The Incredible Indelible Origin Story of Yawk

Part I - The exotic sports cars and ice hotels, the ballroom dancing and titillating celebrity trysts, the thousands of Japanese girls gyrating in miniskirts, the bloody, gruesome unsolved crimes, the deluge of beer, the journey into the inexplicable superfantastic.

Written by Johnny Speedcakes | Mandalay, Burma | January 28, 2022

The horrific bloodletting of an English backpacker at the hands (and fangs) of an apparent werewolf, the gatecrashing of Sukhumvit's most illusive and exclusive club resplendent with thousands of Japanese schoolgirls dressed in miniskirts and bouncing pigtails, sparkling glasses of 1959 Dom Pérignon under pluming swaths of ethereal aurora borealis, an impromptu, romantic encounter with Hollywood royalty in hallowed, moonlit gardens, and the strange and peculiar rearing of divine inspiration's head out of the beguiling ether - how all of these factors collided in blissful, harmonious synergy on the night that Yawk Community Bar was conceived and bequeathed onto the joyous world will hereby be explained.

The story, in so much as historians, detectives, podcasters, and general enthusiasts have been able to piece it together, begins with four principle characters: Nong Serena, Pee Tan, Nong Kitty Boom Boom, and Pee Brett. The location is uniformly agreed on by even the most casual and careless of researcher: Sukhumvit Soi 22 in Bangkok, Thailand.

The principle characters met here on the evening of June 20, 2019, on this quaint lane of ramshackle bars, massage parlors, street dogs, homeless farangs (general whities from origins stereotypically vague) cleaned out by their Issan ladies, and street stall food vendors. The protagonists met there to catch up with one another, cane beers, blow off steam, ignite gossip, and generally kickback and enjoy a brief respite from the incessant responsibilities of life. They had no idea that they would soon be altering the history of bars on planet earth with the opening of Yawk Community Bar, the most incredible, relaxed, friendly, and kickback of bars in the history of bars. No, they had no inkling about what they were soon to gift the world nor what was in store for them on this night.

As mentioned earlier, this evening would be a strange confluence of events; the type of events that commonly only occur when stars are aligned, moons are full, and leaves bustle ominously upon mysterious winds. For instance, just a stone's throw from where our merry gang of characters were plowing into Singha, Beer Lao, and tequila, the homicide department would the next day be slogging through a pool of the sickly, pungent blood that had once belonged to the pale corpse of a backpacker lying on the floor with the better part of his neck chewed off. In a city filled with bizarre and bloody murders, this one would generously rank among the most difficult to explain, and as of this writing, has yet to be solved or even partially rationalized. Most peculiar, aside from the neck chewing, were hellish, crimson fingerprints smeared about the room in an apparently mad and failed attempt at escape. They wailed their desperate, violent, muted song all over the walls, the dresser, the TV, and, most inexplicably, the ceiling. How in the hell had he clawed at the ceiling? This thought would run through the minds of the investigators as they stood in the pool of blood and gawked quizzically upwards. They had no answers.

The victim's passport would still be there in the room along with his wallet, money, backpack filled with Beer Chang tank-tops, fake O'Neill swim shorts, and a battle-damaged iPhone X. Confoundedly, it would all be there. The only thing the backpacker would be missing was roughly 5 pints of blood and a pulse. Oh, and of course, a chunk of his neck.

The Thai police loved a caper like this. No leads. No motive. Bloody claw marks on the ceiling. A crazy ass vampire role play scenario. A tourist traveling alone. No witnesses. No prior murders in the area matching the modus operandi. Security camera footage that showed the victim entering the hotel with what could only be described as a lithe, phantom-like personage with long black hair draped like a mop across her face. This eerie footage showed them walking through the lobby, and then - nothing. Static. The security camera system had abruptly gone down and was off for the rest of the night. In cases involving mystery Mossad agents with net worths of half a billion dollars and their own Caribbean sex trafficking party islands, or when mystery passenger aircraft execute video game maneuvers and crash into government defense buildings, sure - security cameras could magically disable themselves at crucial moments. But for this dime-a-dozen, wandering backpacker with a few thousands pounds in his account, a “nobody” with “nobody” parents, and not knowing a soul in Bangkok, this was an inexplicably random and perniciously unexplainable event.

At any rate, it stands to figure that our merry band of characters were potentially crossing paths or even rubbing shoulders with a vicious murderer that evening. She (most likely, according to those citing the scant security camera footage) or he (who knows) or it (we really have no idea, so why not) was prowling around the shadows and cigarette smoke of Soi 22 like Jack the Ripper in Whitechapel that evening just as our fateful collection of heroes were. Who knows how differently this evening could have played out had one of our characters gone home alone early, taken a left instead of a right, walked down the wrong alley, or taken a piss behind a dumpster instead of waiting for the bathroom to become vacant. Death was on the prowl that night, insatiably so, but somehow, fortuitously, the specter passed like a stoic, vapid cloud over our principle actors and looked elsewhere for a wayward child of Pharaoh.

Free of the potential destiny of swimming in a pool of his own blood either by mere chance or providence, Pee Brett would instead later that evening find himself walking up a crystalline staircase flanked on both sides by thousands of gyrating Japanese girls. All of the girls would be wearing identical white sailor uniforms with miniskirts and breakneck platforms shoes sparkling in glitter. The staircase would climb up through a sea of strobe lights and ethereal mist which rose from a massive, pulsating dance hall below. Hard yes, Pee Brett would say to himself as he passed each gyrating, miniskirt-clad girl. Hard yes, hard yes, medium yes, hard yes, soft no, hard yes, hard yes. Fuck me, he would stop and declare to himself, that's already 200 hard yeses I've passed! This is the best club in the universe!

Pee Tan's evening would play out slightly differently. Not bathed in a tempest sea of flashing strobe lights, he would find himself submerged in a cool, pristinely silent breeze under a crystalline utopia of stars and pluming swaths of ethereal gossamer sipping Dom Pérignon at 10 degrees celsius before the gently lapping flames of a cozy fire pit.

Not to be outdone, Nong Serena would find herself dressed to the nines in the middle of a resplendent gala ball. The ballroom would be gilded alabaster and grand with large classical columns running up to an ornamented ceiling decorated with rococo motifs of richly entwined vine leaves and dazzlingly ornate ivy above a shimmering floor of inlaid parquet. From the center of the grand room would hang a celestial chandelier of mesmerizing beauty raining showers of glimmering crystal and droplets of starlight upon all the merry guests waltzing elegantly below. Swirling about the ceiling would swim a discovery of winged pastel deities and demiurges floating amid billowing peach-hued clouds radiant in sunburst. Along the side of the room ran a row of ivory white french doors below an array of splendid arched windows.

Nong Serena would be swinging with graceful twirls and dips to Strauss's "Tales from the Vienna Woods" as she passed elegantly from one tuxedoed and masked gentlemen to another. The dance floor and her participants would look like the colorful and flourishing inner gears of a churning, celestial pocket watch. Nong Serena's cheeks would be flushed apricot, and her breast would heave in her ballroom gown, sparkling like wedding cake in its pearl and diamond vestments.

From one tall, handsome stranger to another, she would spin about in bliss, the orchestral music reverberating all throughout her body as it moved her effortlessly, as if commanding her through unseen marionette strings or magical flute. She would waft about in an uncaring dream until one masked gentlemen awoke her. He would do so abruptly with a piercing gaze emanating from his blue sapphire eyes. They bore through his mask and reached straight into her.

“Serena, it's you!”

Serena would be startled. Who was this strange man?

“It is you! I knew it! No mask could hide those beautiful eyes from me.”

Speechless would be Serena as she peered at his burning azure portals, all the while swaying and spinning, albeit tensely, in his granite arms and determined lead.

“Come with me, Serena. To the veranda for some fresh air.”

Before Nong Serena would even have a chance to respond, this man would take hold of her arm and lead her out through the throngs of costumed revelers toward two of the stately French doors. The doors would open out to a large veranda illuminated by a sea of candelabras and a whispering galaxy of flickering flames. The man would pull Serena gently to a corner of the veranda ebbing gently between the warm ambiance of flame and the cool sheen of moonlight. It would be here in the semi-intimacy of the shadows that the man would undo the ribbon behind his mask and slowly reveal himself. Serena's jaw would drop. There, standing before her, was Bradley Cooper.

“Serena, I've waited so long to…”

Before Bradley would be able to finish what he was saying, Serena's right hand would scream across his face in a pernicious slap.

“You sonuvabitch!” Serena would spit vehemently.

Bradley Cooper's face would smart in bright, stinging pain and his eyes would grow wide as two full moons. He would stare at Serena like a confused puppy dog in stunned bewilderment.

That leaves us with Nong Kitty Boom Boom. Baffling and mysterious to scholars and researchers, little if anything can actually be ascertained and disclosed about her magical (if indeed it was anything resembling magical) evening. Did she return to her hotel room, eat instant noodles, watch TV, travel to a magic kingdom in the Carpathians to reside over a plenum of unicorns, check her Instagram feed, pass out in the toilet - your guess is as good as mine. We know only that she appeared fresh-faced the next day to work, “aided” Pee Tan and Nong Serena in executing their boutique hotel event (mainly by drinking cappuccino, checking her appearance in her phone, and standing around glaring at people) before more or less disappearing completely from the annuls of history.

At any rate, with the exception of Nong Kitty Boom Boom's whereabouts, how did this strange menagerie of occurrences come to fruition on this magical night - the night of Yawk Community Bar's creation? And how did this confluence of seemingly dissociated streams strangely, one way or another, meld into the creation of Yawk Community Bar - Chiang Mai's most cherished drinking establishment?

Well, enough of the preamble, my dear readers. Let us dive in and find out how all of this occurred and how your beloved beer haven, Yawk Community Bar, came to be.