God Bless Cambodia

by Randy Ross

  A guy on the other side of her leans in to join the conversation. “We live on Long Island.” He runs his hands along his scalp where hair used to be. He has a carpal-tunnel wrist brace on one hand.

  “I grew up in Westchester,” I say.

  “We have friends who grew up in Westchester. You’re probably too young but we’ll ask anyway.”

  She names people I don’t know: “Pritzker, Goldfarb, Weintraub.”

  “When did you graduate?” she asks.

  “Mount Vernon High, class of ’77,” I say.

  “We’re class of ’80,” the guy says. “You’re well preserved. You must not have kids.”

  They ask about my trip.

  I begin a Budweiser-fueled monologue: three red-eyes in four weeks, black-market money-changers in Venezuela, street hustlers in Bangkok, bugs and rats, rats and bugs, hostels and hostel kids.

  “You’ve been traveling with kids the same age as are our kids?” the woman asks, gray eyebrows arched.

  The guy looks at me with pity and then jealousy.

  I loosen up with a second Budweiser: formaldehyde wine, marriage proposals, Parisian sex tourists, motorcycle madams, Australian punters.

  “What’s a ‘punter’?” the woman asks.

  “It’s a john,” the guy says. “Honey, we have to get up early tomorrow. We should probably get to bed.”

  “You can go to bed,” she says. “I’m ordering another round of drinks. Another Bud?”

  I know I should probably stop, but I can’t: Hookers, black hookers, hairdressers disguised as hookers, hookers disguised as hairdressers, Nha Trang boom-boom girls.

  The woman interrupts me. “You know, I read somewhere that one in seven American men has paid for sex.”

  “I’m going to bed,” the guy says.

  Some private, unspoken code must have passed between husband and wife, because she decides to go with him after all. I’m left to my thoughts and a half-filled bottle of Bud. I’m feeling hungry and sociable and cheap. I’m in the mood to hit the streets again.

  Three blocks from the hotel, I find an open-air noodle joint. The place is packed. An old local guy points his cigarette to an open plastic seat across from him. Once I’m seated, the cook comes over for my order. My seatmate points to his soup and his beer. I nod OK and the cook leaves.

  My seatmate offers a cigarette. I accept, and he lights it for me. I point to myself “Randy” and put out my hand and we shake. His hand is sticky and has tobacco stains between two fingers. He smiles but doesn’t say anything.

  My order arrives.

  He gulps his beer. I point at him with my beer.

  “You’re a party animal,” I say.

  He taps my beer bottle with his, and reaches into a bowl of greens on the table and drops a handful into my soup. Then another handful. Then he squeezes a wedge of lime into my bowl. I think about where his hands may have been. Then I stop and tap my beer against his.

  He smiles, nods, and says nothing.

  A few feet from us on the sidewalk, a gray-haired man is dressed as a witch. He stops and chats with my new mate in Vietnamese.

  The witch turns to me: “Where you from?” he asks in a Southern accent.

  “Boston.”

  “Where’s your costume,” he says.

  “What for?” I ask.

  “It’s Halloween. Laissez le bons temps roulez, man.” He slaps my back, waves to my seatmate, and runs off into the crowd.

  The witch isn’t going quietly into middle age. I think of the New York couple back at the hotel: carpal tunnel brace, paunchy, unsteady on their feet, early to bed, and younger than me.

  “Bons temps,” I say to my seatmate. He taps my beer with his.

  I e-mail Pittman the next morning. Minutes after hitting send, I receive an invite to see him that afternoon.

  After lunch, I put on my best outfit, which I’ve been washing by hand for the last two months: quick-drying khaki pants, a maroon collared-shirt with hidden security pockets, and brown urine-stained Doc Martins. I want to reek of success, but I worry that I just reek.

  I thumb through my worn copy of Pittman’s book, Solo Salvation: Travel the World on Your Own. So far, the book has been 60 to 70 percent accurate, with some notable exceptions, such as the Rising Son. I’ve added yellow stickies to pages indicating more changes Pittman may want to make in the next edition. Maybe he’ll offer me a job. Maybe we’ll coauthor a book. Maybe his publisher will ask if I have a book in me and The Chronic Single’s Handbook will sell millions. Maybe I’ll stay in Saigon. Fuck Boston.

  It’s midday and the traffic is light and nonthreatening. The motorcycle mama-sans are nowhere in sight. On my way to Pittman’s All-American Language School, I pass the Cultural Park, the Reunification Palace, and turn left onto Glorious Victory Street in a part of Saigon known as District 3. The guidebook claims the Vietnamese have forgotten about the war. I add another correction.

  In the All-American reception area, four local women in suits and headsets sit behind a long red desk. One of them looks familiar, but I can’t place her.

  The walls are decorated with framed posters:

  “More study, more fun! Joyously together!”

  “Learning with a comfortable feeling!”

  “Celebrate the Halloween. How lively!”

  I introduce myself to the familiar-looking woman.

  “Hi, I’m Randall Burns. Mr. Pittman is expecting me.”

  She hands me an envelope. Inside there’s a note.

  Dear Mr. Burns,

  You’re one of the few readers to make it this far. You’re on your way to the 5-percent club.

  Keep going!

  —Wallace Pittman

  I scan the reception area for a surveillance camera. “Is this a joke? When do I see Mr. Pittman?”

  “No joke. No Mr. Wally.”

  “What do you mean ‘No Mr. Wally.’ Is he out of town?”

  “No Mr. Wally.”

  “What about his e-mail today?”

  She smiles and dismisses me with a little bow.

  The blades of a ceiling fan catch my eye. Whop, Whop, Whop.

  As I consider pounding her desk and yelling, I notice her wedding band and think about the picture of Pittman and his hot, young wife. I think about travel books and middle-aged trifectas and the fools who believe in them. I think about life’s cacophonous hex and English language schools that barely understand English.

  Out on Glorious Victory Street, I give a homeless guy a dollar for a cigarette. I don’t even haggle.

  After walking and smoking and walking some more, I find myself in front of a travel agency.

  Inside a local guy sits behind a long card table that has one leg propped up on 5¼-inch floppy disks. Cigarette butts bury an ashtray. I detect the familiar scent of burning squid.

  I’m holding Pittman’s guidebook.

  “I know this book,” says the local guy.

  “You know Wally Pittman?”

  “No.”

  “I heard he’s around here. Is he?” I ask.

  “No.”

  “It’s kind of important.”

  “What I do for you?”

  “I want to go to Cambodia.”

  The guy points to a sign on the wall advertising a flight to Phnom Penh and three nights in a deluxe hotel for fifty dollars. “Chapter Seven in book,” he says. “You stay Bang Su, Hoi An?”

  “How’d you guess?”

  “I book you Bang Su, Phnom Penh, with nice airlines. Leave tonight.”

  I slide the tickets into my pocket, throw the book in the garbage, and head out.

  The Chronic Single’s Handbook

  Chapter Four

  Tips for Spending Your Life Alone

  •Accept that relationships come and go, but mostly go.

  •Enjoy free porn, but invest in good antivirus software.

  •Use plenty of hot sauce.

  •Accept that moods are cyclical; if you’re happy now, wait a few hours
.

  •Accept that some people grow up to be professional athletes and some people die of horrible wasting diseases. Similarly some people get married and some people—like you—don’t.

  •When someone calls you a commit-a-phobe, counter with the number of friends you’ve had for more than a decade, the number of years you’ve had the same car, or the number of years you’ve had the same career—all numbers that will no doubt exceed the length of most marriages.

  CHAPTER SEVEN: CAMBODIA

  If at first you don’t succeed, remember kind words better no tree frogs.

  —W. PITTMAN

  My third hour in Cambodia, I’m sitting alone in a Phnom Penh restaurant, if you can call it a restaurant. It’s a corrugated roof on tent poles with no doors or windows or name. Three-panel accordion dividers are scattered around an asphalt space that’s probably a parking lot by day.

  The menu is written in what I’m guessing is Khmer, the Cambodian language, a series of square roots, caret signs, fishhook swirls, and dots like lizards’ eyes. The servers and customers are darker-skinned than the Vietnamese—more like the locals in Bangkok. No one pays any attention to me. A waitress in a black skirt and narrow Morticia Addams hips dodges my table for the second time.

  Cambodia is the one place Ricki was afraid to visit, something about typhoid, Japanese encephalitis, and street gangs disfiguring each other with battery acid. The guidebook said that since the average monthly income is fifty dollars, if you tip generously, Cambodia offers “lots of sketchy fun.” I had to come.

  I use the menu to fan myself. The waitress stops short and comes over. “Do you have any specials tonight?” I ask.

  No answer.

  “I can’t read the menu, can you recommend something?”

  Her eyes widen as if I had asked to borrow fifty dollars.

  “Chicken, chili, hot, hot?” I run a finger up and down my menu.

  She steps back as if I might run a finger up and down her next. A busboy plunks down a glass of water and races away without looking at me.

  An Asian couple at the next table calls out to the waitress who gives up on me and rushes over.

  They talk in what must be Khmer. What it sounds like:

  Moon bong, prawn long.

  Climb on, climb on.

  At the hostess stand, I consult the woman who seated me. “Excuse me. I’m having a problem ordering. Do you have an English menu or a waitress who knows English?”

  Same wide eyes.

  “Parlez-vous français?” I ask, recalling that Cambodia was a French colony.

  Ditto.

  I retreat to my table and glance at what other diners are eating: soupy curries, brown stir-fries, rice, and more rice.

  I use the menu to swat at a fly drinking from my water glass. The hostess, the waitress, and a busboy stop what they’re doing and pay me a visit. They look concerned. I point to something soupy on the next table and make a squawking noise while flapping my arms. Then I point to a can of Angkor beer.

  Everyone nods. Meeting adjourned. We have a plan.

  Minutes later, a beer appears, followed by a plate of fried chicken wings sporting a few singed feathers.

  A waiter circulates with a large platter. I hope it’s a dessert tray so I can order something without plumage. I scan his platter for pastry or fruit but the tray is stacked with tiny corpses, like the aftermath of some medieval battle: baby snakes on skewers, broiled frogs on sticks, fried crickets on toothpicks, and kabobbed beetles, the same fingernail-sized bugs I crushed underfoot in Nha Trang.

  “No, thank you,” I say.

  The waiter looks at me, smiles blankly, and moves on to the next table. I twist a feather off one of my fried chicken wings.

  This is the first country in which I couldn’t perform a basic task like ordering food. And this is Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s most modern city. But I’ve been worrying about the same crap in every country: the food, the water, the drivers, guinea worms, dengue fever, armed robbery, torture. It’s getting old and boring, and I’m hungry.

  The guidebook, now spotted and greasy after I retrieved it from the trash in the Saigon travel office, gave this restaurant three stars. I consider throwing it in the garbage again, but for some reason, I’m not yet ready to part ways with Pittman. I toss his book into my daypack and take out The Insider’s Guide to Phnom Penh, a booklet I picked up at my hotel. In a section called “Just for Westerners,” I find no restaurant recommendations. There’s a roundup of hostess bars, whatever those are; a review of Bazooka Joe’s Shooting Range, where you can shoot chickens with a Soviet-era machine gun or cows with a rocket launcher; and a public service announcement featuring a Western guy, head down, gripping the bars of a prison cell. The announcement offers a reminder for people who need reminding: “Having sex with a child is a crime.”

  A fly lands on the page and scratches itself. The ceiling fan wobbles overhead. Time to hit the bathroom, find a quiet stall, and regroup.

  On the way, I pass a middle-aged Westerner sitting with a group of Asians. The table is piled with curries, stir fries, rice, and cans of beer. Everything I want and need. I pause and address the Westerner. “Excuse me, do you speak English?

  “How’s it going?” His accent sounds Midwestern.

  “Not so well, actually,” I say. “I’m having a hell of a time trying to order. I’ve been here for an hour and all I’ve got is some hairy chicken wings.”

  “Sit yourself down.” He points to the empty chair next to him. “We’ve got plenty. Where you from?”

  “Randy Burns from Boston.”

  “Ah, Red Sox country.” He extends his hand. “Ned Downey, Minneapolis.”

  Ned appears to be in his midforties and has a horseshoe fringe of brown hair circling a bald spot the size of an ostrich egg. He’s wearing new, white walking shoes with Velcro closures and white socks up to his shins. He’s as fat as my ex-best-friend Abe.

  Ned introduces me around. Jorani, his twenty-something Cambodian girlfriend, sits to his left. Her yellow-and-white striped polo shirt matches his. Everyone else at the table is related to her: a younger sister; two teenage male cousins; her father, who looks overworked and underfed and could be sixty or ninety; and her plump mother. Both parents have dark skin that they probably didn’t get from golfing. Jorani and her younger sister both have lighter skin probably from covering up in the sun and using skin-lightening cream. Young Cambodians like young Vietnamese consider light skin to be fashionable.

  Jorani says, “Please to meet you.”

  After nodding hello to me, the rest of the table returns to their conversations: “Moon bong, prawn long. Climb on, climb on.”

  Ned offers me a platter of brown stir fry. “Your little city keeps stealing all our good players: Moss, Ortiz, Garnett.”

  “Who in their right mind wants to spend the winter in Minneapolis?”

  “Fair enough. Can’t stand it myself. I’ve been coming here the last couple of winters. I own an Internet business—you know, novelties, inexpensive jewelry, and the like. Last month, we sold a load of Freudian slippers with little bearded faces to keep your toes warm.” He slips me a business card for Horsestail.com. “Check it out some time.”

  “Thanks,” I say.

  “Jorani here is in school,” he says.

  Jorani gives me an inscrutable Asian smile. “Study the business, the accounting, the English.”

  Slender arms, slender neck, a wand. Ned has done well for himself.

  “Eat,” she says, handing me a beer.

  I take a few sips and then dig into a stir fry of green stalky vegetables and spongy brown ovals the size of my pinky. Inside each oval is a soft bone that reminds me of a fingernail.

  “This is interesting,” I say. “What is it?”

  Jorani points to her mouth. “Tongue of the duck,” she says.

  I say nothing.

  “You can leave it be,” Ned says. “Jorani, want to pass him the pork?”

  She spoons more fo
od onto my plate. “Drink,” she says.

  Ned answers his cell phone: “Hi, Ma . . . Eating dinner with Jorani and her family . . . Yes, we’re wearing the shirts . . . The dishwasher kaput? . . . Oh, for gosh. I can’t do much from here . . . A new one will be spendy . . . Emergency number’s on the fridge . . . OK, Ma. I’ll give a jingle-jingle in a few.”

  Later the check comes. Cambodia bars and restaurants are supposed to accept American dollars so I throw in a ten. Ned tosses it back to me, whips out a wad of singles and twenties, and throws down one of each. “How about joining us for a drink and some dancing?” he asks me.

  A Midwestern guy who loves his mother, picks up the check, and is accompanied by a local college girl and her family. Why not?

  At Jorani’s former employer, the Luau Bar, Ned, Jorani, her two male cousins, and I sit at a long bamboo and lacquer table. The decor is nouveau Khmer, lots of red and black. Red awnings, black stools, red and black floor tiles. The windows are covered with black security bars shaped like Asian characters. Several little red motorcycles are parked inside the bar near our table.

  The servers are local women, who appear to be in their early twenties, dressed in modest shorts and polo shirts. Their waists are tiny; sweet Morticias as far as the eye can see. I’m still taking a break from dating, but these women are hard to ignore.

  Most of the customers are Western guys with leatherneck haircuts and military tattoos: scorpions with bayonets, bulldogs with machine guns. Most have British-like accents, smoke nonstop, and wear sweaty tank tops. There’s a striking absence of ski hats and irony. These are not kids.

  The bar menu is in English and includes a list of beers, spirits, and sodas. The most expensive item is a three-dollar beverage called a “Lady Drink.” I order a one-dollar can of Beerlao. Jorani and her cousins each order a Coca-Cola.

  “Mr. Ned, the James, no ice?” the waitress asks.

  “Yes, honey.”

  “The James?” I ask Ned.

  “Jim Beam. He and I go way back, so I call him ‘James.’”

  The waitress returns, serves Ned first, then me, and then everyone else. Jorani dips a finger into Ned’s drink, and then dabs behind each ear. They smile at each other. The cousins look bored.

  Jorani chats with the waitress and points to me. “Moon bong, prawn long.”