Wild Ass Dreams in Kotabesi on the Sampit River
By Korski

He caught my eye right away, and I knew I’d target him for a chat even before I got my coffee. It was the sandals and ugly bare feet, the six-two broken skinny frame and the dangling girly cell phone on his belt, like a colostomy bag in miniature, I thought; and then too the ashen face with lines like rivulets on a soaking steep hill beneath million dollar Southern California bungalows. Sixty he was, if a day, maybe seventy, or twenty less and what’s left after too much neglect and a diet of gin and Dunkin’ Donuts for breakfast and lunch. And then there was the green and gold earring in the left ear. Late-life hippie, the midlife crisis over the ratbag Aussie wife he told me about who cleaned him out after she cajoled him and kissed his ass and sucked his dick all the way to a house in a Melbourne suburb notable only for moldy red tile roofs. And then she told him, Stick your sick Yank country and your meatless ass too. Yeah, the earring, that’s why I targeted him, prime prey, and who knows how many more I’ll roll or bump into in the next couple of months on My Road to Nowhere. Stories, stories...breathing bone piles built on insane dreams.

I invite him to join me and get right inside the dark confessional and put his nose to the peep hole and bare his soul because no one gives a shit about a dying old man with one earring and chapped lips and broken teeth who’s not sure how to hold a fork and knife at the same time. Married five months to a young Filipina from Davao and hasn’t seen her for three and a half months, he says, and maybe more, and now on his way to pick her up in Hong Kong for a delayed honeymoon. That’s what he called it, a delayed honeymoon, I’m sure he did. There for five days he said, and then on to sugary Bangkok he also mumbled over the edge of his fork lined with noodles. And then on to Manila he also said, and more paper to fill out and stack tall with numbers and believable fictions to take to the Embassy, the fourth or fifth or seventh trip (this last part he said after he said, Fuck Davao and all the mooching rellies, I’ll only go back there in a grave digger’s wheel barrel). Then to yet another interview (Jesus, doesn’t this sound important!)—to push three more lead bricks and bleary-eyed bureaucrats in black shoes out of the way, the Home Security Boys, to a man and ten ladies in pants all full of questions about What are you really up to wanting to bring this Filipina with a sixth grade education young enough to be your granddaughter to a biker town called Brawley in the Desert where even she will cook her ass it’s so hot? And all because they know, they sure do know, why he married her and what she’s got in mind what with five sisters and nine brothers and twice that many cousins and half cousins and needy buffalo cousins slurping sewer water and imaging how it’ll soon turn to pure honey that hums. Questions, doubts, suspicions—Home Security at Work; you got to give them something to do after all. Hey, they’re dumb as paint and forget what they did five minutes ago, but they’re not certifiably jackass stupid when they smell the sweat of eighty years and they know the sucker is digging his grave and thinking of what to put on the headstone and she’s pretty and perky as a divorcee checkout clerk on meth and a hell of a lot more than grad school smart, you can bet your britches on that.

He didn’t tell me it was love. Maybe the idea of love, after so much time, smelled as bad as his feet. He didn’t flinch when I told him honeyko honey-for-money stories, and I didn’t make up a word of any of them, and he knew it. He said he tried to get her into college, as a sponsor, before the marriage idea came to him. Into fucking college! Chicago or Princeton, I bet! My smile said, speaking for cynicism, now deeper than Pacific trenches no man or beast has seen. Fourth grade or sixth grade education on some piece of battered land that floated away from the nasty edge of Mindanao, and he wonders, seriously wonders, no shit he wonders, and out loud, why a good university didn’t let her in! He wonders--I shit you not in this little story as true as the color of brown in my colon--why the dullards at the Embassy and the Home Security politely told him: No buster, go get a better excuse or forget it. We don’t need forty-two more Filipino gardeners and maids and kitchen sweepers, thank you very much. We’re trying to be a bit more selective about our slave labor.

He met her on the Internet was his story, something vague about a dating service I’d never heard of, and I’ve heard of all of them. A dating service called the L.A. Café, I thought. Manila’s low-end whorehouse that’s not even good enough for Henry Miller’s lovely Germaine, his lusty slutty whore in his stable of cunt-sweet whores. He’s telling me this and I’m thinking, you mean bargirl or hooker on the hustle on a Net hotline, and yeah you bet she’s as innocent as any Filipina, that is before she got bonked with three inches of an uncle bone at ten or twelve on the dirt floor in the nipa hut while mom was out back feeding the pigs, and that was only the beginning of so many hapless days; now she can’t even remember the year in which it first happened, and surely can’t count how many times she dropped her panties before you, heaven sent Dr. Peters, appeared and made all her dreams come true.

Peter is Dr. Peters to little old me from Nowheresville (always Nowheresville if you’re there for the telling), which degrades to simply psychiatrist without that Dr. up front, a low-end shrink in some small corner of a nuthouse facility in biker Brawley, three days a week, counting a half day on Tuesday and the same on Thursday. I wonder if he listens to John Lennon or the Beach Boys to calm his nerves on the mountain expressway to San Diego, before he concocts more sage advice on how to deal with Life. He lives, he tells me, the rest of the week inside what’s left of the ravages of two marriages that gave him serious heart palpitations—two bedrooms and a bath in Escondido, the best and the worst of which was this foul-mouthed Aussie whale who pushed him into gold and emerald earrings and all the way into an imaginary Loveland that Homeland hears about nineteen times a day, and that’s only talking about the L. A. office. Well, that kind of Loveland--he confessed before I administered his penance of nine Our Fathers and Fourteen Hail Marys for being such a fool--that translates to a shag when he can get it up, and pressed and folded undies, and meals endlessly mounted and surrounded with fried fish heads and white rice and morsels of fatty chicken.

Okay, he finally says, almost tearful but I don’t know for what, I have to go. Time to get me to where I can get the honeyko on the phone and talk about the Taliban and what we should really do with Iran.

What we should really do with Iran. Taliban and Iran in the same sentence with honeyko!

This gave me an ear ache hearing this, and then a piercing pain in the scrotum. At this point I thought, seriously thought: Give me my sanity, my wild ass dreams amid rambling geckos and five-winged mosquitoes in Kotabesi on the Sampit River.

Bye Dr. Peters, I say, standing, not knowing why I stood. I wished him luck and a long life, and—what I didn’t say, didn’t have the courage to say--three dozen good shags before saying: Honeyko, I just can’t anymore, I just can’t.

 

Stickman's thoughts:

Oh yeah, there really are some lost souls floating around Asia.  I sure hope I don't become one...

The author can be reached at korski1@cox.net.
 
The author of this website, NOT this article, can be contacted at: stickmanbangkok@gmail.com.