The Book of Drugs (19 page)

They: “ru ok?”

Me: Yteah if ciyrse ium pl. ehjsy yfp upi yjoml. o, kidy fine.

They: “hello?”

Me: nothing

They: “hey doughty ru ok? hello?”

 

Stanley Ray's mother was ill. He seemed tranquil. “When my mom dies, I don't want anybody to call me,” he said. “I don't want anybody to make a big deal about it at all.”

A week after she passed, he was too angry to look me in the eye. “I can't
believe
you didn't call after my mom died, that's
really fucked up,
you don't care about
anybody,
there's something really
wrong
with you,” he said.

 

I met a sensationally gorgeous girl in Dallas, on a radio show. She had wandered backstage without intending to; the security let her through because she was so beautiful they figured she must belong with the rock stars. She said she was going down to Jamaica on vacation in a week, did I want to go? Pretty good for a first date. I said yes.

I stayed at a rundown hotel down the beach, but I bribed a uniformed guy with a nightstick to gain my way into her all-inclusive resort, drank the watered-down beer they offered, and tried to get her high. She refused the joint, so I smoked the whole thing, and wastedly tried to make out with her as we floated in the placid water. She rebuffed me, but I kept coming on. When you invite somebody down to a tropical island for a vacation with you, you must know you're going to fuck them, but this girl had worked out, in her mind, some accelerated, but quite proper, version of a three-dates-before-sex schedule.

That same day, I had her naked in her room, and I asked her to go down on me. She leaped up, yelling, told me she barely knew me, and get out.

There was a guy who worked at my hotel—in no clearly defined position—named Eustace. He had a fishing boat bobbing out in the water by the hotel painted with the name THE AMAZING EUSTACE. He sold me some coke, and some weed, and some stuff he called opium, but which was black tar heroin. I asked him for some aluminum foil so I could smoke it, but he had no idea what I was talking about, so I rolled it up into a joint, which will do you
little good with black tar heroin. I smoked it anyway, crestfallen, because there was no way I was going to wait until I could get to a store and get some foil.

I did coke until the morning, then passed out, woke up near dusk, and bought some more coke from Eustace. I was chatting with him in my room, tapping out a pile of powder, when the door opened and the Texas girl came in. She was penitent; she smiled sweetly at me. She sat on the bed. I offered her a line, and she refused, so I sat there sniffing coke as Eustace made polite conversation with her. Finally, half an hour later, she got up to leave. She paused before walking out the door, but I didn't follow her. It wasn't that her earlier rejection had so humiliated me; it was that I had a pile of cocaine and what I wanted to do was sit there in my room all night and sniff cocaine.

“Why did you let her leave?!” asked Eustace, shocked.

I was there for a week, doing coke, smoking weed, occasionally going down to the beach and drinking, but never going into the water. I may as well have been in St. Louis.

One night I couldn't find Eustace; I went out to the beach looking for drugs. This haggard guy behind a palm tree hissed, “Coke! Coke!” He whipped out a bag and named a price. I was wasted, trying to look at the bag and maybe negotiate, but he hissed, “Quick! Now! The cops are coming! I can hear them!” I gave him the dough, he disappeared in the trees, and I found myself holding a baggie of laundry detergent.

The next day I saw Eustace and recounted the tale jovially, thinking I'd get a laugh out of him, but he turned to me, fuming, “Why didn't you come to me?! I have to feed me pickney!”

Years later I came back, sober. I went to a twelve-step meeting; it was in a church across the street from that hotel.

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 white colonist, look down upon us, the unwashed, in our primitive distress?

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 dance spectacle on TV. Men danced the cabbage patch and threw paint on each other.

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.