By John Stapleton
Bangkok is a city full of expats, and Chris Evans, who had been there for decades living both the high life and the low life, from being one of the city’s most sought after male escorts, at a time when European escorts were highly sought after in the city of black-eyed angels, to years literally living on the street, from professional English teacher to an actor with a role in a number of films, from kindly to mischievous to outright devious, from shrewdly sad to philosopher king, he knew the city backwards. Chris was one of the most fascinating and endearing characters I have ever encountered. I only knew him in his final years, but even in those years he was at once kind, charismatic and intelligent. He told many a remarkable story. It fell to me to pull together a Memorial leaflet. This is it.
IN MEMORIAM
“When I remember Chris I think of his John Huston smile. He was a handsome devil, tall and debonair. I think of an American frontiersman, a guy that would lift his hat when you got off the postal coach in the gold rush town.
“He was the founder of two meetings: Who can say that in Bangkok?
“He didn’t want to be locked up in a job in Wal-Mart like most Californians are.
IN MEMORIAM CHRISTOPHER EVANS
(../../…. – ../../2012).
INTRODUCTION
They called him “Tall Chris”; the people who knew him in Bangkok.
His sister describes him as “King of the Bad Boys” when he was growing up in Berkeley Hills, California.
He was later, in a sense, to become King of the Bad Boys in Bangkok.
Everyone, everyone who ever knew him could tell bad stories about Chris. The stories were better shared with laughter at a wake than rendered in print for gossip.
On his passing, what surprised people the most was the outpouring of affection for this errant soul.
“He helped me,” “He helped me,” individual after individual in the sub-culture for recovering alcoholics of Thailand’s capital stepped up to say; proudly declaring themselves to have been a friend.
Chris died alone in an apartment he had miraculously acquired.
He might have died alone but he did not live alone.
The number of people he knew rivaled the prince of any kingdom.
While he came from a comfortable upper middle class background in America, Chris spent years on the streets of Bangkok as a street alcoholic, with no money, nowhere to live, without even a passport.
His affection and respect for the people he met on the streets remained with him into sobriety – a period of his life in which he enjoyed various successes working as an extra in Thai movies and as a teacher all over Thailand.
Even when he had money, Chris’s bohemian life-style continued. He patched together a living from various sources, including working at all sorts of odd jobs. As often as not he relied on “the kindness of strangers”. And he displayed little regard for his health, continuing to regard the take-away meals available from the “Seven” stores that dot Bangkok as more than sufficient.
Prior to hitting the streets Chris had lived an even more colourful life amongst some of Bangkok’s richest Thais and amongst the litany of colorful characters of Bangkok’s netherworld of bars and sex workers.
But it was life on the streets of one of the world’s most challenging, beautiful and ever fascinating cities which shaped him more than any other experience. That left him with an understanding for those who fall through the cracks, who live on the pavements of any giant city, who cannot abide the orthodoxies of middle class working life and who much prefer the streets to the comforts any hotel can provide.
You could be walking with him down some non-descript Soi off the main Bangkok thoroughfare of Sukhumvit when Chris would point to a pile of boxes and garbage accruing in a street corner and say: “She’s a marvelous woman. You couldn’t meet a nicer person. She would always bring me food and make sure I was OK when I was on the down and out.”
No normal person would even notice the wizened face at the center of the boxes, much less know her by name or speak to her kindly.
Below are scenes from an earlier sunset.
Chris’s sister Caitlin says: “These are pictures of a very important view. This is from our family home in the Berkeley Hills looking west at sunset to the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco. This view was in Chris’ mind always as we grew up with it and lived in it. It’s important to his spirit.”
Amongst the tributes:
“When I remember Chris I think of his John Huston smile. He was a handsome devil, tall and debonair. I think of an American frontiersman, a guy that would lift his hat when you got off the postal coach in the gold rush town.
“It is as if Japan and Thailand were the new frontier for him.
“Chris could see those who were hurting in the (recovery) rooms even though often they are trying to be invisible. He saw me for example. I was lost and I needed someone to talk to but I was too proud to admit it.
“The champion of the downtrodden, Chris fought for the right of those who would join a meeting in Bangkok but have no trust fund or pension.
“The champion of the downtrodden, Chris fought for the right of those who would join a meeting in Bangkok but have no trust fund or pension.
“He was the founder of two meetings: Who can say that in Bangkok?
“Twenty years from now, someone who has been sleeping rough will walk into a meeting that too tall Chris founded and hopefully be spared the hell that is the final stage of alcoholism.
“Sometimes people need a break.
“Sometimes people need a break.
“They say that to make someone trustworthy you have to trust them first. He was tough, almost sought out adversity. Anything was better in his mind, even sleeping rough in Bangkok, as long as sister freedom was there.
“He didn’t want to be locked up in a job in Wal-Mart like most Californians are.
“The streets of the world were his oyster and he knew there was gold in them there hills.
“God speed Chris. I hope when I reach the other side you will be there to greet me with that smile and show me around the new town.”
Chris with big his sister Bronwyn, 1965.
Chris at the Beach, 1966.
Ever energetic, Chris’s love of and understanding for the under-belly of Bangkok life and for those struggling to gain some sort of stability in their own lives, led him to start or attempt to start several different recovery meetings, with varying degrees of success.
He was the co-founder of one of Bangkok’s smallest and longest running meetings, at the Park Hotel in Soi Seven off Sukhumvit.
Bangkok’s aging but well known Park Hotel in the heart of the tourist district of Nana.
A dispute over the lack of formality, structure and financial accountability at the Park Hotel meeting led to the breakaway group known as the Ambassador Hotel, now the largest and most formal of the recovery meetings frequented by foreigners in Bangkok.
While not to everyone’s taste the meeting is regarded as a beacon of traditional “hard-core” recovery, as a lighthouse for alcoholics attempting to establish a sober life in a new country and in a city replete with many temptations such as Bangkok.
The persistence of the English language meetings has now led to the establishment of Thai language meetings and the adaption into the Thai Buddhist culture of the “Twelve Step” programs originally developed within a fundamentalist Christian tradition in the America of the 1930s.
A memorial meeting for Chris was held at The Park Hotel in Chris’s honor in late August.
Around 40 people attended.
It was more attendees than the meeting had ever seen and went well beyond the usual allotted duration of one hour.
While there were occasional references to the more colorful side of Chris’s life – “the bastard left owing me 4,000 baht” got an instant laugh of recognition for example –the tributes were in turn compassionate, sad and affectionate.
And that line, “he helped me a lot”, was often repeated.
Unlike the more comfortable members of any recovery program, Chris always had an eye out to help the new comer.
Sometimes he would cause controversy by dragging drunken Thai men from a nearby local whiskey stall into the meeting.
Always looking from the outside on the comfortable middle classes from whence he came, Chris dismissed his critics with an airy wave of the hand as nothing but simpletons, hypocrites, would-be’s if they could-be’s, as people who had no idea what it was like to genuinely suffer the throws of addiction and alcoholism and hence no compassion for those less fortunate than themselves.
As one of the speakers recalled, Chris had established the Park Hotel meeting after persisting with trying to establish a meeting on another tourist mecca, Bangkok’s Koh San Road, once a center for the backpacking set and now a major tourist destination for budget travellers.
RESPECTABLE CHRIS AS A TEACHER
Chris: in his later years.
Chris: in his later years.
Chris, in his final year of life, beginning to show signs of his final illness and having already survived a bout with cancer, still managed to make it down to his beloved Pattaya, where he had been a frequent visitor over the years.
Pattaya, one of Thailand’s best known centers of sin, is now busily trying to rebadge itself as a cultural center.
Wat Suthit where Chris’s funeral service was held.