God Bless Cambodia

by Randy Ross

  I couldn’t speak or breathe.

  “The clerk refilling the beer case saw you,” the manager said. “Take out the cheese, get the fuck out of my store, and don’t come back.”

  “But I’ll pay for everything, I’m really sorry.”

  “Get out before I call the cops.”

  From then on, I imagined my photo hanging by the Kitty’s cash register. On the way home from work, I’d cross the street so the store employees wouldn’t see me. I had learned my lesson about shoplifting, but I was more convinced than ever that poverty wasn’t for me.

  Next I worked as a waiter, which paid mostly cash. Instead of schlepping to the bank every week, I stashed the money in the dirty socks in my laundry bag. White gym socks were crammed with singles. Dark socks with larger bills. When I ran out of socks, I started stuffing the inside pockets of the coats in my closet. Being surrounded by all that cash made me feel safe and warm, as if I were floating in some kind of amniotic fluid.

  Six months later, I landed my first full-time magazine job. Six months after that, the publisher was fired. Then the editor-in-chief was fired. The remaining editor decided to boost morale with team-building exercises, such as happy hours featuring Twinkies, Devil Dogs, Hostess Cup Cakes, and Schlitz. After four months, the magazine moved to New York and we were all fired.

  I swore I’d one day accumulate enough money so I’d never again worry about unemployment checks or Twinkie hangovers.

  Eventually I snagged a senior editor job at Personal Computer Computing Week and was able to save 10 percent of my paycheck. After fifteen years, I was starting to feel financially secure. Until five months ago, when I got laid off again.

  But looking into my bag filled with 380,000 bolivars, a familiar sensation returns: I’m safe, warm, and ready for a beer.

  Blog Entry: August 30

  Playa El Playa, Venezuela

  Dear Friends and Family:

  Made it to South America in one piece, having a great time. The natives are quite friendly. The highlights:

  • Two flirty Latin women on the plane who plied me with local delicacies.

  • A Venezuelan beauty queen at the airport terminal who gave me her phone number.

  • An attractive Polish surgeon in the hotel’s four-star dining room who invited me to join her and her boyfriend for breakfast two days in a row. Is there an accent over the “a” in ménage à trois? (Just kidding, Mom.)

  The second night, I went to the local tiki bar: good food, great crowd, dueling DJs, fire show, fog machines, confetti cannons, mosh pit, go-go girls in suspended cages pouring margaritas on the crowd At dawn the police sent us all home. Slept till noon. Am I getting too old for this? Will find out tonight when I go back.

  Also have been picking up a little Spanish.

  Cocos (breasts)

  Melónes (breasts)

  Tetas (breasts)

  Culo (ass)

  And an insult that you would love, Abe: Chinga tu madre, cabrón. (Go have sex with your mother you cuckold with no testicles.) Sorry, Mom.

  Ciao for now,

  —Burns

  Two nights later, I put on a clean Red Sox T-shirt and give Manrico’s another shot. Same empty cabana tables, same barren bar scene. The guy who wore a yellow aloha shirt the other night is now wearing a red one. Instead of a local beauty queen, tonight he’s drinking with a man with a thick Sasquatch beard. I take a cane stool next to the wiry stranger with the big watch from the other night. Everyone is drinking little beers.

  As I try to assemble a Spanish conversation starter without the words “tits,” “asshole,” or “motherfucker,” the stranger lights a filter-less cigarette. I watch a loop of smoke leak from his mouth. I think of Abe’s cousin Denise before she gained weight. I think of the ritual Chronic Single’s smoke.

  The stranger slides his pack of Gitanes and lighter along the bar to me.

  “Help yourself,” he says. “You traveling alone?”

  Before I can answer, Edmundo, the windsurfing instructor, walks in from the dark beach, his arms wrapped around a clinking, unlabeled box. He puts it on the bar and ignores me.

  “Manrico.” Edmundo gestures with his chin to the wiry stranger I’m talking to.

  This must be The Manrico.

  Edmundo opens a box flap just enough to peer inside. Manrico counts the contents, nods approvingly, and extracts a bottle. Edmundo leaves.

  The bottle is filled with dark liquid. Manrico pours four shots and puts one in front of each of us at the bar. “Chin chin,” he says to me.

  Another item on the guidebook’s list of “Things to do in El Playa” is to sample the local black moonshine.

  He downs his shot. I down mine.

  The black hooch has a smooth licorice flavor like sambuca.

  “Nice,” I say. “So where are you from originally?”

  “Rome,” says Manrico.

  He tells me he’s owned this bar for five years. “Once owned a bar in Key West. Had to sell it,” he says. “Owned a bar in San Tropez. Had to sell that one too. And then there was the bar in Bali. Hated to sell that one.”

  On the dark beach, I hear sandy footsteps, whispering voices, and then a sputtering motorboat.

  “How’s the crime here?” I ask.

  “Not too bad. Last year at high season, some punk snatched the watch off my wrist. I lost the little prick out on the beach.” He smiles exposing a black space where a molar used to be. “I bought mountain bikes for the El Playa police to make it easier for them to patrol the beach. They’re regulars here. You traveling alone?”

  He keeps asking if I’m alone. As I decide how to answer, the attractive bartender saunters over. Her outfit is as transparent as a mosquito net. She sits on his lap and acknowledges me with a shy smile. Her hands are cupped, as if she’s holding something, a secret, a magic wish for the right guy. Right now, I’d like to be that guy, Manrico with the big watch.

  She peeks into her cupped hands and opens them, revealing a huge, gorgeous moth. She strokes its furry little head. Manrico asks for a closer look, and then gives the bug a nasty flick. It hits the ground. A bony cat sitting nearby pounces on it.

  The girl tightens her smile and returns to work.

  Manrico pours us each another drink. “So, Mr. Red Sox, what do you do in Boston?”

  “I’m in publishing and taking some time off to travel.”

  “You’re a publisher.”

  I’m about to correct him and say that I was just a senior editor. But I’m 2,000 miles from home. I can be anyone I want, the world’s most interesting man. “I was publisher of a business magazine,” I say.

  “Businessweek?” he asks.

  “Something like that.”

  I stub out my cigarette and he offers me another one. “Some local business owners are getting together tomorrow night to party,” he says. “You should join us.”

  An invite to the inner circle. I imagine a crazy Latin party filled with surgically enhanced beauty queens. Who cares about Manrico’s disappearing businesses, his missing tooth, and that poor moth? I’m in.

  “Meet me here at five thirty tomorrow night,” Manrico says. “We’ll take my car. Where you staying?”

  “The Bonzi.”

  “Oh.” He stands, yawns, and stretches. “Don’t let the bed bugs bite.”

  Manrico and his girl head onto the unlit beach. I try to picture him chasing divorcées around a science museum. Not a chance.

  The chubby bartender comes over. “More drink?”

  I look at her plump face and arms. Part of me wishes she were sitting on my lap and wearing only a mosquito net. But what I really want is Manrico’s girl.

  I try to picture a life in Boston with a girl like Manrico’s.

  I’d learn Spanish. She’d learn English and how to ski, and she’d get a college degree and a white-collar job. Not too good a job, but enough so that I wouldn’t have to pay for her all the time.

  Friday nights she’d don a gauzy outfit an
d we’d go for steamers at the Minuteman. Lenny would stop by our table to flirt with her. Abe would stop by to say, “Burns, you were right not to settle.”

  She and I would sit side-by-side, my hand on her thigh. She’d take a clam by the neck, peel off the scabby foreskin, and dip it in broth and butter. She’d jiggle it in front of my face, flick the clam belly several times with her tongue, and deep-throat it. Butter would drip down her cheek. She’d lean over for a kiss. Our lips would meet and she’d slip the buttery bolus into my mouth.

  For someone like her, I’d do the whole deal: six-figure wedding, six-figure honeymoon, new furniture, heated leather seats, kids, more kids, family portraits, time-outs, private school, reform school, his and hers housecoats, silent treatments, infidelity, couples’ therapy, divorce, debt, bankruptcy, and Thanksgivings at her five-bedroom Victorian with our kids and her new husband. I swear, I’d do it.

  On the way back to the Bonzi, I spot Aurek and Zofia at a pizza joint. He’s glad to see me and waves me over. She’s now blacker than a seal. Her usual smirk has been replaced by a scowl.

  “Where’s the action?” I ask.

  “Right here.” Aurek raises his black after-dinner drink. Zofia stares into her bowl of vanilla ice cream.

  “If it wasn’t for you two crazy kids, this place would be dead,” I say. “Where’s all the drunken, Latin, nakedness?”

  “Did you try Manrico’s again?” Aurek says.

  “It was pretty empty again. Just a few regulars. But I met Manrico and he invited me to a party tomorrow night.”

  “Be careful, my friend.” Aurek raises his hand to the waiter and taps his glass. “We’re leaving you tomorrow morning. Tonight we party.”

  A shot of dark liquor appears before me. We toast.

  “Cabrón,” I say.

  “Cabrón,” he says.

  The booze has a familiar licorice flavor, the black hooch of El Playa.

  “What’s in this stuff?” I ask, finishing it off.

  “Nobody knows, but it’s supposed to stir the passions.”

  He looks at Zofia. I look at Zofia. She stabs her ice cream several times with a spoon, and then looks at us like we might be next.

  I’ll take a surly woman over no woman anytime.

  Maxie: Cell A40

  First encounter: Online dating, September ’01

  I met Maxie on Match.com. After weeks of e-mailing back and forth, we agreed to meet at a bar downtown. I waited forty-five minutes. No Maxie.

  Back at home, I checked my answering machine.

  “Message one: ‘Where the fuck are you? You better not have stood me up. Christ, this always happens to me. Bartender. Bartender!’”

  “Message two: ‘I just drove by your house and the lights are off. You better call with a good fucking excuse.’”

  Maybe I should have been put off by Maxie’s outbursts. But her e-mails had always been a little testy and, when it comes to women, I’ve always had a problem telling passion from pathology. Moreover, I was suffering through a drought and hadn’t touched a woman in months. Against my better judgment, I called.

  “Guess who?” I asked.

  “Where the hell are you?”

  “I’m home. What happened to you?”

  “I was at the Meridien for thirty fucking minutes.”

  Our date had been arranged online and we’d never spoken before. I found her language both titillating and terrifying. I considered hanging up, but worried that I might find a dead cat nailed to my door. Then I remembered her online photo: auburn hair, black running tights. I pressed on.

  “Weren’t we supposed to meet at the Tavern on the Charles?” I asked.

  Maxie sniffled.

  “Are you OK?” I asked, feeling guilty for something I couldn’t identify.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s been a bad week. Do you want to come by for a beer?”

  Maxie opened her apartment door wearing an oversized man’s T-shirt that hung from an exposed collarbone to midthigh. She swirled a huge glass of red wine and directed me to the couch. I watched her walk to the kitchen. Everything about her was long and toned as advertised.

  She returned with a beer. As I sipped, she spoke about her ex-husband and her demeanor softened. He had died a year ago, and she was now raising two kids and working full-time. She advanced across the cushions, asked why I wasn’t married, and brandished a tin of Altoids.

  When I hesitated, she asked in a little-girl voice, “Don’t you like me?”

  “Umm, yeah, you seem like a nice person,” I said, retreating to the far corner of the sofa. She advanced some more and leaned in for a kiss. Against my better judgment, I puckered up.

  Then she bit me on the lip. As I felt the sting of her teeth, the image of a hooked marlin flashed through my head. A moment later, I had her pinned against the armrest.

  “What are you going to do now, homo?” she said.

  “Where’d you get that mouth? Are you from New Jersey?”

  I looked down at her breasts as they rustled in her T-shirt. Droplets of sweat circled her navel. I thought about marlins. I thought about dead cats. Then marlins again.

  She rubbed me through my pants and flicked my zipper. “Looks like maybe you do like girls. Let’s go to my room.”

  She shooed two beagles off her bed, relocated an armful of stuffed animals, and pulled back the duvet. We grappled for several minutes and jettisoned each other’s clothes until we were down to our underwear.

  “Wait a minute,” she said.

  Maxie rooted around under her pillow and handed me a humming, black oval. I hummed around her slick belly and over her hips. I traced my name across the crotch of her panties. I whispered her name into her panties. Her stomach clenched and relaxed and clenched again. I tugged the elastic to the side and rested my face on her smooth-shaven skin. She smelled like lavender. Her breath deepened, she started to groan, and I heard the clitter-clatter of beagle feet as the dogs scurried from the room.

  Over the next four weeks, Maxie and I established a pattern of engagement. She’d call me at the last minute and say, “Come over now and fuck me until I’m numb.” I’d cancel my plans and race over. At some point during the evening, we’d get into an argument and she’d say: “You turn my stomach,” “You’re spineless,” or “I need to find a rich radiologist to support me.” I always shrugged and said, “Fine.” A few days later, she’d call again and I’d run over.

  One night as I was leaving, she said, “This isn’t working for me.” And then, “I just met an oral surgeon.”

  I was upset for a while, but Maxie had ended my drought. And I met her in September. And now it’s almost September again. My high season for meeting women, surly or otherwise.

  I catch the waiter’s eye, tap my glass, and two more shots appear.

  The next morning, the boardsailing center is empty except for Edmundo who is contemplating an open closet filled with plastic buckets, pots, and copper tubing. He ignores me. Next door, Manrico’s bar is empty except for Manrico who gestures for me to join him. He probably wants to remind me about the party with the local crowd.

  “Qué pasa?” I say.

  “Clausurado,” he says. “The Venezuelan IRS just visited El Playa. They say we have ‘irregularities.’ The town is being shut down for twenty-four hours.” He seems more annoyed than worried. He lights a cigarette without offering me one.

  I’m annoyed and worried. I don’t recall a clausurado section in the guidebook or on the State Department website. I don’t ask if buying black hooch out of an unlabeled box is considered an irregularity.

  “Catch you later,” Manrico says. I’ve been excused.

  In town, white crime-scene tape has been strung across the front of every store except one.

  Inside the bodega, Thug One mans the cash register while Thug Two mops. Edmundo emerges from a backroom carrying a glass beaker, tongs, and a thermometer. He leaves without acknowledging me.

  A regular from Manrico’s bar
is on the checkout line with a six-pack under his arm. It’s the guy with the aloha shirts. He looks fiftyish and wears a big watch. I grab a six-pack and get on line behind him.

  “Looks like a good day to drink beer,” I say.

  “Every day is a good day to drink beer.” He sounds Russian. He turns away to chat in Spanish with a young Latina dragging a child by the hand. She nods and leaves with the kid.

  He turns back to me. “The little woman.”

  I file this away: average middle-aged guy, beautiful exotic wife, gets to drink beer in the middle of the day.

  He introduces himself as Becker from Germany. He owns a local hotel and says he’s lived in South America for more than thirty years. “I came here in my twenties to study psychotropics. I forget what I concluded.”

  I could learn from this guy.

  I pay for my six-pack, and then follow Becker across the street where another regular, the one with the Sasquatch beard, is standing in the shade. The guy not only has a six-pack, he has a bottle of black hooch at his feet.

  Becker says to him, “Morgan from Seattle, this is Randy from Boston. Onward.”

  Manrico’s bar is now sealed with crime-scene tape and he’s sitting with a middle-aged woman at a table on the beach. Becker and Morgan take seats next to the woman. Manrico gestures to an open chair. I sit down. The beach is empty: no dogs, no kids, no parents. No one here but us regulars.

  The middle-aged woman has blonde hair, blue eyes, and a weathered face that resembles an old hunting boot. No babe, but she probably knows some.

  Morgan’s beard collects foam as he slugs down his beer. “I hear Boston has a good baseball team.” He shakes my shoulder a few times. “How’s Manny behaving?”

  “Two weeks ago, he left a big game with a mysterious knee ache,” I say.

  “Those Dominicans are even lazier than the Brazilians,” Morgan says.

  “But nobody is lazier than the Italians.” Becker gestures to Manrico.

  Manrico’s only response is to open a bottle of hooch and pass out glasses.

  We all do a shot.

  I feel relaxed for the first time in months. It’s like I’m back at the Minuteman with Abe, Lenny, and Rachel during the good times.

  “How did you guys end up down here?” I ask the group.