chapter Twenty-Seven