Before Khaosan Road became a haven for gap-year students, it was a haunt for alcoholic teachers, petty criminals, and weirdos from all points of the compass. Jim Algie remembers the nutjobs.

Walking along Phra Sumen Road towards the old fort on the corner, which was whitewashed with sunlight, I stopped in front of my old residence, the KC Guesthouse, to find that it had been completely rebuilt and gentrified.

Popular with backpackers, the KC was also home to a cast of crazies back in the early to mid-90s that would rival any lunatic asylum. For instance, my next door neighbour for about six months was a long-haired, 40ish chainsaw logger from Oregon, who had received a massive payoff because (I shit you not) a tree had fallen on his head.

He brought his 14-year-old son to stay with him, and the two would go drinking together at go-go bars on Patpong Road. But the father soon got jealous because the son did not have to pay for sexual favours, and he did. So dad would lock him in the room at night.

Through the dirty cream partition, which had pretensions of being a wall and was decorated with the old guesthouse ‘art’ of brown smudges that had once been cockroaches, I would hear the son plead, “Can I come to Patpong too, Dad?”

“Nope. I’m lockin’ ya in the room again ‘cause ya don’t know how to spot a ladyboy and ya don’t know how to wear a dick-wrapper.”

Soon enough, Papa sent the spawn of his loins back to the US and had a Thai bargirl move in with him. Then I had to listen to him give her regular spankings with a broom while educating her about proper etiquette. “Say please when ya want somethin’, goddamnit.” Whack! Whack! Whack!

Another neighbour was a very amiable young African guy with a swampy accent who claimed to be studying computers in Bangkok. Can’t say I ever saw him with a textbook, though, but I did see him hanging around a lot of bars on Khaosan Road and talking with shifty dudes who looked as if they’d had very unhappy childhoods.

From time to time, there were police raids in the guesthouse – usually on weekends around 6 or 7am. One time, Bangkok’s finest busted a backpacker in a room upstairs. He had three kilos of ganja under his bed.

I can’t say enough good things about the kindly Thai woman who ran the place, however. She often served as a surrogate mother for all of us lost souls, and would let us run up our room and restaurant bills for a month or two at a time.

One of the stranger occurrences in the KC – strange being a relative term in this nuthouse – was the sound of thumping in one of the upstairs rooms. Nearly every night the thumps and bangs would repeat for about an hour. For a while – maybe it was all the Mekong Whiskey – I thought it might be a poltergeist. Then I thought it must be some guy with admirable sexual stamina and a very willing partner, or perhaps a demented masochist who got off on throwing himself against the wall while giving ‘Mr. Perky’ a long and loving spit-polish.

As it turned out, it was the middle-aged Irishman who lived upstairs and taught at the Nature Method School of English. He owned one pair of beige trousers with cuffs that waved at his ankles in the distance, and he rarely spoke to anyone. An ex-soldier for many years, Kevin hated Thai people so much that he would walk down crowded streets, deliberately bumping into them.

From what I heard, every night he put one of his mattresses up against the wall. Outlined on the mattress with a felt marker was a human body with X’s marking those vulnerable areas where you could kill a man with one punch. So the thumps and bangs came when Kevin practiced his deathblows.

Then there was a Slavic loon from Tasmania known, because of his pharmaceutical fetish, as the “Valium Kid”. When Davor would hibernate in his room for days on end, if somebody telephoned for him, the surly Thai maid would bang on his door, rattle the door knob, scream through the window, “You! You!” and even – I’m guessing here – mutter some incantation for a local spirit to rouse him from his slumber. All to no avail. In his drugged state, Davor would’ve slept through The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But he did finally put a note on his door when he wanted to visit lullaby land, which read, “Davor mai sabai today,” meaning that he wasn’t well. Unfortunately, the maid did not read English and kept up her door-storming tactics.

It’s too bad Ken Kesey passed away a few years ago because if he wanted to write a sequel to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest I would’ve had plenty of material for him.