ZOMIA - PRACTICAL ANARCHY

BROKEN BRICKS

PHNOM PENH AGAIN

Now four months into the odyssey, the first known pilferage occurred the day after Tết. I suspect the glitchy MacBook was lifted by my Tết hosts as a going away gift, and I think I got the better of that deal. They didn’t get the hard drives, so no harm, no foul. Though happy to be rid of that Cupertino millstone, this also piqued my concerns about my dwindling sack of fiat currency. A new laptop was gonna eat at least a grand. I could try to live without my box, but I could also laugh in the face of fate by buying a replacement.  

The car ride to Phenom Penh was uneventful, except for a large truck veering head-on. Just like a bus ride in Laos, the truck swerved away at the last second, and I see a look of terror on the driver’s face. Since stunts like that are common in Asia, I figured this musta been a close one.  

After underway, we stopped to milk a few cash machines, but it turns out dollars only dispense in major cities. The ride is now officially C.O.D. And as we approach Phnom Penh, I wonder how to direct her to the Bright Lotus. Her having a pre-planned destination went unconsidered, but when we park in an unfamiliar part of town, I see the light.

We are near a public square, where she will join the socializing. First, she pantomimes me walking to a cash machine over yonder. After squaring away the bill, I hailed a tuk-tuk for the Bright Lotus, and off we went.

It's now twilight and getting dark. For most of the tuk-tuk ride, nothing looked familiar and before I knew it, we were rolling into a place that looked like they were filming a scene for The Fifth Element. A redheaded scantily clad chick was levitating into a tuk-tuk. And before I could join her, a horde of service providers surrounded me proffering their various wares. This was the infamous Boeng Kak Lakeside Village, a backpacker enclave of some renown, that was urban renewaled out of existence a few years later.

My new tuk-tuk driver carries me to the Bright Lotus, but there is no room in the inn. With some persistence we find a stable that offered free WIFI and a decent rate. Run by an Ozzie and offering WIFI seemed to me a safety guarantee for my stuff. Seems like a nice place too and I will explore the hood on the morrow.

The night passes without incident, but I am awakened around 5 AM by a cacophony pouring through my closed window. WTF is that?! It’s a wedding party in the middle of the street, warming up for the ceremony. The street will be egg frying hot in a few hours; so why not start at sundown? I dunno.

After breakfast I check email and learn that JT and his friend Brat are launching their boat trip to Saigon from Phnom Penh, and will arrive tomorrow. Exiting the Internet, I wander around Terra Firma and encounter Huxley’s Brave New World Bar and Grill. The name derived from a reputed progeny of Darwin’s Bulldog, owner of the Brave New World. It looked too upscale for my ilk.

Turning down a side street, strolling back towards my lodging, I encounter the counterpoint to Huxley’s huckstering, aptly christened Broken Bricks. A pub of sorts occupying half the first floor of a dilapidated building from the colonial era. The edifice had been defaced with scrawled graffiti; mostly the poetry of Dave, the pub landlord.

Broken Bricks was a work of art, posing as a bar. It had one of those third world ambiances, with a touch of otherworld surrealism. The owner was a Brit who had a thick Geordie accent, and a Khmer girlfriend, and a young son from another Khmer girl. Dave had gone native.

Broken Bricks is an apt metaphor for what is about to befall me in Phnom Penh. The ensuing clutterbucks begin tomorrow evening, and lasts my entire 30 days in Phnom Penh. Thirty days in PP? Yes, that’s part of the tsunami of unwelcome circumstances about to roll over me. And it starts when I buy another laptop, while laughing in the face of fate. And then Fate laughs back while bitch-slapping some sense into me. It was all in good fun and ends well… eventually.

Not wanting to wait till Bangkok to buy another laptop, I go shopping for another right away. Skipping the tedious details of that, it is now time for me to meet JT and Brat at the Bright Lotus. The new box is on the desk near the curtained window, but unlike Nam, I’m several stories up and there are bars on the windows. So it’s safe and I don’t bother to stash it; I’m running late for dinner.

Brat is a Brit with an intelligible English accent, unlike Dave, and probably due to his not living in England since the sixties. And Brat had once stayed in Phnom Penh for a month, and was going to guide us through Sin City.

After an unmemorable dinner, Brat decides we should go to Sharky’s Bar. It’s the place to meet Khmer women, have a drink and play some pool. Brat has a laundry list of instructions about how to deport oneself in a Khmer whorehouse: “Don’t let them seat you; you pick the seat! Don’t buy any girl you wouldn’t fuck a drink. Don’t let any girl sit with you if you’re not interested.” It was like the headmaster at whore school was exhorting us to persevere in proper decorum. 

Sharky’s was what it was, and we all ended up with a girl. And all were obtained in the proper manner. That would be the last of Brat and JT I would see till Bangkok several weeks later. The girl and I tuk-tuked to my place near Broken Bricks, and upon entering my room I immediately notice my new laptop was invisible.

Now the realization that my box has vanished, and knowing nothing I can do will bring it back, I continue on like nothing happened. Later I would complain to the front desk. It turned out that the barred windows had been left unlocked whilst getting ready to rob me. Note to selfie, always check the barred windows.

No use crying over spilt milk, but I did inform the guest house owner I wanted him to pay for that, and he sent word that it was not his fault. And I retorted that I would be staying at his place gratis for the duration. That’s how we worked that out, and that’s why I spent 30 days in Phnom Penh. And the fun was just beginning.

The next afternoon I’m at Broken Bricks and run into a Brit who tells me his phone was stolen last night. It seems to be going around. Then he tells me he went to the market an hour ago looking for a phone, and he bought his old phone. He powered it up and the contacts and stuff were all the same. It did not occur to me to go and do likewise.

My constant worries about loss and money are creating these circumstances; I am aware of that on a meta level. By spending time everyday worrying about my financial future, and by imagining bleak future outcomes, I was multiplying this subtraction of my things. Now once again, this was nothing more than mental goal setting, and negative goals come about more easily than positive goals; or so it seems.

If any of that had occurred to me then, I could have spared myself the wave of negativity that would wash over me. It seemed the flow was no longer going my way. But the flow is the flow, and how I respond to it has an impact on me, not the flow. Struggling to disengage from a riptide will end in drowning, but by letting the riptide play itself out you will live to see another riptide.

Maybe two weeks into my stay in Phnom Penh, I meet a tuk-tuk driver named Bob. It’s pronounced with a long O; kinda like the way the Blackadder pronounced Bob. Bob is taller than most Cambodians, lighter skinned and speaks English pretty well. He strikes me as a fast-talking grifter, but he says he has access to American grade “skunk.” Turns out he does not, and is indeed a huckster.

Bob helps with some errands, and as I am ready to call it a day, Bob invites me to a party. You would think I’d be wary of this kinda thing by now, but if you’re afraid to swim with the sharks, the sharks own you. So I say, “Sure why not.” Once again I’m the only gringo, and once again too much moonshine and way too much snake, but this time I lose my camera and not my virginity.

And I was so out of it I didn’t realize it was gone until after noon the next day. When I finally recover enough to face the glaring sun; I go looking for Bob, and when I confront him, “Your girlfriend stole my camera Bob!” “Yeah, I know. No hard feelings, right?” said with a sheepish smile. How Cambodian.

In less than a month I have lost two laptops and two video cameras, and only one of which was not stolen. Not just that, I lost my security blankets. I had been making videos and posting them on YouTube. It gave me a sense of purpose, and I felt like I was “doing something.” This time my hard drives were stolen too, and they contained my video footage, my music collection, my important digital docs and my only surviving copy of a book I wrote, were all wiped. Now all I had left was poor old analog me. 

BROKEN BRICKS

Most of my evenings are whiled away at Broken Bricks. And when I order a beer, a kid runs down the street and buys the beer on credit, and then brings it to me. I pay him, and he settles up with the middlemen. How’s that for Just in Time inventory control? I like the place because it is as unpredictable as my life, and I’m often surprised by the happenings.

One night I met the owner of the building, an entrepreneurial Vietnamese woman who owned several hair salons and worked as a concierge at a casino on the Thai border. What did she think of the bar? “I like when he pay rent.”

One night I walk in and Dave is ranting like the madman he is. Seems his recent Khmer girlfriend split for parts unknown with Dave’s cash on hand and with another Dave. And in the Broken Bricks unisex pissoir is painted a riddle: "What do you say to a Farang who tells you his Khmer girlfriend just stole his money, and left with another Farang? …Welcome to Cambodia!"

My thirty days in the hole had lapsed, and it was now time to head for Bangkok. After packing and informing the house of my departure, I went to the curb for a tuk-tuk. There is only one in sight… and it’s Bob’s.

OK, that’s god winking at me, but she wasn’t done. Several weeks later while on a “visa run,” Bob would again be the last man standing to chauffer me. Wink, wink. Oh and as we ride to the airport the second time, Bob tells me his girlfriend stole all his stuff, even his old tuk-tuk. Wink, wink.

Wait there’s more, on that visa run I sought out Broken Bricks and found it shuttered. There seems to have been some trouble stirred when Dave took revenge upon his Khmer ex-girlfriend. Enough trouble to get Dave deported, and the exhibition of Broken Bricks closed. A fitting end to the story of Broken Bricks.

Now on to Bangkok.