The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [62]
The boring light ceded to a conjuration of pink and orange. I looked out the window and saw Khmers zipping around on their mopeds, pack animals, magical chaos. I didn’t want to see the temples, I wanted to sit on a bed and watch bizarre, exotic life through a window and on a screen. Not to be in it, but to long to be in it.
The waiter at breakfast tried to set up an appointment to practice his English. Heavy-headed, I assented and then flaked. The next day, he was genuinely confused as to why I didn’t make it. I skipped breakfast the day after.
I went to the tiny pharmacy to clean them out. I piled box upon box of Valium onto the floor, then noticed—more preposterous luck!—boxes of codeine. I started flipping those out of the case as well.
I heard a French-accented voice behind me. “What are you looking for?” I turned around and saw a manly, unshaven guy in mirrored shades. I said something half-assed and dismissive.
“Maybe I can help you find what you’re looking for,” he said.
I snarled, kept rummaging. He shrugged and went away.
Maybe he was trying to help me in the way I wanted to be helped. Who knows what that guy knew how to get—heroin? opium? Here we were in the immediate vicinity of the Golden Triangle. There were a number of basic drug-addict skills that I never got together.
The frat boy took me on a tour of a floating village: barges and boats tied together in the Tonle Sap Lake, with houses and stores on them. It’s populated by ethnic Vietnamese; they’re a minority in Cambodia, regarded with suspicion and contempt.
Our boat was steered by a Khmer kid, maybe thirteen, in worn jeans, with a heart-shaped American flag patch sewn on the ass pocket. We cruised slowly through the weird scene. Rowboats loaded up with goods—plasticware, cookware, canisters of condensed milk, fruit, inflatable toys—eased past us. Naked kids jumped gleefully into the water from the railing of a houseboat as we passed, shouting to me. The frat boy laboriously cut open a durian fruit with a pocketknife, and we ate the soft, stinking flesh. We floated up to a barge where plastic picnic chairs were gathered around under a canopy.
The proprietor produced beer from a cooler. Then the entertainment began. There was a monkey chained to a rail. A beer was cracked open and handed to the monkey, who grabbed it with both hands and feet, rolled onto his back, and gulped it frantically. The proprietor brought another cooler and set it down, opened it up, reached in and removed a huge snake. He swung the hissing monster at the terrorized, drunk monkey. The monkey shrieked. Everybody on the barge laughed. I faked a laugh because I didn’t want to seem unappreciative.
The snake was taken away, and the monkey crouched there, unnerved, his eyes shifting around wildly. The proprietor plucked a cat from under a table and brought it towards the monkey. The cat mewled and struggled. He brought the cat down to the monkey and held it down. The monkey drunkenly grabbed the cat’s flanks humped its back. The cat wrestled out of his grip and shot away.
The proprietor came over with another cat, a grey one. This one wasn’t struggling so much. It seemed resigned. The monkey took the grey cat by the ears and humped its skull.
“OHHHH!” squealed the frat boy. “HE IS SUCH A NAUGHTY MONKEY!”
They gave the monkey another beer. He drank with greedy relief.
I was back in New York, and out of Cambodian codeine.
A girl with an unsingable name sent me an e-mail out of the blue, saying she was on a high school field hockey team with the assistant of a woman who worked at a music magazine, and that she loved my music. Her name was a melodious string of vowels. Just looking at the e-mail, I decided that a girl with that name must be beautiful.
She came to a gig at Irving Plaza. She was a funny Valentine, with a long, strange nose disfigured by plastic surgery received when she was teenage and still growing, and blue eyes so pale they were translucent. She was shit-faced,