A Cook's Tour (26 page)

     Driving out by the airport one afternoon, my cabdriver pulled his car over suddenly, as did everyone else on the road. A police escort whipped by, sirens screaming, followed in short order by a spanking new black Humvee with tinted windows.

     ‘Hun Sen nephew,’ said my driver with distaste. Hun Sen’s family and friends are the subject of frequent stories of drunken beatings, stabbings, and pistol-whippings, when one of them gets cranky during an evening out in the discos. There’s a famous tale of the time one business associate arrived at Pochentong Airport on a commercial airliner. Told that the airline had misplaced his luggage, he is said to have disembarked, procured a gun from a waiting flunky, then begun shooting out the airplane’s tires until his belongings were recovered. Needless to say, this behavior did not result in arrest.

     Shooting things, if you have enough money in your pocket, is perfectly all right in Cambodia. Drinks are free at the Gun Club. Ammunition, however, you pay for by the clip.

     My waiter, a slim, friendly Khmer, stood over my shoulder as I perused the menu. A tray of Angkor and Tiger beers sat in the middle of the table. Under the thatched roof of the long, open shelter, a few well-muscled soldiers in paratrooper camos from the nearby base sat at another table, unsmiling behind their sunglasses, drinking sodas and beer.

     ‘I think I’ll start off with three clips for the .45 . . . three clips for the AK-47 . . . followed by an entrée of five clips for the M16 – can I have some grenades on the side?’

     ‘You like James Bond?’ asked my waiter, refilling my glass for me. ‘You like James Bond gun?’

     ‘Depends,’ I said. ‘Sean Connery or Roger Moore. If we’re talking Roger Moore, forget about it.’

     ‘Look!’ said my waiter, dangling an automatic pistol in front of my face. ‘Walther PPK! James Bond gun! . . . You like?’

     ‘Sure,’ I said, hefting the thing over a picnic snack of baguette and sausage I’d brought along. ‘I’ll try it.’

     You’ve got to admire an establishment that invites its customers to get drunk and then fire automatic weapons indiscriminately. Next to the gun racks and the ammunition locker, at the Gun Club, there was a sign on the wall that said in big block letters Please Don’t Point Your Weapon at Anything You Do Not Intend to Shoot. This being Cambodia, I thought the text left a lot of room open for interpretation. A Japanese businessman boozily pulling the pin from a grenade a few feet away gave a glassy-eyed look in my direction, smiled, and hurled the thing at a target about fifty feet away.
Boom!
Next time I looked over, he was playing with an M16, trying to jam a full clip into the rifle – backward.

     I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t have a great time. Firing bursts from heavy weapons at paper targets of charging Russians is fun. I did surprisingly well with the AK-47 and the .45, hitting center body mass almost every time. At one point, his hands over his ears to protect them from the racket of my discharging weapon, my waiter tugged my sleeve and asked, ‘So . . . whey you from?’

     ‘New York,’ I said.

     ‘What you do?’ he inquired.

     ‘I’m a chef.’

     My waiter looked at my target, which I’d pretty much shredded from neck to crotch, smiled encouragingly, and said, ‘You could be a killer!’ That’s what passes for a compliment in Phnom Penh, I guess.

     They had an impressive selection of armaments at the Gun Club. Ammunition cost between eight and fifteen dollars a clip. I favored the AK-47, as the M16 seemed to jam anytime I put it on full auto – and my marksmanship was better with the heavier gun. I sprang for a few tries on an ancient M50 machine gun, an old partisan weapon from World War II, they told me. It had a big drum canister, like a larger version of the old tommy gun, and discharged in one extended noisy squirt, kicking up and away. The first time I tried it, it raked the target area from floor to ceiling, very difficult to keep steady, sandbags blowing apart in smoky bits as the bullets chewed through. They used to let you play with a mounted M60, but no longer, my waiter informed me. The high-powered shells were tearing right through the sand berm separating the pagoda next door from the Gun Club range, causing mayhem among the bonzes. If I wanted to shoot a cow or a water buffalo, however – maybe with a B-40 rocket? – one could be provided.

     I learned a few things at the Gun Club. I learned that when you see Bruce Willis or Sylvester Stallone in a movie, firing for what seems like forever with an automatic weapon, he must be changing clips a lot. When you squeeze down on the trigger of an M16 with the selecter on full auto, it’s all over fast, all the rounds gone in seconds. Sly and Bruce would have a problem with overheated barrels, too, I’m guessing, as even on an AK-47, firing on semiautomatic, the gun gets very hot. And any idea that someone can competently handle two machine guns – one in each arm – with any kind of control or accuracy is ridiculous. Try firing two M16s at the same time and you’ll blow your own feet off – at best.

We crossed over the Japanese bridge to the other side of the river. A strip of gigantic, football field-sized restaurants had been built on sagging wooden platforms over wetland. At the place we were eating, there were seats for at least five hundred people, yet Philippe and I were the only customers. A Khmer band played a mix of traditional Khmer and pop standards on a large soundstage with disco lights. A menu the size of a telephone book contained laminated full-color photographs of at least 150 offerings – mostly not very good-looking takes on stir-fry. We ate
chrouk pray
(wild boar),
popear
(grilled goat) in hot sauce, and
chilosh
(venison) with a salad of cabbage, tomato, and eggplant. A bus pulled up outside and the ‘beer girls’ arrived. Buying beer in a restaurant or nightclub can be tricky. Every beer brewer or importer hires teams of attractive girls in distinctive, presumably sexy uniforms to work the places the brand is sold. They arrive together – the Angkor girls, the Tiger girls, the Carlsberg girls – and representatives of two or three other brands. They’re paid by the can or bottle sold, so competition is fierce. Within minutes, Philippe and I were surrounded by a throng of aggressive young women, all trying forcefully to get us to order their brand. When we ordered Tiger, the other girls melted away, leaving just the Tiger girl to work our table. Every time I’d get halfway down my bottle, she’d snap open another one.

     That night, we went out with some expats. Misha, a Bulgarian; Tim, a Brit; and Andy, an American, sat at a table with me, drinking warm beer over ice, comparing bullet wounds. ‘ ’97,’ said Misha, pointing at a puckered, shiny spot on his neck. ‘ ’93,’ said Andy, pulling back his shirt to expose an ugly recess in his chest.

     Along the wall, twelve or thirteen girls sat silently on folding chairs, looking as enthusiastic as patients waiting for the dentist. One of them cuddled an infant.

     ‘Look at that little scrubber,’ said Andy, pointing out a sad moonfaced girl hunched over in her chair under a flickering fluorescent light. ‘She’s a chunky little beast, isn’t she?’ he said in English, then translated it into Khmer for the girl’s benefit.

     We stopped at three or four bars, FCC, the Heart, a nightclub filled with underage whores. At the end of the night, I asked Tim how much to tip my moto driver, a kid who’d been hustling me around town on the back of his bike all night, waiting for me outside until I was ready, then taking me to the next place.

     ‘Give him three dollars,’ he said.

     I gave him five. What the hell? Two extra dollars, right? He needed it more than I did.

     ‘What are you doing?’ complained Tim. ‘You’ll ruin it for everybody!’

Psar Thmei is the central market, a fetid, sweltering mess with heaps of room-temperature food sweating in the crowded aisles beneath heavy canvas tarpaulins – none of it looking (or smelling) any too fresh.

     The difference between this market and markets in Vietnam was like night and day. But then, the Vietnamese have the luxury of pride. I passed by reeking cloudy-eyed fish, limp vegetables, slimy, graying poultry. Philippe, however, was undeterred. He dug into a towering pile of lemongrass tripe and tongue with a blissed-out expression on his face. ‘Mmmm! Yummy!’ he said to the tripemonger, clasping his hands together and affecting a short bow. ‘Tony! You should try some! It’s delicious!’ He came at me with a steaming, dog-smelling mouthful of tripe pinched between chopsticks. I opened my mouth, and bit down, reminding myself to call Nancy later and ask her to make an appointment with the gastroenterologist. Philippe was trying to kill me.

     He tried to kill me again at the ‘Jello-O’ stand at the market, insisting I try the nasty-looking gelatinous kelp-colored stuff they were eating from iced bowls. But Philippe is an adventurer, a gourmand, in the best senses of those words. He is afraid of absolutely nothing. He’ll put anything in his mouth. Maybe it’s because he’s French. We visited a Vietnamese floating village off Tonle Sap, or Great Lake. We drifted past floating homes, businesses, livestock pens, catfish farms. ‘What is she eating?’ asked Philippe, pointing out a woman cooking in a wok on the small porch of a dingy floating house, naked children squatting next to her. He made us take our boat over. He smiled broadly and asked the woman if she’d be willing to share a small portion of her meal with us. She very nicely obliged, spooning up a serving of ground fish and pork cooked in sugar syrup with dried shrimp. It tasted pretty decent. As we pulled away after a rudimentary but filling meal, I pointed something out to Philippe. The woman was rinsing the wok in the brown river water a few feet down from a floating livestock pen, and a child washing nearby. ‘How do you say
E-coli
in French?’ I asked.

     I knew it was close. I could smell it. The fabled durian fruit. You can smell it a hundred yards away. Imagine a big green menacingly spiked football – only it exudes an unforgettable, gassy, pungent, decomposing smell. It’s an odor that hangs over markets and produce stalls all over Asia. It is said to be delicious. I was intrigued. Expensive, ugly, difficult to transport – it’s against the law to take durian on most planes, buses, and trains – it is said to be one of the most prized delicacies of the East. I had to try it. I bought a nice big one; it looked much like the relatively benign jackfruit, except spikier. I’d planned on taking it back to the hotel, but after ten minutes in the car with the reeking, foul-smelling object, the crew were crying for mercy. We had to pull over by Wat Phnom, a pagoda and park in the center of town, where, under the watchful eye of an elephant, I carved up my durian, sawing through the thick skin and cutting myself on the stegaosauruslike armor. God it stank! It smelled like you’d buried somebody holding a big wheel of Stilton in his arms, then dug him up a few weeks later. After sawing through the skin, I pulled apart the fibrous yellowy pulp, exposing, around the avocado-sized pits, lobes of cheesy, gooey, spreadable material that looked very much like whole foie gras. The smell inside was less intense. I took a thick smear of the stuff – it had the consistency of a ripe St. André – and was shocked. It was fantastic. Cheesy, fruity, rich, with a slightly smoky background. Imagine a mix of Camembert cheese, avocado, and smoked Gouda. OK, don’t. That’s not a very good description. But tasting the stuff, one struggles for words. It didn’t taste anything like it smelled; the flavor was much less assertive, and curiously addictive. Durian was one of the first truly ‘new’ flavors I’d encountered – unlike anything else in its uniqueness, its difficulty. Remember the first time you tasted caviar? Or foie gras? Or a soft ripened cheese? There’s that same sense of recognition that you’re in new and exciting territory. You may not love it right away, but you know you’ve tasted something important and intriguing.

     Licking the delightful gleet off my blade, I wondered what I could possibly do with this information. What could one make with durian back in New York? How would one store it? Even wrapped in six layers of shrink-wrap, buried in foil, and encased in cement, the odor would escape like an evil spirit. You’d have to treat it like fissionable material, keep it segregated in a special locker in some specially ventilated subcellar constructed just for that purpose. But it’s a tantalizing product. Someone, some New York chef, someday, will harness durian’s strange and terrible powers. And I’ll be there to eat it. Probably alone.

I flew President Air to Siemreap. It was a forty-year-old Antonov cargo plane with passenger seats bolted clumsily into the cabin. The seat belts were broken, hanging uselessly on the sides. When I took my assigned seat, it fell back immediately into the reclining position. The cabin filled up with impenetrable steam as we taxied down the runway. When the flight attendant handed out the in-flight meal, a cardboard box containing plastic-wrapped mystery-meat sandwiches, the entire planeload of passengers burst into nervous laughter and discarded them untouched under their seats without a second thought. Chris and Lydia, the shooters, sat paralyzed, their eyes bugging out of their heads as the plane wobbled and shimmied over Tonle Sap, then slowly descended over the mud flats as we approached Siemreap. Misha, the likable but sinister Bulgarian from Phnom Penh, was on the same flight, on the way to some ‘business.’ From what I’d understood from previous meetings, he was selling exotic snakes to a Russian clientele. But Kry, my translator/fixer, was dubious. ‘He going to see KR,’ he said. ‘You don’t wanta know. Believe me. I don’t wanta know.’