Stickman's Guide
to Bangkok
Welcome To Cambodia
By Korski
South Africa Hotel Guide • Park Hyatt Johannesburg Hotel • Park Plaza Hotel • Pembury Plaza Hotel • Rosebank Hotel Johannesburg Alfred looks over at me and smiles and I see what I've seen since we met several hours earlier: a huge oval head that is sparkling scarlet and lumpier than a floor covered with marbles of a thousand shapes. He's got the worst case of acne I've seen in a decade. Then, too, there's the well-defined purple monkey bite the size of a razor blade on the right side of his neck. A souvenir, I surmise, from the Thai girlfriend who kept him drinking rum cokes and scotch nearly around the clock, for thirty-six hours straight, he claimed. What makes Alfred's story so plausible is that he's twenty-two, is 197 cm. tall, and everything about his muscular body says that he's got all of those robust Dutch genes that produce the world's largest men and women.
I don't have to ask him why he's smiling. We've got the same thought. I'm sure we do. We're through one round and halfway into round two of our Angkor beers and our food hasn’t arrived. Fifteen minutes ago we ordered a "Happy Pizza" and we're eager to get to it, see how long it's going to take to give us a buzz, everything we won't get from this weak piss water we're drinking.
We're here at the Koh Kong River Side Hotel after a long delay at the border because of some problems that TJ, sitting at the next table and brooding over unspeakable secrets, had because his visa from his previous visit to Cambodia in December of last year mysteriously went missing from his passport. The chunky Cambodian with a massive chest and that killing Khmer bearing that's enough to scare the shit out of Mike Tyson owns the okay stamps to let you in or keep you out at this far southern border. He was more than a little unhappy about TJ's missing paste-in visa.
The featured "Happy Pizza" is right there on the eighth page of the hotel menu. For 350 baht we get a nine-incher with tomato sauce, morazella, two toppings, and a nearly seamless carpet of marijuana that lies between the bread and the cheese. Here and there throughout Cambodia marijuana is known as ganja, a word that has now made its way into the international language of hard and soft drug users and will probably do as much to insure Bob Marley's legacy and the overreaching geography of Jamaica as will anything having to do with reggae.
Let's order another one, I say to Alfred, the first one still nowhere in sight. We don't want to lose a step or two after we knock off the first one and find out it's not enough and the buzz is starting to feel oooooooooh so good.
Two more? he says.
I look over at TJ, the mystery man whose unrevealed troubles I want to know more about, and will with any luck before the night is out and we've piled the square varnished cut-wood table at this outdoor breezeless eatery with Angkor and Tiger beer cans and Happy Pizza platters and who knows what else.
We agree to order one more. For now.
Alfred reaches for the menu and I think he's still thinking about the rum and scotch and the monkey biting Thai girl who simply couldn't be satisfied. He wants something stronger than Coors Extra Light to wash down the cheese and the ganja and the anchovies, and maybe some memories too, confessing as he did earlier that it wasn't such a good idea to go without a condom with the two-day or the three-day girlfriend with more one-night boyfriends than pimples on Alfred's massive frame. It just slipped it in and I wasn't thinking, I guess, he said. She said don't worry, so right then I didn't worry. I'm a little worried now, he adds.
Yeah, the Cocktail Menu. The one that Alfred’s fingering. The pages that followed the Eating Menu and the pizza possibilities. Not something for polite company or those easily offended. Drinks with names like: Leg Spreader, Speedball, Skunk Pussy, Duck Fuck, Ebola, Dick Hard, Hot Bitch, Horny Bull. Cambodia grab-ass juice on the far southern frontier. And who knows what the frontier becomes when I find myself among Aussies and Brits and skewered ratbags in Phnom Penh, two-bit losers on the run from alimony and white whale wives and the law.
We're finishing Happy Pizza No. 1 when John from Quebec City, who’s sitting alone at an adjoining table, joins us at his own invitation. He’s been eyeing our ganja-spiced meal. John’s small, stocky, barefoot, forty, and has a large bush of black hair on his thick and blunt face. He’s also got an accent thicker than week-old frozen pea soup.
John wastes no time letting us know that the most important thing to know about him is that he's an alcoholic and a drug addict, and he knows more about how to mix mind-bending chemicals to get just the right effect than anyone in Southeast Asia: the screaming highs, the easy long run in low gear, the unconscious charge through dank tunnels lined with vampire bats and vermillion nose worms. Second on John's list of personal particulars are some facts you have to know and if you don't want to know them you're going to know them anyway. He's been on the road in Southeast Asia ten years, and just look at me--he says. Don’t I look like a cross between Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs?
Not at all, I think, imagining Kerouac's balloon-sized liver in a bottle of bourbon, the nether world stare in Burroughs dead eyes after poking himself with another needle loaded with smack.
John knows all the beaches, all the drugs worth taking, and all the theory worth knowing about how to mix pharmacy offerings that anyone can buy anytime in Cambodia without even making a pretense of having a prescription. Prozac, Valium, Zantac, Librium, Viagra--a list that goes on and on, no end in sight. And then, of course, there's ya-ba, or yuma as it's called here in Cambodia. Meth spiced with mercury and other unfriendly poisons thrown in for fun. The addict's killing field, John says. NEVER touch that shit, man, he shakes. I mean never! You won't come back whole. More like popcorn wrapped in peanut butter. Sand on a beach with too many people and no brotherhood, man. Get me?
John's mostly full of shit, you soon realize, and way too much mouth. He just can't stop talking about himself or the novel he's never going to write. Or how the Thai mafia was after his head a couple of months back somewhere south of Pattaya because he made the wrong kind of deal with people who don't like being fucked with. John's got it all figured out: life is all about a smile. You give a smile, you get a smile, and that's the day, man. Got it.
Got it, John.
Understanding time as Einstein never could, man, he rattles on. Understand?
John’s on a roll.
It's all in the mix, you see, putting the pharmo goodies together in the right order. Take one good example. Start with ten or twenty mgs. of Prozac, two pills ten minutes apart. Follow with a couple of Tiger or Angkor beers. Then pop one, maybe two, 30 mg. Prozacs before you get another Angkor in your blood. Three days and another five or six pills in quick succession, 20 or 30 mgs., take your choice, don't matter, and then you'll be cruising baby. Not even thinking about where you are and never doubting that you'll see the sun whenever and wherever and forever every time you take your hand out of your pocket and stick it in front of your nose. But then, hey, if you change the mix and throw in a couple of Penegras or Kamagras, no telling what might happen, right man? Dick times three or four and every fucking world record in sight.
He helps himself to two slices of Happyland. Which means it's time to order a couple more of them because TJ has temporarily come out of his funk and decided to find a cool spot in his mind.
More John blabber. More local names for the pharmo goodies and how to cook them in the head. And hey, we can get them right down the street not far from the barefoot kids without noses sitting in muddy pools and beside the stick shacks without front doors and the piles of garbage that have been around since Pol Pot began his rampage.
The TJ story began back in Thailand in the first half hour in the border-bound mini-bus not long after we began exchanging tales and lies about personal histories, TJ telling me he was a civilian contractor living in Monterey and working out of the Naval Post Graduate School. He was in Thailand helping the military set up satellites and monitoring devices to keep a watch on some of its borders. In particular, the porous frontier with Myanmar in the north around Chiang Rai where the forested gates are always open to opium and ya-ba and other delicious mind deserts. TJ's no pussy. No sir, not at all. The Thai dudes he was working with wouldn't climb a shaky two-hundred foot tower to install a tracking device. But TJ did; he’ll tell you twice over he did. And he stayed up there three hours with a single hook around the top rung. No sweat. I never think about dying, he purrs. It happens, it happens.
Good war zone talk.
TJ also helped in the tsunami relief in Phuket. Not a nice scene, he opines. Bloated and smelling bodies. Black corpses dug up after two weeks because some Swedes got all upset about proper burials, but now it was too late and you can't imagine the putrid sight. Never going to identify half those bagged bodies. No way, man. Not in a hundred million years.
Before we got to the Thai border, TJ and I got talking about Cambodia, the Wild West, Thailand thirty years ago. That country a little outside of time and ordinary geographies. Where everything goes.
Not everything, I say.
He comes back with, Only thing gets you jail time is being with little girls in the wrong places. With good reason. Thinking: touch my young son and I’ll cut your nuts off and feed them to my dog.
TJ reads me and kicks his sullen mind sideways. There's a long silence.
You hear about the Bush laws on child prostitution? TJ says.
Yeah, I say. Also heard they got some old guy near where I live even before he left the U.S. Set everything up on the Internet. Sick shit, you ask me.
TJ bites his upper lip. He turns to his two failed marriages, some kids going to college, getting engaged to a Thai woman and doing the Apology with the joss sticks and coming up with a dowry of $2,000 and a heavy gold chain and watch for mom in the bottom of the bucket. Then discovering that she had a couple of other farang on the hook. A cunt. A thorough going cunt.
He found out by breaking into her hotmail account, because he knew her favorite drink. As calmly as he could under the circumstances, he went to all the future husbands and told them that she was taking every one of them for a long ride to a dumpsite of lies and deceptions and unhappy endings.
At the border it’s the sweltering tropics, that country where sweat knows no kindness, and never a halftime. We’re soon hit by a swarm of young hustlers. They grab for our bags, our legs, our attentions. Bags and legs and attentions meaning money, of course.
Fifteen feet away is the window to get a Thai exit stamp. I pull my passport out of my front pocket, which is starting to look like a comic book too long in a nursery full of ADD rascals.
TJ stops and murmurs, I don't think I want to put up with all this hassle.
Relax, I say. He's going to stamp our blue books, smile sweetly, and then we'll be off for a short walk to the border. Won't cost you a dime.
Naw, he says. I can't deal with it. His shoulders drop three inches and his knees wobble, like he’d spent the last week in a wheelchair.
I'm looking at him, hard now. Five-seven, strong, forty-five, short-cropped black curly hair with a prominent widow's peak. Tough fucker, I think. Wouldn't want to tangle with him, no way. He went up that 200-foot ladder on the fast step, I know he did. Then why does he sound like a dying old man, afraid off putting out the night light in his own bedroom?
I don't know, man, he says again, as I verbally drag him along. Wondering. Curious. Getting more curious by the minute. Knowing there's more than a small story here.
A young kid with a clean tan sport shirt pulls a steel cart with our bags. He’s moving at twice our pace. Extortion is just down the road. You can smell it. We were stupid enough not to make a verbal contract with easily remembered numbers.
It’s a dusty walk of a hundred meters, some torn flags flying high on the right, a guard station home to lonely and hungry flies and unnamed vermin. The immigration post lies off to the left. Leftover barracks, no a/c, a sure sign that no one wants the local currency. Pretty paper with large numbers that go south by the hour.
I walk in, force a smile, hand the skinny lady in military dress with glasses hanging on the end of her nose my passport. She’s got to be pushing the high sixties. I don't have a photo, I tell her. She gives me this kissy, toothy smile. Almost solicitous.
Standing outside on the wooden platform, no idea what it’s going to cost for a visa, and not caring, I move my eyes toward TJ He’s got this pained expression on his face. Like he just got a fax from his wife of twenty years saying bye-bye and I emptied the bank accounts and sold everything of value and I bet you can't find me.
What's wrong? I say.
I think I'm going to go back. You want to buy my hotel and ferry tickets?
I don't plan this far ahead, I say. Then add: I’m never sure which road I'm going to take, often change my mind at the last minute.
He shuffles his feet, does a girly three step. He’s turning white when he's supposed to be turning red and drippy. Like Alfred. Like me.
My name's not on the hotel and the ferry tickets, he says. He folds them, unfolds them. Hoping, I sense, that I’m a buyer that will rescue him from the growing mystery he won’t reveal.
I'll sell them to you for 2,000 baht.
Relax, I say, sensing he’ll drop to a 1,000 and then 500 if I breathe hard. This gate’s a cakewalk, I say. Nothing like the shit they give you in Burma.
The old lady with the corrupt smile and too many teeth and bones everywhere has an arm that reaches to my belt. I pay 1,200 baht for a visa and a photo that'll be taken in another five minutes. Shot through a slimy window with a camera the size of my fist that looks like a color adjusting gizmo for a computer screen. I pull on the underside of my nose and my eyes go to the floor and catch a glimpse of a dull brass roach lying under the table, right below where my money begins a one-way journey into oblivion.
TJ’s seated at a wooden table, trying to answer some very pointed questions about what the fuck happened to that visa we pasted in your passport on your last visa?
It got wet and fell out, TJ says, lamely. The passport got wet, he adds, more lame than ever.
Be more creative, I think. Tell everyone how you climbed that shaking tower. Inform this Khmer asshole that the kid you don't have tore it out and used it for a school report.
I know he’s lying through his nose. Now looking like an amateur mule about to shit his double-bagged drug load all over the floor.
The questions continue, repeat.
I remember our brief conversation, the one about fucking with young boys and girls getting you serious jail time.
TJ is outside again. He’s leaning against an insubstantial wall, holding himself up. I'm thinking he's going to make a run for the border. A hundred in ten flat and FUCK YOU GUYS, CATCH ME IF YOU CAN!
There are more questions. Alfred and I are captives to TJ's problem. Maybe we’re going to be part of the problem too. Who knows where this shit will land?
There are phone calls. Cell phone calls. No computer checks into a data base because all of these guys are clueless natives in modern loincloths.
TJ's asking around to see how much it will cost to get a taxi, anything that moves that will get him in one piece back to Thailand. The first number he hears is seven times the going rate. He’s nailed inside the money squeezebox. A sweet time indeed for five-foot predators who smell that perfume that goes by the name of Desperation.
I'm wandering around, taking shots of little kids on the ground, full face photos of a boy who hustled me earlier for money. Then one of a military sort with his shirt off, back to me, cell phone at ear, standing in front of a shithouse that's only a hole in the ground behind some boards. That kind that reminds me of outback Mexico, cloud-high Bolivia, Cuba near the coop sugar mills south of La Florida that got me into the kind of trouble I didn't want—behind locked doors, no nose on a written statement I was told to sign if I didn’t want to be eating pig shit for dinner.TJ gets his visa and he's got a half smile that’s frozen in time. You can see that he's still shaking inside, not sure he should be here. Not sure where he is. Still asking if I want to buy what I don't have and will soon need.
We're in a taxi and heading for the hotel where we're going to get several Happy Pizzas and lots of beer and way too much John mouth and half-cocked pharmo drug theories. TJ's sitting next to me because all legs Alfred with a good three inches or thereabouts on my six feet is up front and still searching for leg room. Minding his own business. Only that stupid barebacking with that Thai honey to worry about.
TJ smirks. He says, I had to write them an apology on the back on the visa application. I wrote; I am sorry. I won't do it again. I love Cambodia. He pauses, scanning his neurons for a revised history that doesn't make him out to be a pussy who’s afraid of wobbly towers that he can climb in his sleep.
There’s a brief silence. We hit a pothole and the cab jumps. Then he says, No, I wrote: I like Cambodia. Yeah, that's what I wrote. Trying awfully hard to assure Alfred and me that he’s really not a pussy after all.
I'm not sure TJ does like Cambodia. Not at all sure as we rumble toward a hotel and a room I don’t have. I’m not at all sure that he’s returning to see a twenty-something gorgeous Khmer girl he met on the Internet and saw last December and couldn't be around without an escort and never once kissed.
The ganja is down the hatches and the buzz is on and getting better and TJ's come alive. He’s putting the make on one of the chatty young Cambodian waitresses at a table just out of reach of Alfred, and John, and me. He’s kissing her.
Suddenly he’s in confessional mode. All about finding himself in a park in front of some fancy hotel in Siem Reap, where all the money stays on its way to Angkor Wat, the Egyptian Pyramids of Southeast Asia. He's in the park because he and a friend he was with got a moto driver and TJ had said, Get us some young girls. It was late, very late at night. They were maybe twelve or thirteen. That’s how old they were, he mumbles. Maybe an inch or two above four feet, he adds. TJ's friend left. He was tired. He wanted to go to bed. TJ just couldn’t resist staying there with prison-time younglings.
He sucks in air like he’s been under water for two minutes. Man, I don't want to talk about it anymore. Too complicated. Just can’t talk about it. You don't want to know what happened. Know what I mean?
I think I’ve got the picture.
Waaaaaaay too complicated to talk about. Waaaaaaaaaaaa…
I don’t get the rest of the story. Just visuals. TJ shaking. A head down and reaching for shoes. Images of him with Khmer toughs who would gladly do more than cut off his balls and feed them to village dogs.
In the morning we were to meet. Alfred, TJ, me. To get the boat that would take us to Sihanoukville.
TJ didn’t show.
Don’t know where he is, Alfred said.
I imagine he ran all the way back to the border in the middle of the night.
I imagine they grabbed him in the room and put some black rags over his head and tied his hands and threw him to the floor and beat the shit out of him. Good. Really good. This was round two.
In round one TJ took a twelve old girl to a room, got her pants down, and then the police came through the door like they were cleaning ladies with master keys. Cleaners all right. They shook him down for all the money he had on him. They beat him with sticks and pistols and threw him in jail for several days.
At the airport, on the exit visa that not so mysteriously went missing, they wrote: PEDOPHILE.Stickman's thoughts:
Wow!
The author can be contacted at Korski1@cox.net.
The author of this website, NOT this article, can be contacted at: stickmanbangkok@gmail.com.
