My Story (A Young Man Returns to LOS) Part 4

So I'm off to Cambodia via minibus. We get into Sa Kaeo and the bus pulls into a building labeled Sa Kaeo Immigration where we are ushered into a building with tables that have visa applications and pens on them. So I fill them one out and
give it to a lady who charges me 1200 baht. After I give her the money I realize that I've been had. I had read about travel agencies scamming you and giving you a visa that you don't need, but they only mentioned touts that approached you
when you where walking towards the border and not about the bus pulling into a building and stopping. The fact that the building is labeled Immigration is misleading because it's not a government agency but a travel agency. I thought this kinda
shit only happened on the cheap buses and not the minibuses. That bus driver got a nice commission that day.

The Poipet border crossing was the most lax, disorganized border I have ever crossed. Customs was a joke too, one disinterested looking guy sitting in a chair, no metal detectors. I coulda had a bag full of AK-47 and RPGs and they wouldn't
even know. In the line for Cambodian Immigration, people were slipping the guards money and being ushered to the front of the line. On my way through the Cambodian side of the border I am constantly hassled by touts way more aggressive than their
Thai counterparts. I take the shuttle bus to the bus station and the touts keep insisting that I need to change my baht and US dollars into riel even though I've already been warned about this so I decline.

After much hassle I share a taxi for twelve dollars and take it to Siem Reap. The bus drops us off at Siem Reap center and I find a tuktuk and ask him to find me a hotel. He drives me around to look at hotels free of charge. I know that he gets
a commission but in Thailand the taxi drivers do the same thing and charge you for the ride.

I remember I heard once that Cambodia was the real land of smiles and I found this to be true. In Thailand the Thais would smile at me but it never seemed genuine and I always got a bad vibe. In Cambodia everyone was genuinely nice to me. It seems like
Thailand gets so many tourists that they take them for granted. I always noticed that the Thais had this attitude that they didn't really give a shit about customers cause they had so many and once you paid them they would take their time
performing services and not really giving a shit about repeat customers. In Cambodia everyone was happy to accept my patronage and would perform services promptly.

I noticed this with tipping too. Half the time I tip a Thai I get no thank you at all like it's expected of me, like I owe it to them! One time In Siem reap I tipped the Khmer hotel cleaner a dollar for cleaning my room and he was so
happy and thanked me emphatically. Every time he saw me at the front entrance to the hotel he would run up and open the door for me.

By the time I find a hotel and get settled its' about 10 PM and so I go on the hunt for Khmer girls. The only nightlife in Siem Reap is Pub Street <Far from true, there are in fact many places and many options – Stick>
so I head there. It's a couple small streets in a grid full of backpackers on their way to see Angkor Wat. I don't see a single Khmer girl in any of the bars. I got approached by two girls offering massages who were very aggressive but
they were ugly, and I saw some massage parlours but I wanted a girl for long-time. I had read about a place called Martinis disco. I kept asking tuktuk drivers where it was and they would point me in a direction and then I would go there and then
I would ask another one and he would point me the opposite direction, maybe they thought I was looking for the drink and not the disco. Then a tuktuk told me that martinis was shut down a year ago, so I'm like fxxx.

I keep walking, walking in Cambodia at night is like this…

"Tuktuk mister?"

"No"

"Motorbike sir?"

"No!"

"You want lady?"

"No"

"Ladyboy"

"No"

"Marijuana sir"

"No !"

"Cocaine sir"

"NO"

"Heroin sir, I have heroin on me right now"

Finally I turned to him and explicitly explained that I wanted to go to a place where I could find a girl and then bring her back to my hotel. He said ok so I got on the back of his motorbike. We start driving down dark narrow roads with
no streetlights and dark alleys, and I'm starting to worry that he's going to stab me and rob me and throw me in the gutter to die, when we pull up to this really nice hotel looking building with columns in the front and a big entrance
in the middle of a slum. I walk in and my jaw drops to my left and to my right are about 50 Khmer girls with numbers on them, all smiling and winking at me.

The mamasan ushers me into a back room where she explains that it will cost 60 dollars for one girl for one night and that I need to pay upfront. I pay her and she calls the girls in with a walkie talkie. I'm a shy person so I'm
intimidated when they all walk in and start smiling and waving to me. A couple of these girls are 10's most of them are 7 and 8 and young and about ten of them are older and not hot. So I narrow it down to two girls, one of them is light
skinned and really hot with big tits and the other is not as hot but is really charming and has a good attitude. I pick the second one but the mamasan tells me she's only available for till 1 AM and not for a whole night so I pick the stunner.

We get back to my hotel and she doesn't speak a single word of English so I couldn't get any chemistry goin. We did the shower routine and go into bed. I tried to fuck her but she was a total starfish. I thought about eating her
pussy but was afraid to cause this is Cambodia, so I tried to get a blowjob and she refused. This girl made the shy Thai girls look like porn stars. After we finished I still had her for another six hours but I wanted to sleep and didn't
wanna get robbed so I told her to leave. I contemplated going to Phnom Pen and Sihanoukville but, it was a gamble. The nightlife was probably gonna be lame and I was missing my regulars on Walking Street so I decided I would see Angkor Wat then
head back to Patts. I have this love : hate relationship with Patts. Every time I'm there I get sick of the place and it has nothing other than whoring, but every time I leave I just wanna go back there. Koh Samui and Phuket are too far away
and too expensive to fly to.

So I get back to Patts, and Fon has now left for Bangkok. I go looking for Layla at the old Simon Bar and at this point I think I met Fon at the new Simon bar. Layla's not there so I look at what the other bars have to offer and I end
up barfining Ping from the next bar over. She was 21, very hot and she knew it. Back in my room she saw my laptop and hinted that she wanted one. She said she saw one at the store for 14,000 baht and I just ignored the hint. Again these girls
don't understand that I'm not rich. I would never spend 14,000 baht on a gift for one girl – that's what I spend on bargirls in a week!

That night, after Ping left, I got really sick. It felt like a really bad fever. After a couple hours I couldn't breathe, I had diarrhea and my whole body hurt. I'm the kinda guy that doesn't go to the doctor unless my arm
is chopped off so I took some Xanex and waited it out for a couple hours. By 6 AM it was really bad and I realized I needed to go to the hospital. I probably shoulda called a taxi but I'm a cheap motherfucker so I hopped on a motorbike taxi
and headed for Patts Memorial.

The guy is weaving in and out of traffic, I'm feeling weaker and weaker and I'm trying real hard not to fall off. The Xanex isn't helpin matters either. I stumble in to the hospital and sit down and I'm guessing that this
is food poisoning from eating from vendors so I tell them that. They make me fill out forms, as I'm trying to fill them out I keep passing out and the nurses shake me awake. The paperwork is really hard and I can't remember my birthday,
my name or even my hotel. It's getting really hard to breathe.

They walk me over to a bed and I lay down. The doctor comes over and talks to me. He says it's contamination from food and I'm dehydrated and that he wants me to stay for 6 hours. I ask him how much and he says he doesn't know,
so I'm like fuck that. They're gonna hit me with a monster bill. I'm on a tight budget, I have no health insurance I'm on a long holiday with not a lot of money and if I stay at the hospital then I might have to go without
pussy for 1 or 2 nights, so I tell him do what he can in one hour and I'm leavin.

So they hook up IVs and shoot me up. I can't help but think about how sexy the Thai nurses look in their uniforms. I still feel horrible and can't breathe. I'm in so much pain it feels like someone's scraping my insides
with rusty screwdrivers. Next to me is a middle-aged farang who keeps puking everywhere and having seizures accompanied by a ladyboy companion. After a half hour I start to feel better and whatever they shot me up with worked and the pain goes
away. I started to think about how hot it would if one of the Thai nurses came over and jacked me off, like in Japanese porn. So they take the IV out and ask me if I'm ok and want to go home. I say yes. I go to the desk and my bill including
the meds they're gonna give me is 2400 baht. I can't imagine what it would be if I stayed for six hours. It's still a lot cheaper than the states though where same service woulda cost me 10,000 baht. So I take my bag of meds and
go back to my hotel and sleep.

The next night I finally catch up with Los, the gogo dancer I've been trying to barfine for the past two weeks. She's happy to see me, we eat some Thai food get drunk and make love. The food poisoning comes back and I don't
get any sleep that night. With Lek out of the picture I'm trying really hard not to fall for Los. I don't let on in any way that I like her, but I was sure she figured it out since I had gone looking for her at her bar about five times
when she wasn't there.

Fon calls me the next day and wants me to come to Bangkok in the morning and meet with her. She said she's going to Isaan in the early evening but wants to hangout with me in the morning and afternoon. So I decide against my better judgment
to go. I do need a change of scenery. I decide to head for Sukhumvit and get a cheap hotel on soi 4 so I can see the area. I've never been there and want to see Nana Plaza and Soi Cowboy. I end up sleeping in and arriving in Bangkok in the
afternoon. She wants me to come meet her at her sister's. I'm thinking fuck that, I wanna shag her. I don't wanna meet her sister but she refuses to come to my hotel so I get a taxi cab and put her on the phone with the driver.
We head out about 40 kilometers north of downtown Bangkok. She's from Isaan so I'm expecting the taxi to pull up to some dirty, poor apartment building and we pull up to a gated village, with security guards.

The taxi driver calls her and then tells me she's coming to the gate and to look for her. I see a girl pull up on a motorbike. He asks me if it's her, and I tell him no. She gets closer and I step out of the taxi and I realize it's
her I don't even recognize her she looks completely different. She's wearing conservative clothes and no makeup. I realise it's quite possible that her family doesn't know what she does for a living. The taxi driver laughs
and teases me saying "You forget her".

I get back in the car and we follow her through what I can only describe as a vey nice clean suburb, with rows of identical houses. We pull up to her sister's house, a very nice big house by Thai standards with three bedrooms and two
bathrooms.

She's really happy to see me. So I meet her sister, and I see a toddler walkin around, then I meet her two brothers. I don't see a farang in the house, so I'm wondering where they're gettin on this money from. I observe
the way that she interacts with the toddler and how she held him and comforted him when he fell and cried, and I knew he was hers. I asked her about him and she confirmed this. I give her credit for that they usually lie, and say it's their
nephew or something. Now I'm discreetly looking at her brothers trying to find a family resemblance or lack there of, because I suspect that one of these "brothers" is her husband and the father, but alas all these Asians look the
same. I even put my arm around her and touch her leg to see if I can get a rise out of one of them but I get nothing.

I ask Fon if I can take a shower so we go upstairs and she stands there in the bathroom doorway watching me undress and I can tell she's horny but I close the door on her. I'm not an exhibitionist. I couldn't do anything with
her family and son all hangin out downstairs.

I come downstairs and she asks me if I want to go to Korat with her to her brother's wedding but I declined. It would be a whole day and they would stay overnight and I really didn't feel like going into the heart of Isaan to be
the only farang hanging out with a bunch of Thais, plus I was still sick. I was also afraid to because I had read so many horror stories about farangs meeting families. I didn't really know Fon so I didn't know what I was walkin into.
Then I ask her how she's getting there. I'm thinking bus and she points out the window to a very nice shiny double cab pickup truck. Again I'm thinking "where the fuck are they getting all this money" and at that point
I realize that her family is richer than mine. She shows me a photo album with a picture of her brother who's getting married. Later on when no one's looking I flip through the photo album and bingo, there is a picture of her sister
and what looks like her mother with a much older farang, so I'm guessing that her sister married this guy and he's rich. Either he's a sponsor or is now out of the picture cause next she introduces me to her sister's Thai husband.

I look around the living room and all I see is signs of wealth – a nice computer, a big flat screen TV with speakers and many other things. They're getting ready to leave and Fon asks me if I'm taking a taxi back to Patts. She doesn't
get it. I would never spend 1500 baht on a taxi and I take the cheap Charlie bus. They give me a ride to downtown Bangkok, cause they are headed for Korat. They stop for gas and I'm thinking should I offer money for gas cause they're
goin outta their way to drop me off and her sister pulls out her wallet with a thick wad of 1,000 baht notes, so I do nothing.

I can't figure out why she wanted me to go with her to her brother's wedding. I don't think it was to milk me for cash cause her family was pretty well off. She probably just wanted to gain face in the village by bringing a
farang, I don't know.

I'm in Bangkok and I'm meeting Fon the next day so I have a night alone. I check out Nana Plaza. It's around midnight. I had read about Nana and heard so much hype about the place but I was disappointed. It was a lot smaller
than I expected, only a couple of gogo bars had hot girls, and there were five ladyboy bars. I found only one gogo bar that actually had customers in it and I was drinking inside and all the girls stopped dancing and put there clothes on so I
figured the police were coming so I left. I ended up walking around and checking out the bars near the Nana Hotel where I noticed a lot of farangs but not a lot of bargirls. I walked through Soi Cowboy and there wasn't much goin on. I guess
if I saw everything before I saw Patts I woulda been impressed but it seemed like a waste of time, and the atmosphere and attitude of the girls was really pushy and not relaxed.

I ended up pickin up a girl in front of the Nana Hotel who was probably in her thirty's and semi good-looking but she had a fun attitude. I really just wanted some company, but she didn't understand. We took showers, we sat on the
bed, she kept hinting by asking if I had a condom. I told her I didn't want boom boom and only wanted to talk. She laughed one of those nervous laughs that Thais do when they feel they have lost face and she took it as an insult. We hung
out and drank and watched TV. I started using my laptop and she asked if I could help her check her email, so I did. She hadn't checked it in over a year and there were a couple farangs looking for her so I helped her email them. I paid her
for short time and she left.

The next day I met up with Fon, and the first thing she said to me was, "You take lady her name Ping from my bar!"
I looked at her and tried to act like the name didn't ring a bell but it did. It was the girl I shagged
from the old Simon Bar complex a couple nights before. I wondered how the fuck she could know if she was in Bangkok when it happened, and then I realized that I had made a tactical era. I had only barfined Fon once and the other times I met her
on the street so I was convinced that her bar was in the new Simon Bar complex. They both look exactly the same, but it was actually in the old complex where Ping's bar was as well, and it was right next to Layla's bar. Needless to say
I steered clear of the old Simon Bar complex for the rest of my trip, busted by the bargirl network again. She didn't mention it again I think she was just sending me a message that she would always know if I butterflied on her.

I wanted to go sightseeing but I was too tired and we ended up lounging around the hotel room. I asked her a lot of questions about the father of her son and she told me she was finished with him, that he didn't work and that he was
no good, the typical Thai man no good story that they all say. I didn't know if it was true or not. I asked her about her family and she said she had two brothers and a sister and that she was the youngest. Her parents lived in Khon Kaen.
She said she had a farm with fifty pigs, six buffaloes, and sixty rai of land. I don't know much about Isaan but it seems like that meant her family was pretty well off.

This girl was a mystery to me. She had money, her family had money, she was taking a month off work in the peak of the high season so she wasn't working cause she or her family needed the money. It was either she worked cause she had
nothin better to do and wanted to hangout with her friends but was too lazy to work a real job, or she was looking to snag and marry a rich farang and get a piece of the pie like her sister did. If she was looking for a rich farang I don't
know why she was hangin around me. She knew I wasn't rich. I wear t-shirts and sandals, stay at cheap hotels and carry everything in a backpack and I looked like a backpacker!

There was definitely the possibility that she was playing the long con. She never asked for money and would buy stuff like food and clothes with her own money. There was always something off about her that I just couldn't pinpoint. She
never got any calls from farangs, didn't have an email address, could only speak English a little but could read and write pretty good. I had only seen her a couple times off and on but she had already got it in her head that I was her boyfriend,
and was really paranoid and jealous. She said she had only worked in bars for six months. It seemed like she genuinely liked me and didn't care about money but everything about her just didn't add up. I kept my guard up, after what happened
with Lek I was still cautious. Also I understood that in Thai culture a Thai woman marries a farang expecting him to give her security and take care of her family. I don't have any money and can barely support myself, let alone her and her
son and I can't see any of that changing for at least a couple years. I can't live in Thailand and she wouldn't be happy in the states meaning me and Fon had no future together.

I practiced Thai with her and kept asking her to repeat words over and over again and I would try and listen for the tones. She would keep repeating the words and I would keep trying to say them and getting them wrong, and she not knowing
that farangs can't hear the tones would get angry and frustrated. Cute.

I told her, "When I come back next year I speak Thai mak mak."

She said, "I no like when farang speak Thai". I knew what that meant.

She was listening to Lady Gaga's "Poker Face" on my laptop. I asked her if she knew what the song meant. She said no so I explained it to her. I said it's about a lady seducing a man and she doesn't love him, only
wants to use him, so like in playing cards she keeps a poker face, and he can't read her. She looked in my Thai English dictionary and pointed to word "secrets".

I said to her, "Thai lady have many secrets".

She said, "I no hab secrets."

I sat there looking at her trying to read her and I couldn't. Fon was starting to mean something more to me than just a friend or shag. She was my antidote to Lek.

I helped her set up a new email address, because she never used her old one and it got shut down and I decided I would give myself a wild card, something I could hold onto and that I could play in the future. I watched her type in her password
and memorized it. If I ever did wanna take it to the next level with her I could find out more about her. If I ever did find that she was emailing other farangs, and getting sponsors I wouldn't hold it against her, cause I never made a commitment
to her. I was just curious to see how she operated and what kinda girl she was. The next day she said she had to go back to her family so I told her I was going to back to Patts. She said she would meet me the next day if I wanted, I said ok.

I went back to Patts and gave Nui a call. I hadn't seen her in awhile. She had been calling me everyday but I never answered the phone. I didn't really want to see her but I had left some stuff with her, sex toys and Xanex that
I didn't wanna cross the border with and some other things that were too heavy to lug around in my backpack. She showed up at my hotel with my stuff and we shagged. I remember the feeling I had looking at her, as I lay there right after we
fucked. I was just so disgusted with her. I was so tired of her manipulation. She had tried to make me feel guilty for not calling her and not seeing her for ten days. I never told her I was her boyfriend but she acted like I was supposed to call
her everyday and tell her where I was and not see any other girls. Through the heavy makeup on her face I saw an old whore who was as hard as a rock. The only thing she missed when I was gone was the 1500 baht a day I used to give her for longtime.
She didn't give a fuck about me and probably had a Thai boyfriend one block away. It didn't disgust me that she was a whore. I couldn't care less about that. It disgusted me that she was so god-damn fake and manipulative.

She pulled out some yaba and put it in a cigarette, and started smoking it. Now I really wanted to get rid of her I didn't wanna be anywhere near a girl doing drugs for fear of the police. I told her she had to go and she gathered
her things real slow and kept stalling. She kept trying to make me feel guilty and feel sorry for her but I wasn't buying it. It took me ten minutes to get her to leave, I decided that that would be the last time I saw her. Fon called and
said she getting on a bus at Morchit, and would be there soon.

The next day me and Fon were loungin in the hotel room and my phone rang. Fon answered it. She had been doing this lately to send a message to the other girls. I didn't really care cause I was sick of my phone ringing all the time. Fon
gave the phone to me. It was Lek, the girl who I hadn't seen for a year, hadn't talked to in two weeks and who I thought was never coming.

"Hello"

"Jack?"

"Yes?"

"Jack I come Pattaya tomorrow"

"Where the fuck were you, I waited for you, you said you would come, you never showed up, then you never answered your phone"

"Papa mai sabai, I come Pattaya tomorrow ok?"

"I don't know"

"You have lady? you pay bar lady"

"Yes?"

"You no lub me"

I said nothing

"you no lub me"

"You no love me. you have farang", I said.

"You no lub me"

"YOU HAVE FARANG, YOU MARRY FARANG"

"I come Pattaya tomorrow ok"

I stood there with the phone and looked at Fon. I had to choose between the two.

"Up to you" Fon said

Go back to Lek, I missed her and wanted to see her but it was a dead end, I looked at Fon, this mysterious girl that I had only known for four days, but we had made some connection. It was a path that was open and full of possibilities.