Everybody's looking for something. Some of them want to use you, Some of them want to get used by you.

—Eurythmics, "Sweet Dreams"

"I go with you," she said softly as she slipped her hand inside my arm. Slightly startled, I turned to see a smiling face—twenty-something, I guessed, but she could have been sixteen. It is so hard to tell the age of a Thai woman, especially with the nighttime neon lights that reveal only outlines and shadows.

I looked at her beguiling face, smiled back, had a fleeting thought of saying yes, but said, "No, thanks." The waif-like face turned her lips into a pout of disappointment, and she tugged on my arm as I kept walking. My mind started playing "Why not?" and "What if?" games, and I started to slow down.

"I like you," she purred. "I boom boom good."

I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk as my imagination ran away with the idea of boom boom, but I started walking again as words failed me. She held on to me for a few steps and puckered her lips in a tantalizing invitation as I was prying her hand from my arm. She made a pouty face again as I walked backward away from her, but then she quickly turned to another man, put her arm around him, and said, "Hey, handsome man, I go with you?"

Whoa, did I feel special! I laughed at my momentarily inflated sense of attractiveness as I watched the girl disappear in the crowd. She was a walking fantasy but hardly the only one.

"Wewcome! Hewoo. Hey, sexy man, I wuv you. Want go wid you. What you name?" and more broken-English come-ons came rapid-fire from the steady stream of painted women on Soi Cowboy. Jeez. It was overwhelming and dick-hardening walking down the crowded street with sexy Thai girls touching me, beckoning me into some unknown mystery. I saw dozens sitting on bar stools, standing provocatively in doorways, coaxing strangers into bars with a little butt wiggle or titty jiggle. Some were wearing short shorts, some tight skirts, and almost all had high heels or boots to show off their legs. Yeah, Thai women have nice legs and cute butts, and they know how to advertise their best parts. The rubbernecked foreigners—almost all men, many with cameras—strolled through the soi (street) like shoppers at a market looking at the fruits and veggies. Hmm, this one looks nice, round, firm, feels good too. That one looks a little fat—oops, overripe—too skinny, too old. Really it was sidewalk shopping, but the goods were in miniskirts, shorts, halter tops, bras, and stuff that made Victoria's Secret look prudish and old-fashioned. It was hard to think straight with cute girls smiling and touching me as I walked by. Yes, sir, I blended right in with my wide eyes and silly grin, smiling while the music in the background made a beat that pulsated the night and made me bob my head unconsciously.

Welcome to Bangkok—candy land for sugar freaks, something for everyone, and an overdose for a newbie. Yes, I know there are skyscrapers, beautiful temples, shopping malls galore, and a bustling metropolis in this city of eight million people, but Bangkok's reputation for tawdry, gaudy sex overshadows the cultural highlights—at least for many foreigners, at least men, at least me. I had only been here for two hours, and I was still figuring out day versus night, but that is hard to do in Bangkok, where nights throb with action, where streets are lit up, where traffic always clogs the roads to a standstill, where food is cooking 24-7, and where midnight ushers in worlds that teenage boys dream about.

The doorman at the hotel gave me a funny look when I asked him where to go for nightlife, but hey, I had no idea. "Soi Cowboy and Nana Plaza" was all he said, but the wink and grin gave me a pretty good hint that everyone but me knew about these places. Besides, I was a single American guy in Bangkok, slightly lost and clearly very naive, and not the first goofy foreigner to be snorkeling in the ocean and ask, "Where are the fish?"

That was how I ended up on Soi 23, a little one-block street near the intersection of Asok and Sukhumvit Roads, perhaps the main tourist drag in Bangkok. Every city has one street that is an anchor point for exploration and a common reference point for tourists. Hey, have you been to London? Do you know where Piccadilly Circus is? Paris? Yeah, look for the Champs-Élysée and the Rive Gauche. C'est tres bonne n'est-ce pas? New York? Go to Times Square, Fifth Avenue, and Central Park. Florence? Got to see the Ponte Vecchio and El Duomo. Venice? St. Mark's Square is action central.

Well, in Bangkok, everyone knows Sukhumvit Road and the Bangkok Transit System (BTS) Skytrain that goes from the National Stadium and MBK (seven floors of everything technological), past Paragon Mall and Ploenchit, past Nana Plaza, Emporium, Ekkamai, and all the way out to On Nut. Nana Plaza at Soi 2 and Soi Cowboy at Soi 23 are landmarks for farangs (foreigners), like the Reeperbahn in Hamburg and the red light district, De Wallen, in Amsterdam—all for the same reason: sex, in every size, color, shape, gender, age, and dress that you can imagine and a lot that I never thought of. Mark it on the map, and take a walk along Sukhumvit Road to discover Thai versions of sexiness, entertainment, and gender-bending. Actually, the fun is that your imagination will be stretched in ways that make you gasp or smile.

There are no vehicles allowed on Soi Cowboy at night, because it is lined with bars, go-gos, discos, street performers, an occasional elephant, people cooking an amazing variety of food in carts, and hundreds of young women trying to hustle some money for the way they look and the promises they make. It is the tainted, touristy side of Thailand where the women ply their trade and the foreigners come for fantasies. It is a concentrated place for the free market economy based on sex and booze so it does not pollute the rest of the city, where supply and demand meet, where some gawk, some smile, and some lose their money, but where most get what they are looking for. So business is good, and the girls and customers keep coming back for the beer, shows, sex, money, and thrills. It makes capitalism in the developing world look like Girl Scouts selling cookies.

What did I need? Adventure? TLC? Sex? Yeah, all that, but I was curious too. What is a go-go bar like in Thailand? Are all the girls brown, skinny, and short? What is it like with a Thai prostitute? How much do they charge? What do I say? Yeah, I was very naive—a midwesterner from America lost in the lights, noise, and short skirts of Bangkok. There was a lot to see and do, and I wanted to make up for lost years and lost youth. It does not take long to stroll Soi Cowboy from end to end, especially if you don't stop to drink along the way, watch the dancers, or have a quickie. So I went up one side and back the other of Soi Cowboy in thirty minutes and was still sober and curious. Clearly, I was a newbie farang overwhelmed with sex, music, booze, and open opportunities to do everything I thought about when I was sixteen, and quite a few things that didn't occur to me until much later.

I wondered what Nana Plaza was like, so I walked the twenty blocks to get there. Distance was not the problem, but my senses were overwhelmed along the way. I smelled the fumes from motorbikes and buses as they roared and belched along Sukhumvit in...