An Ode to The Wall, (and an Observation of Today’s Performative Gem Dealing)

An essay for a bar, or time, that doesn't really exist anymore.

There used to be a place in Bangkok called The Wall.

Not the Pink Floyd one. Not a metaphor. An actual bar off of Silom where the gem dealers drank. It's gone now. It closed years ago and the building is now used for something else, and I won't tell you what because it doesn't matter. What matters is what The Wall was, which was the headquarters of an entire era of the trade, outside of normal trade hours.

It was where, in the 1970s and 1980s and into the 1990s, as my family once told me before my first trip, you went after the markets closed. You went because everyone else you wanted to see was there. The Thais who had cornered the heating game. The Sri Lankan exporters are in town for a week. The Burmese guys who came over the border with rough in their pockets. The Australians, British, Americans and Israelis who came east in their twenties to learn the trade and stayed twenty years. A melting pot of dealers.

My Opa, Boomsy, heavy man, heavier laugh, hands that had been in the business since before the war. Bob Stevenson, the legend, pre-eye patch and all, who I genuinely thought had passed years ago until I ran into him in Bangkok two months ago and he hollered at me from across the room like no time had passed. Khun Chuck, gone now. My uncle Harry. A dozen others whose names you'd recognize if you were in the trade then and wouldn't if you weren't.

The drinking was heavy and everything was heavy. Deals could be done in cash over a cocktail napkin. The phone calls came on the bar phone, the ones with the long chords that are all but extinct today. The wives, if there were wives, were home somewhere in another time zone. The talk was about stones. What was coming out of Mogok? What the Thais had done to the latest Sri Lankan rough. Who was buying what in Tucson? Who had been ripped off in India. What the Chinese were paying for the finest Muzo emerald that month. There were stories that started “in ’78” and ended around 4am. There were lessons in those stories you could not get from a book.

You learned the trade by being in that room. You learned who lied. You learned who paid. You learned which dealers’ parcels were always five percent better than they showed and which were always five percent worse. You learned that the man with the loudest laugh was usually the most careful buyer, and the quiet one in the corner was the one to watch. You learned by osmosis, by accident, by drinking with people who had already done the thing you wanted to do and being patient enough to listen.

That world is gone.

It's gone in a way that I think people who came up after it don't fully understand. The Wall closed. The dealers got older. Many died of various causes, some retired to Phuket or Vancouver or Tel Aviv, some just stopped coming out at night because their wives won and, frankly, thank God. 

The new generation doesn't drink the way the old generation did, which is healthier and also a real loss, because something happened in those rooms that does not happen on WhatsApp. Information moved. Reputations were made and unmade. You could not fake your way into a parcel because the man with the parcel has watched you for a year before he showed it to you. The trade had a shape, and the shape was a room, and the room had a door, and you were either inside or you weren’t.

What's replaced it, if anything has, is Nadimos.

Nadimos is the gem dealer’s hangout in Bangkok now; not the only one, but the one that matters. Lebanese food, a nice set lunch menu of the day, a corner booth that always seems to have someone you know in it, walls lined with gem books with the kind of photographs that make you feel like you're in the right place. The food is great. The room is warm. The dealers come in every lunch time, or after the markets and there are deals being done, quietly, the way deals are always done. Over coffee. Over a lunch special. On the back of a paper menu.

It's not The Wall. It can't be. The era that produced The Wall is over and you cannot reverse-engineer it. But Nadimos is something. A place where the people who actually do this work still gather, still drink, still talk stones, still carry the line back to the era that taught them.

What I want to say, and I will say it carefully because it sounds bitter and isn’t meant to, is that the trade has been replaced, in a lot of places, by the performance of the trade, on places like instagram.

There is a new generation of “gem dealers” who saw the Instagram of it before they saw the work of it. They post the parcels. They post the trips. They post the stones with the hand model and the perfect lighting. They walk the shows, selfie sticks in hand. Some of them are doing the actual work underneath the post and the post is just marketing. Fine. That’s the world now. But many of them are not. Many of them are doing the post work. They saw a video of a guy in Sri Lanka with a parcel and thought, “I could be that guy,” and they bought a ticket and a ring light and are now performing gem dealing for an audience without ever having sat in a room where the deal got done. Without ever having waited a year for a dealer to show them the real parcel. Without ever having eaten the curry that poisoned them and gone back to work anyway. Without ever having sat in a barred room in Tana with a guard behind them. Without ever having been at The Wall, or its current equivalent, long enough for the old guys to stop watching them sideways. 

You can tell. You can always tell. The stones tell you. The way they talk about origin tells you. The certificates they cite tell you. The way they price a piece tells you. Too high because they bought it too high, or too low because they don’t know what they have. The trade is small and the trade knows. The performance reaches the public. The work doesn’t. That’s a problem for the public more than for us, because the public is the one being sold a story by people who learned the story from other people’s stories.

I’m not against new dealers. I am one, in the long view of this trade. Every generation has to break in. My nostalgia tells me you drink with the old guys while they are still here to drink with. You learn to eat with your right hand. You learn to take the calculator off the table when you stand up. You learn that the man who tells you the longest story has the most to teach you and the man who tells you the shortest one has the most to sell you.

The Wall is gone. Boomsy is gone. Khun Chuck is gone. Uncle Harry is gone. Bob Stevenson, against all expectations, is not gone. He is still going, eye patch intact, a living link to the room I came up in. Every time I see him I am reminded that the era ends when the last person from it stops telling the stories, and I have a responsibility to keep telling them as long as I can.

Which is, in the end, why we are writing this blog. Not to own keywords. Not to be discovered. To put on the record the trade as it actually exists and as it actually existed, and to do it in our voice while the voice still has the people in it who taught us how to use it.

The next one’s at Nadimos. Corner booth. Bring a parcel.