by Rob Binkley
I whispered to Brian, “This is no ladyboy bar, dude … This is a man-on-boy sex club.” A red neon sign behind the stage flashed BOYS BOYS BOYS, which summed up our predicament.
Brian wheeled around to flee but ten boys in tight Speedos surrounded us. “Oh, hi fellas. We seem to be in the wrong place here,” he said.
They yelled in broken English, “No sailor, you home! You home with daddy!”
“You’re daddy?? You’re teenagers!” I laughed.
The strippers gyrated around us, circling their new prey. Brian and I were so freaked out we let the gang of strippers back us into a corner where sat down at a table. Brian looked at me and whispered, “I hate you.”
A waiter came over and we ordered two beers; boy, did we need them. The ten strippers hopped back on the stage and started dancing in Speedos with numbers attached to them so we didn’t get them confused.
There was only one other patron in the club—an old, fat German man sitting in the corner flagrantly French-kissing two boys on his lap. The German was clothed but it wasn’t a pretty sight. I tried to lighten the conversation. “Remember the time you wanted to become a male stripper? How is this different?”
Brian shot back: “At Chippendale’s a man strips in front of women. It was nothing like this!”
I egged him on. “You’re so homophobic. These guys dance way better than you. Admit it!”
“I’m closing my eyes.” Brian shut his eyes and started humming to himself.
There we were, waiting for our beers, watching ten boys dance for us. There was no escape, I had to look at them. Either that or stare at the dirty German.
Every time a dancing boy came over and tried to sit in my lap, I turned to Brian and said, “Sorry, I’m with him. We’re lovers! We’re in the Navy!” I asked one of the dancing boys how many Navy guys came in. “Don’t worry, you can tell us. We’re officers doing a survey on gays in the service.” The conversation was highly entertaining but Brian was getting extremely uncomfortable.
Our beers finally came. I was hoping more alcohol would calm him down but it wasn’t happening. Brian bolted up and went hurtling out of the club, leaving me with two beers, ten boys, and a gay German with his pants around his ankles. As soon as Brian dashed out, the ten dancing boys pulled down their Speedos and started pleasuring themselves to show me their hard-ons. Seeing I was the only one left in the audience, they hopped off the stage and jerked their way across the floor to me.
Now, I’m confident in my sexuality, but even I was getting uncomfortable. But being on a strict budget, I told myself there was no way in hell I was going to leave two full beers on the table so I started drinking them both at once, which felt strange since I now had two bottles in my mouth while surrounded by a litany of boners a few feet from my face.
The scene was getting out of hand. I had nowhere to turn and didn’t want to deal with the boys who were trying to sit on my lap. So after chugging my beers, I got up and tried to exit. To my pleasant surprise, all the boys who had just been jerking off stopped whacking to shake my hand goodbye and told me to “come back soon!” The boys were very gracious.
When I finally escaped the club, Brian was waiting. He laid into me. “What the hell is your problem, rice queen!? I know you want to experience new things, but we’re wanted by the authorities and you stop to watch a boner fest?”
“Technically, we’re not wanted … and I had no idea that was gonna happen.”
“You dragged me into the most flaming gay bar since Liberace’s Slipper!”
“That’s funny you remember that. I woulda been outta there sooner if you hadn’t left your full beer for me to finish!”
“Well, I hope someone finished you off!”
“They did! I mean, no … Who do you think I am?!”
“I’m really starting to question your sanity. I don’t know if I want to continue this trip with you. You’ve lost it!”
“C’mon, those were nice boys—if you overlook their raging boners. You’ve just lost your sense of adventure.”
“I can’t talk to you anymore. Go back into the circle jerk; I won’t stop you!”
“The only circle jerk I’m enjoying tonight is my own!”
I reminded Brian that we were still kind of fleeing from two police forces and needed to keep a lower profile lest we get arrested for real this time. We quieted down and escaped down a side street. After a few minutes, we came across a baby elephant.
I looked at Brian. “Getaway pachyderm? It’s a miracle! C’mon, hop on.”
“You must want to go to jail tonight.”
I looked at Brian. “No I don’t.”
I gave the elephant’s mahout (keeper) a few baht (Thai money) and he let me hop on.
“We’re not stealing it. We’re renting it.”
Brian looked at me. Then he looked at the elephant. I thought he was going to leave me in Thailand and take the next flight home, but he didn’t.
Instead, he hopped on the little fella.
Brian sighed, “Okay … let’s go.”
We rode the elephant back to our room in silence.
Brian wasn’t talking to me the next day thanks to last night’s tomdickery.
We packed up our stuff and left for our next destination in silence. I didn’t mind; I had a horrible hangover anyway so I left him alone and chatted up a funny surfer bloke from Sweden on the bus out of town. We swapped stories and laughed all the way back to Bangkok.
After visiting a travel agent to get our visas, we jumped the next plane to Hanoi, which was just next door.
“Ever gonna speak to me again?” I asked on our short flight over.
“Just don’t drag me to anymore gay clubs from now on,” he said with his eye mask on.
“Do lesbian bars count?”
“Don’t make me punch you.”
“I hear Vietnam has some cool lesbian bars. There’s one run by an old Vietnam vet who never left … I heard she’s hot.”
“Bet she looks like Colonel Kurtz.”
“C’mon, don’t be negative.”
“You’re crazy, man.”
“I take that as a compliment coming from you.” Then I used his old line on him, “C’mon, have a drink … have a drink.” Brian lifted his eye mask up, grabbed the cocktail from my hand, and drank it down. He handed me the empty glass. “Needed that. Can’t wait to see what happens next!”
“Gentlemen, start your boners … Just kidding.”
“Stop,” he said, slipping his eye mask back down.
After a month lost in the miserable woods of Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand, I was a happy traveler again. Who knew what tomorrow would bring, but my friendship with Brian was back on. My personal renaissance was back on. It may sound insane, but there was hope again that if we could survive all this madness, we could come out the other side with our souls intact. I couldn’t wait to see what happened next.
Life was weird … but good again.
6
Cambodian Zen
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN TWO BURNT-OUT backpackers barely on speaking terms parachute into so-called enemy territory with no clue of what’s awaiting them below? What happens when we willingly remove our safety net of wine and women that we clung to for the past five months? Would we burn up during reentry into the straight world? Brian and I were about to find out.
We were rolling the dice and dropping anchor in a former enemy state where we couldn’t commit felonies or screw around, a place where the government could send us straight to hell in a bamboo handbasket for anything resembling our past behavior. Why gamble with our lives? We were young and naive and wanted to test the boundaries. We wanted to be challenged; we wanted to be uncomfortable. Island-hopping had nearly killed us, so how bad could Vietnam really be?
Vietnam was a scary place to us growing up. We were born in the Watergate era, so we’d heard all the horror stories about the war from relatives, from teachers, and from movies and television. Now that we were grown, we wanted
to see what the country was really like. I had a feeling it would be nothing like I imagined, and I was right.
When we landed in the former communist nation of Vietnam, the borders had just opened to American citizens. Brian admitted he was a tad apprehensive of the lingering effects of the war. “I’m not saying it’s going to happen, but we may want to prepare for a hostage crisis,” he said as we de-boarded the plane at the Hanoi airport.
“What, why? They kicked our ass. What beef could they possibly have with us?”
“I dunno … maybe because we killed a shitload of their people.”
“I didn’t kill anyone.”
Brian looked at my shaved head. “You look like you did.”
“Relax, man. I’m sure it’s water under the bridge.”
“But dude, what happens to bridges in war movies?”
“What?”
“They blow up! All I’m saying is, if we get up to any monkey business like stealing statues or starting any barroom brawls with gay strippers, we may find ourselves hanging from our toenails in a bamboo pen.”
“How many times do I have to apologize? That was the old me—I’m maturing.”
“Your body may be a man, but your soul is still a boy.” Brian was starting to sound like some of the Zen philosophers he was reading.
“Can’t believe you’re lecturing me on decorum,” I said.
“Believe it.”
“Just calm down,” I said. “You’ve seen Platoon way too many times.”
I promised Brian I would not go crazy in Vietnam. We’d done enough partying in the preceding countries to last a few lifetimes, and I was serious about growing up. I wanted to continue the personal renaissance I’d been talking so much about. Hell, I wanted to start it for real this time, before it was too late.
But could I change—can anyone? Did I even want to anymore? I knew I wasn’t the person I left behind in America, but that DNA was still stuck to me. It always will be. I am a stupid American! I can’t change that unless I get a brain transplant or go back to grad school or defect to Cuba.
“Maybe we should go to North Korea next?” I had to throw it out there.
“Um, let’s see if we survive this first,” Brian shot back.
I will say at this point, even though Brian had become a buttoned-up pain in my ass, I respected him for finally showing some maturity. After his romantic Singapore sojourn, he seemed to be more Zen about life and less about living on the razor’s edge of indecency. He actually seemed to be growing, which was a frightening proposition. That was my goal. What was I doing wrong?
Our fears of bamboo incarceration were quelled when we finally arrived at customs. As soon as the customs official found out we were Americans, he got excited and wanted to teach us Vietnamese right there. “See, they love us here,” I whispered to Brian as we smiled and pretended to understand what the hell he was saying.
We walked over to a currency exchange and turned in our Thai baht for some Vietnamese money (dong), then we shared a taxi to our hotel with this big English guy named Scott (I called him Scotty), who would end up traveling with us for weeks. After roughing it in hostels for months, we decided to splurge and get a nice room at the Trang An Hotel for ten dollars a night that had functional air conditioning and a private bathroom.
Once we settled in, we were ready to experience Hanoi—the city of bicycles, mopeds, scooters, and rickshaws. Touring around on rented bicycles, we noticed the city still had quite a bit of French influence. We saw lots of French colonial architecture and found the baguette was the bread of choice in town. All this finally made sense when the Book reminded me that Hanoi was the capital of French Indochina for the first half of the twentieth century.
What we as Americans remember, of course, is what happened after the French left. Hanoi “turned to the dark side” and became the capital of communist North Vietnam from 1954 to 1976. Then, after "Charlie" kicked the crap out of our fathers during the war, Hanoi became capital of reunified Vietnam in 1976, which is where we stand today.
Brian and I vowed not to bring up any of these sordid facts to anyone here, which paid off because, despite being in former commie country, everywhere we went the people were extremely friendly—the exact opposite of what we imagined.
“See, anytime you assume anything in life, you’re gonna be as wrong as the dong,” I said.
Brian wasn’t convinced. “The night is still young.”
Speaking of the wrongness of the local dong, after spending a few hours in Vietnam, we quickly learned the real currency over here is the US Yankee dollar. The exchange rate definitely benefited us to trade back to the dollar and not convert to the dong—so we did.
I wouldn’t describe our first day in Hanoi as “fun” per se, but it was interesting. The first thing you notice is it’s an extremely congested and perplexing city. I have never seen so many bicycles and mopeds in my life—they had overwhelmed the city like ten million ants on a mountain of sugar. The only cars in town were taxis; it was like some third world New York except for the nightlife, which still seemed to be run by the old communist regime.
To say there wasn’t much to do in Hanoi at night was an understatement. It was barely open for business, so we tried out a few places we heard of (Tin Tin’s and Apocalypse) and had a few beers. They were good bars, supposedly, but you wouldn’t know by its patronage. We were literally the only human beings in any bar, which was surreal.
“Did somebody drop an H-bomb in here?” I said.
“This is like partying in Chernobyl!” Brian shouted to the empty bar.
“Tourism here is definitely in the nascent stage,” I said. “Let’s cut out.”
Being the great Marco Polo travelers that we were, we decided to go for an aimless Hanoi walkabout. First we stumbled onto a water puppet show. Brian tripped over the puppeteer and had to apologize and sit down and watch the show to make up for his stupidity. The show was in Vietnamese, so we didn’t understand anything other than it took place in a temple, but we politely sat through it.
Brian whispered, “This is not long-lasting stimulus.”
“No kidding. It’s a freaking puppet show.”
“I’m already templed out. Let’s fly out tonight.”
“What, to another party island? We haven’t even visited one temple yet.”
“I’m projecting into the future.”
After the puppet show, we tipped the puppeteer for the effort and kept wandering the streets. Downtown Hanoi was pleasant at night with lots of kids running around staring at us. They all wanted to sell us postcards and maps but we politely declined. “They’re looking at us like aliens. What are we doing here?” Brian looked uncomfortable, this was a good start.
“Guess I’m looking for a spiritual clue,” I mused.
“A clue to what? I totally agree with shutting down the Cirrhosis Tour, but we may be barking up the wrong tree if you’re looking for answers here.”
“Just wait for it … Maybe the universe will meet us halfway.”
It’s funny how life works. The moment I asked the universe for help, we had our first moment of Zen. This five-year-old boy approached Brian saying nothing. He just took Brian’s hand and walked with him as I trailed behind and took pictures. They walked up a hill that led to a small market, then Brian and the boy went in and Brian came out holding a chocolate bar. I quietly watched Brian split the chocolate bar with the boy. It was an amazing scene of simple human connection.
The universe was listening.
After that, the boy followed us for what seemed like miles. I began to wonder if his mother was missing him. How would he find his way home? After a while, Brian looked back. “Where’d my sidekick go?”
“It’s way past his bedtime. That was pretty cool, though.”
“Where the hell are we?” Brian stopped walking.
“Vietnam,” I said.
“No, literally where are we?”
“Err … Asia?” Brian and I recognized nothing.
I put my arm around his shoulder. “We’ve just broken one of the cardinal rules of backpacking: always know how to get home.”
“Way to go, Magellan. I blame you,” Brian said. He never had any sense of direction.
Our compass was off in Vietnam because there weren’t any of the ubiquitous American franchise signs littered about that we had become so accustomed to seeing in other countries. When we hopped in a Vietnamese taxi, we couldn’t tell our cabbie our hotel was 2 blocks down from the 7-Eleven; there were no 7-Elevens, all we saw was a blur of Vietnamese letters everywhere.
Brian asked, “Dude, what’s the name of our hotel?”
“Uh, something house?” I drew a blank.
“We’re both useless.” Brian went to work on the cabbie using his charades skills to somehow mime us back to civilization. When we finally got back to our hotel, one of the backpackers in the lobby told us the first American ambassador had just arrived last week and the first American Embassy was set to open tomorrow on the grand exalted leader Ho Chi Minh’s birthday.
“The times they are a changin’, man,” the backpacker said. “What a time to be alive.”
“You said it.”
“There’s gonna be a killer party tomorrow,” he added, which in Hanoi meant there was going to be a somber group procession past the corpse of Ho Chi Minh that everyone was ordered to attend.
I smiled. “We should crash.”
Brian yawned. “That sounds like, something.”
I eventually talked Brian into visiting the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum with the rest of the populace to pay our respects.
“It’s your funeral, brother,” Brian added before turning out the lights.
I couldn’t sleep, wondering how we would be received tomorrow. Since we were some of the first Yanks let back into the country since the war, who knew how the mourners would treat an American with a shaved head who shows up to celebrate their dead commandant. We were going to find out.
The next morning was the big day. We needed to get in the mood so we found the only Mexican bar in Hanoi to lube up.
“If we’re going to celebrate a dead enemy of the state, we need to be as un-sober as possible.” Brian didn’t need to convince me. We were drying out but not going cold turkey. We proceeded to get as rowdy as you can day-drinking in an empty bar in a former communist country. It didn’t take long for the Vietnam jokes along with margaritas and pints of 333, the local beer of choice, to pour out fast and furious.