As one who is fond of traveling but often short on money, I often find myself in a variety of odd situations while traveling.  In this instance, I was in northern Malaysia with my friend Jennifer, traveling north toward Thailand.  We were passing through Kuala Lumpur, and had decided to stay in the centrally-located but seedy red light district.  Most of the hotels in the area were pretty inexpensive, often doubling as whorehouses.  Hey, what do you expect for five bucks a night?  The hotel we selected that night was no exception.  We had to negotiate a rate for the entire night (an apparent rarity that raised the eyebrow of the clerk) and headed upstairs.  Upon reaching our floor, we discovered the room next to us was the epicenter of conflict.  A Malaysian hooker was pounding on the door, yelling in an unusual regional patois I couldn’t entirely place.  The only word I could make out was “Ringgit” (the Malaysian unit of currency).  From inside the room, a drunken male voice made a dismissive “Waaaahh” sound.  Apparently, the dispute was about payment for services rendered.  We paid it no heed, dumped our bags and headed out to sightsee.  That night, after returning to the hotel, we noticed a few odd things about the rooms in this hotel.  First of all, the bedsheets were actually more like a towel than a blanket.  The bathroom was also interesting.  The hot water heater was mounted on the wall and did a crappy job, bringing the water to something resembling lukewarm.  To stand in the shower required one to essentially to straddle the toilet, which appeared to double as a drain.  Finally, we noticed that the door to the bathroom locked, not from within, but from the outside.  Why anyone would want to lock the bathroom from the outside seemed odd, but so did everything else in this country.

We had experienced a lovely day in Kuala Lumpur, and decided to stay another night.  We spent the next day sightseeing, more or less uneventfully with one exception: I ran into a gang of Malaysian pimps.  They were tiny little guys, and they all dressed like cowboys with full-length fur coats.  While Jennifer got a massage, I hung out with the pimps, who spoke excellent english and were delighted to hang out with a tall westerner.  I learned many things, one of which was never to cross an Asian hooker.  As I learned from the most sociable pimp Pho Ho (seriously, that was his name) “Malay women hot with love, but also angry.”  After we parted ways, I returned to the hotel with Jennifer.  In the stairwell, we passed the same hooker from the previous day.  She was in the stairwell, heading toward the general vicinity of the room she had been banging on the previous day.  Jen rejected my lighthearted suggestion for a threesome, and and we went about our way.  During the night, we heard a few romantic sounds, and assumed that this hooker had either found a new customer or had made up with her old one.  This was hardly shocking, and it definitely explained the towel/bedsheet thing.

The following morning we were scheduled to leave town.  We had packed up and were heading down the hall when we heard a muffled cry for help from one of the adjacent rooms.  The door next to ours was unlocked and ajar.  I wanted to keep walking, but Jennifer is a humanitarian and suggested we investigate and render aid.  I poked my head in, holding Jen back in case it was an ambush.  The room was totally empty, free of belongings and personal effects.  Where were the people we heard last night?  And what had we heard just now?

Again, we heard a muffled thump.  It’s coming from the bathroom.  Unlike the hallway door, the bathroom door is firmly bolted.  Something (or someone) is trapped in the bathroom.  I tell Jen to cover me as I extend an arm and spring the lock, allowing the door to swing open.  There’s a Malaysian man in the bathroom.  He appears to be completely naked, save for the shower curtain he’s hiding behind.  Jennifer pops her head out from behind me and emits a startled “Oh My!”

Upon seeing rescuers, the man becomes overjoyed and rushes forward, abandoning the shower curtain.  “Ugh, no!” Jen and I chorus, neither excited about the prospect of a close encounter with his free-swinging genitals.  We’re lucky: he’s apparently fashioned a crude diaper from toilet paper.  From the looks of it though, there wasn’t much TP left when he started making it.  It’s more of a TP-thong, and he’s flossing hard for us.  

We have no idea what to do with this guy.  It doesn’t take a genius to reconstruct what’s happened here: the hooker, pissed off at being stiffed, has returned, lured the John into a false sense of security, and then locked him in the bathroom and robbed him blind.

“This isn’t my fight man,” I say, not entirely certain he understands me.  “I’ll have the front desk send up some more toilet paper, so you can make a vest to go with your shorts.”  As I turn to leave, the semi-naked man makes a play to grab my arm.  In extremely broken english he implores me with a heartfelt “Please... sir... your pants.”  He points at my trousers and then to his pelvis, indicating I should make him an extended loan of my clothing.  “Hey, no, really.  I’m flattered, but I’ll need these for later.  Pay your bill next time my friend.”

Jennifer was still hesitant to leave him in such straits.  A year before, her boss had been robbed and locked in a hotel room by a Thai hooker.  “Maybe you should give him your pants,” she said.

“Maybe you should give him yours,” I countered.  Jen paused, thinking about it.  “I think he looks good in white,” she finally said.

We rolled out, leaving him in the bathroom from whence he was confined.  True to my word, I told the front desk clerk that there was a nearly naked man roaming the hotel.  She didn’t seem surprised.

The moral: stay out of the bathroom if you play it fast and loose with Malaysian hookers.