The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [61]
I barked, No!
Freaked him out.
It haunts me, the memory of misunderstandingly yelling at him; makes me wince.
I got the ballet dancer to take me to a market to buy some weed before returning. We walked into a covered market and right up to a stall where a guy scooped awful yellow stalks of marijuana into a plastic bag. The guy in the next stall was selling fortified wine—bottles, boxes, and two-gallon-sized oil cans with greased-up, flexing bodybuilders on their labels, analogizing the alcohol content.
In the car, the ballet dancer asked me what I was going to do with the weed—cook with it? No, I was going to smoke it. He giggled kind of psychotically. “Why you smoke that?! That for old man!”
I flew to Siem Reap, where the temples of Angkor are. A guy who looked like a Khmer frat boy drove me to a nondescript hotel. The lobby was lousy with glum Italian tourists.
I went to the market and bought a pipe with a ceramic bowl shaped like a skull, a poster of a benevolent King Sihanouk looking off into the distance, and the de rigueur tourist item, a t-shirt with a Jolly Roger and loud script in Khmer and English: DANGER!! BEWARE MINES!!
There was a pharmacy across the street, about the size of a closet, with barely enough room for a counter and glass shelves lined with medicine. I didn’t want to sully the pipe yet—I had to get it through customs back into America—and I had no idea where one would buy rolling papers in northwestern Cambodia. They didn’t have rolling papers, but behind the glass shelves was a box of twelve generic Valium. Somehow I had the gumption to casually ask for the Valium. She plopped it on the counter and I paid a couple bucks for it. Preposterous luck.
I popped a couple of them, and drank some beer. The frat boy met me in the lobby and drove through the woods, to Angkor. We saw a temple called Ta Prohm, which had been left unattended for so long that the jungle was taking it back. Muscular trees had broken through the walls, and massive roots, like bridge cables, grappled with the carved stones, gripping them, an excruciatingly slow act of violence.
There was a kid, maybe a seven-year-old, trailing us.
“Hello!” he cried.
Hi, I said, smiling.
“SAME TO YOU!” he yelped, and ran away.
He came back and tried to sell me postcards. I didn’t want to appear rude to a seven-year-old Khmer—these were, after all, his temples—I flipped through them.
“Look!” he said. “Look!”
He was pointing at two stone lions flanking a staircase.
“Lion!” he said in an urgent whisper. “Lion. Lion.”
The frat boy led me slowly across a frieze that illustrated a creation myth called “The Churning of the Ocean of Milk.” He assiduously described every tiny bas-relief of characters and plot points. My benzodiazepine buzz was wisping away.
The frat boy paused before an image of a man in a tree.
“Who is this?” he asked.
I don’t know.
“This is thee Buddha. He is in tree. See? What is this?”
A pack of elephants?
“Elephant! Elephant are hit the tree. They try to knock thee Buddha from thee tree. But no! They can’t do it! Because of thee perfection of thee Buddha.”
He made a shrill, joyous cry. “Noooo! They can’t do it! Because of thee perfection of thee Buddha!”
I sat with the glum Italians in the hotel bar. There was a large, strange band on Khmer TV—stringed instruments both plucked and bowed, and animal skin drums. They all wore military fatigues. Two singers, man and woman, stood amid them. The band struck up a hypnotic racket, each instrument veering away from each other out of time and tune, like avant-garde jazz taking a wild detour through folk music. They stopped abruptly and one singer stepped forward and caterwauled a long, jumbled melody line, also utterly liberated from the tempo. Then the man stopped singing, the band played another cacophony of elongated riffs, then stopped, then the woman stepped forward and sang. The music was mystifying.
In my room, I videotaped a tube of Ta Prohm toothpaste, and a wild Bollywood