The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [60]
We flew to Portugal to play a festival, second on the bill after the Pretenders. I was certain we were hot shit, because the last gig we’d played in Oporto was sheer adoration, the audience banging on the stage, calling for encore after encore.
Instead, we played for an indifferent crowd. In the front, at the barricades, an affronted woman waved her fists. “PLAY MUSIC!” she yelled, indignantly, during the songs. “PLAY MUSIC!”
I stayed up all night afterwards, because I was catching a flight to Frankfurt, then a flight to Bangkok, and then a flight to Cambodia. Having been everywhere in North America and Western Europe, I wanted to go someplace weird.
There was a night’s layover in Bangkok. I stayed at a Days Inn by the airport. I videotaped the clock radio in the room—the numbers blinking, the DJ speaking the intoxicating tumble of the Thai language.
I spent one night in Bangkok before a holiday in Cambodia.
I landed in Phnom Penh in sunshine that was not so much blazing as boring: boring in the other sense, as in, it bored through your eyes and into your skull. I carried a sheaf of teletyped papers with the rainbow logo of a tour company; I was scared to wander through Cambodia unguided, and in any case, wanted to be drunk or high most of the time, and was thus in need of someone to drag me around.
We deplaned into a square building that looked like a library in Kansas. I was met by a slight, effeminate Khmer guy from the tour agency. He wore a white shirt over a Cambodian krama—a wide, multicolored scarf—wrapped around his waist like a skirt, and plastic sandals. He was immediately suspicious of me.
I had a couple of beers in the hotel buffet room, staffed by sternly obsequious waiters dressed like UN translators. I went up to my room and opened the curtains; I looked out over the Mekong River, away from the city, onto an endless marsh. As if Phnom Penh, the chaos behind us, wasn’t there at all. There was a Sheraton Phnom Penh message pad on the desk. I videotaped it. Over the bed hung a painting of topless women with plump, conical’60s tits, bathing in a pool by the temples of Angkor.
I was given a lugubrious tour of the National Museum. Every four steps we would stop in front of a statuette for a long recitation of dates and kings’ names. I wanted to be out in the broad dirt lot between the museum and the riverbank, where kids zoomed around in dust clouds, kicking soccer balls made of wicker, in the wild weirdness, the bike-rickshaws and mopeds, some with families of five clinging on: Dad at the helm, Mom in the back, two toddlers sandwiched between them, and a baby perched on the handlebars.
To my great relief, the guide to the Silver Palace had gone missing. The guy who’d picked me up at the airport was somberly apologetic. The king still resides in a cordoned-off portion of the Silver Palace—at that time, King Sihanouk, a French-speaking, jazz-saxophone-playing cosmopolitan who presided over his country’s atrocious poverty and, before selling out his subjects to the murderous Khmer Rouge, directed epic movies depicting a suave, glam Cambodia of beauty queens and sports cars.
My guide told me that he used to be a ballet dancer. He asked me if I planned to do any shopping. I told him, just for the sake of conversation, I might possibly look for some jewelry. He lit into a hysterical whisper: “What do you want to buy?! Rubies?! Silver?!”
He showed me Tuol Sleng, the junior high school that had been used as a torture house by the Khmer Rouge. Mug shots of people about to be murdered, a map of Cambodia made from the skulls of the tortured, metal bed frames onto which the tortured were bound. I walked out of the gates and back into the drowsy suburban neighborhood.
I was devastated, I couldn’t figure out if I was fighting back tears or if the very ability to cry had been sucked out of my head. I told the ballet dancer that I couldn’t go to the planned next stop, the Killing Fields.
He said, “Do you feel pity for my people?”
Somehow I heard this as: Do you, the privileged