God Bless Cambodia

by Randy Ross

  • Hostel owner in Bakvissie offered me a job running his website. Money was decent, but had to decline, having too much fun touring and sightseeing.

  Sampled some delectable South African cuisine:

  • Ostrich egg: One egg feeds ten people. Tastes like egg.

  • Meat pie: Tastes like a Twinkie filled with ground skunk.

  • Biltong: Dried meat snack that tastes like a cream-filled Slim Jim.

  Did I read somewhere that the Red Sox are doing well? Abe? Lenny? (All we get on TV here is rugby—what a pansy game, just a bunch of guys trying to pull down each other’s shorts.)

  And for all you folks who’ve forgotten how to write, here’s the e-mail address again: rburns@rburnsworld.com.

  Heading up the coast to a town called Lekker Anties. Will report in later after detoxing.

  —Burns

  Outside the Lekker Anties hostel, I’m preparing for a jog. The guidebook recommends a five-mile route into the Tsitsikamma rain forest past soaring yellowwood, hard pear, and stinkwood trees.

  As I’m stretching, Anika, the taller Dutch blonde, comes out and begins picking nearby wild flowers. She smiles. This is the most interaction we’ve had since Mompie Bay. I play it cool and acknowledge her by saying simply, “fynbos,” referring to the pink and green flowers she’s holding.

  “I used to work for Reed Elsevier in Amsterdam,” she says. “The big technical publisher. I just got laid off. But I am not a writer.”

  Anika talks about publishing and computers and unemployment and flowers. I’m bored. So I start lying: I tell her about the short stories I had published, my readings in Boston book stores, the writing courses I taught.

  She’s wearing black running tights. Cheetah hips. “I like to jog too,” she says. Then the untouchable one squeezes my arm as if we have some deep, mysterious connection. I flinch. I’m not sure why she’s being so friendly, but I have a hunch.

  “I didn’t see your friend at breakfast,” I say. “Everything OK?”

  “She took a job in Bakvissie. So now I am traveling alone. You want to meet later?”

  At dinner, Anika saves me a seat next to her.

  “How do you like it here?” she asks.

  “Great. The food’s decent, the running trail is nice, and I’ve got a king room with a shower.”

  The word “king room” seems to hover between us.

  “Ah. I am in the dorm,” she says. “That is all I can afford.”

  I feel her leg brushing against mine. “Want to meet later for a hot tub?” she asks.

  “I’ll bring the wine,” I say.

  As I’m showering after dinner, I imagine rolling Anika around in the fynbos. I imagine traveling up the coast with her for the next week. I imagine us living in the Netherlands on a street with a goofy, skloofy Dutch name.

  The hot tub is on a raised deck. Anika is in the churning water and she’s not alone. She’s with some guy named Peter, a British medical student, in his early twenties, scrawny, pink, and without chest hair. A needle dick. I can probably kick his ass.

  Anika motions for me to sit next to her. Peter pours me a glass of wine from an open bottle near him on the deck. I put my bottle near me on the deck.

  Amongst the bubbles, Anika squeezes my hand, and then turns to Peter and raises her wine glass. “As I was saying, if you don’t look into my eyes when we toast, you’ll have seven years of bad sex.”

  They toast. I sit there like a bump on a stinkwood. Peter looks past Anika into my eyes. He smirks. I consider leaving.

  Anika hops onto the lip of the hot tub. Black bikini, full balconies, high-relief abs. I reconsider.

  Peter hops onto the lip of the hot tub alongside Anika. Black swim trunks. The outline of a geoduck clam, a python with a Portobello ski cap. Needle dick has a monster schlong.

  I try not to look.

  I think of initiation night at my college frat. I was blindfolded and naked. The pledge-master said, “Burns, you call that little thing a dick?”

  “Sorry, sir, it runs in the family.” Everyone laughed but me.

  Anika is now talking about her former job at Reed Elsevier. Peter leans over to offer me more wine.

  When Anika abruptly says good night and leaves, I hand over the wine I brought and say to Peter, “Got an opener?”

  Back in my room, I pace the floor. In less than two months, I’ve struck out with women on three continents and been hit on by guys on two.

  I want to feel sad or angry or anything. But instead, I’m just misty, fogged in, numb.

  I drop to the floor and do twenty-five push-ups, a dozen leg raises, and side planks. But it’s no help.

  For years, Moody, has said that when the Dark Place looms, I should stop fighting it and just visit. “Don’t move in,” he said. “Just visit.”

  The foyer of a split-level ranch in Mount Vernon, the New York town where the kids would just as soon knock a pencil off your shoulder as look at you. I am seven years old.

  Upstairs, a bedroom door that is always closed since my mother remarried after divorcing my biological father whom she never talked about. “Adults need their privacy,” she told me. I always assumed privacy referred to her bedroom and any discussion of my biological father.

  Another bedroom belongs to my stepsister, Harriet. I used to go in there, but not anymore.

  Nearby is the bathroom. This is my safe room. It has a black oval rug where I kneel to pray for luck playing sports and for protection against tough kids at school. When I can’t sleep, I read the labels on vials, bottles, and cans in the medicine cabinet.

  One day when I am eleven, the girls at school create a loose-leaf “slam book” that ranks boys by attractiveness. My page says stuff like “shy” and “weird dresser,” in other words, I’m a zero. That night after praying and reading labels, I stand at the toilet watching my poops drift like dying goldfish. I get this inkling to touch each one three times, the magic number.

  After several months of following this compulsion, I stop. Touching my poops has not changed my luck or my slam book ranking.

  In the basement there’s a playroom, the land of failed distractions: a weight set, a chemistry set, fly-casting gear, snorkeling gear, an empty fish tank, an empty terrarium that once housed a chameleon that looked like a little monkey, a saxophone in a dusty case. And the fail-proof distraction: a Motorola television.

  Under the Ping-Pong table, a crate-sized cage covered with a tarp. Whimpering emanates from inside. I lift a tarp corner and something stirs against the metal bars. An empty water bottle, a food dish with a few pellets of food covered with ants, an untouched baby toy. More whimpering. When I lift the tarp higher, the house’s central air-conditioning system rumbles like the footsteps of a giant space monster coming to get me.

  Visiting hours are over.

  Later, on the hostel computer, there’s a note from Pittman:

  Dear Mr. Burns,

  Our sincerest apologies.

  While we make every effort to be factually accurate in our books, we do make mistakes. We rely on readers such as yourself to help us keep our materials up to date.

  As a gesture of our appreciation, we have contacted the hostel in Bangkok and arranged for a 50-percent discount on your room. Please visit us in Saigon, so we can make further amends.

  Stay the course,

  Wallace Pittman,

  President, All-American Language School

  Author, Solo Salvation: Travel the world on your own

  I hit “delete.”

  Back in May, just in case, I calculated return flights from all my stops back to Boston. A return from Cape Town was $1,300.

  I zip over to farescrooge.com and type “Cape Town to Boston.” While the site is calculating fares, I pace the room until I feel something firm, like a power cable, under my sandal. It’s an eight-inch millipede. The bug is curled up like a kitten with 200 pairs of legs. It looks like it wants to play. I wrap it in a tissue and throw its black ass out the door. If ther
e’s a flight for $1,500 or less, I’m out of here.

  The computer stops churning. The cheapest flight on an airline I can pronounce is $1,920. I search for flights to Boston from Bangkok where I am heading in three days. The cheapest one-way is $1,530. Close enough. I click “Buy Now” and the price immediately jumps to $1,750. Fuck it, I just want out. I enter my credit card number. The computer churns. And then crashes and I’m fucked again.

  The next morning, my hostel room is cold and dank; getting into my clothes is like climbing into a wet gym sock. Outside, it’s about fifty degrees. Tall weepy trees drip rain on everything.

  My hostel-mates are assembled at the front desk reviewing a blackboard listing the local attractions: abseiling, kloofing, shark-cage diving, skydiving, and bungee jumping. Peter avoids looking at me; maybe he thinks I’m a tease. The Americans are not giggling for a change, and Anika and her friend, who must have just reappeared this morning, are busy ignoring everyone. Apparently life as Mrs. Blond didn’t work out.

  “What’s abseiling?” Matt asks the desk clerk.

  Peter responds: “It’s what you Americans call rappelling.”

  “What’s kloofing?” Matt asks, ignoring Peter.

  Peter responds: “It’s what you call canyoning, following a mountain stream down its course. It can involve abseiling and jumping from great heights. It’s quite dangerous.”

  The desk clerk cuts in: “Sorry mates, due to the weather, the only activity for today is bungee.”

  Matt turns to me: “We doing this for the fucking US of A?”

  Without thinking, I high-five him. “Fuck yeah,” I say.

  The Lekker Anties jump site is about 700 feet high, the equivalent of two Statues of Liberty stacked on top of each other.

  On the way to the site, Peter the med student provides a litany of possible whiplash injuries incurred by those who’ve survived a jump: retinal hemorrhage, broken neck, severed carotid arteries, shoulder dislocation, spinal damage, and blackouts caused by strangulation from the bungee cord. And then there were those who simply soiled their knickers.

  In the bungee check-in area, we fill out liability forms that are remarkably brief and free of legalese. Basically, it says, “If you get hurt, tough scheisse.” A local guy, who appears to be in his teens, straps me into a body harness while another teen weighs me and Magic-Markers my wrist with the number seventy-three, that’s seventy-three kilos, about 161 pounds. I’ve put on six pounds in the last month. Scheisse.

  Tara is being harnessed next to me. She starts to hyperventilate, “Ohmygod, Ohmygod Ohmygod.” The teen who weighed me looks in my eyes, “You don’t have to do this, if you don’t want to, mate. You can watch from the observation deck.”

  The observation deck is across the ravine. Peter and the Dutch girls sit there in comfy chairs with glasses of red wine. Peter toasts in my direction. I ignore him.

  To get from the harness area to the jump platform requires tottering along a metal-grate catwalk that provides a view of rocks and boulders that drop away underfoot to a thread of river 700 feet below.

  The catwalk ends on an open concrete platform suspended beneath a bridge that spans a ravine. Techno music booms. A girl from another hostel starts jumping up and down to the beat. A few others join her with tight, nervous smiles. Matt walks alone in circles, exhaling deeply. Tara and Ivy must have bailed.

  I pace focusing on the lines and stains on the concrete slab floor. One stain resembles a fractured femur, another, a gravestone. A guy working the platform calls out names in the order in which we’ll jump. I’m going third.

  Matt approaches and then looks across the way to where Peter again toasts us. Matt gives him the finger. “That British guy is the biggest fucking pussy.”

  Matt looks around at the other jumpers on the platform. “You know, we’re up here with a bunch of twenty-year-old girls.” He drums on the railing in front of us.

  “I guess that begs the question: Do we have the balls of a twenty-year-old girl?” I ask.

  He points to his “I’d Rather Be in Mississippi” T-shirt and says: “A Southern man don’t do fear.” Matt slaps a metal nosmoking sign above us. “I want to try skydiving next.”

  “I’ve been skydiving,” I say. “This is much hairier.”

  “No way.”

  “Jumping out of a plane, you’re so high up, the ground looks soft and fuzzy. Here you can see every rock and tree, any one of them could take you out.” I slap the sign. “Just like that.”

  Matt glances over at his girlfriends, who are now sipping wine on the observation deck, as if he wishes he were there too.

  He opens his mouth to talk and I cut him off: “Listen, Matt, no more talking, we need to focus.”

  When I’m called to the platform, Matt makes a fist. I make a fist. We bump fists. “For the fucking US of A,” we say.

  A girl in a Lekker Anties Bungee T-shirt tells me to sit. She binds my ankles together with a padded collar that attaches to a white bungee cord as thick as a sink pipe. She has skin that’s at least 80 percent cocoa and a sweet-sounding accent like Ola’s.

  She and another assistant maneuver me to the edge of the concrete slab. I repress the urge to ask how long they’ve been in this line of work.

  I feel a hand under my chin. The girl tells me not to look down. She’s either a mind reader or she noticed that I’ve stopped breathing. I stare straight out at the horizon and can feel tears in my eyes.

  I think of my family and suicide and my mother’s brother, Uncle Woody, who jumped off a building at age forty-two. “Didn’t feel a thing,” my mother always said.

  The assistant rubs my shoulder to calm me. A little oxytocin flows, but not enough. “Mr. Burns, where you from?” she asks.

  “The US.”

  “You have good rugby team, hey?” I hear the other staffers laugh, and somehow recall that the US team was creamed by the South African team two nights ago.

  “OK, Mr. Burns. We gonna count to three. You bend your knees and do a nice swan dive for us, arms out, hey?”

  I nod without looking down.

  “One, two . . .”

  I’m humming a line about Billy Joe McAllister on the Tallahatchie Bridge, when I feel a gentle push.

  During a bungee jump your body accelerates from zero to ninety miles per hour in five seconds. A $200,000 Lamborghini goes from zero to ninety in eight seconds. I drive a Honda Civic, which goes from zero to ninety if I’m lucky.

  As I’m falling, I feel like I’m in a plane hitting the world’s biggest air pocket. Only there’s no seat belt, emergency floatation device, or drink service. There’s a yanking sensation in my stomach, as if someone has grabbed it and is trying to pull it out through my ears. I keep waiting for an explosion of ground skunk deep inside my colon or a seeping wetness in my pants.

  Gradually the collar tightens, noose-like, around my ankles and the falling stops. I open my eyes as I bounce back up toward the sky. The numbness recedes and the only wetness I feel is from the soft mist around me.

  The next day, our tour returns to the Bonobo in Cape Town.

  Lucky me, there’s an e-mail from Ricki:

  Hey Burns,

  Should I send you a new liver? Give me a break. I bet you’re depressed as hell. Guess that misogynistic, head-fucking shrink didn’t help you much. Still can’t believe you dragged me to see him. Do you do that with all your girlfriends? No wonder you’re still single.

  So, your so-called friends aren’t writing. Shouldn’t be a surprise, what a bunch of schmucks. Abe the fat fuck with the porky wife. I bet he still hates me because I told him off for making fun of you. Why are you still friends with that ass? Oh, and Lenny the poon-hound who hit on my seventeen-year-old cousin. Then he kept bugging me to set him up with my friend Valerie with the eating disorder. And let’s not forget Josh, your other wingman, who ditched you the minute he got a girlfriend.

  Good luck to you.

  —RRRRRR

  And another from Ricki:
>
  Hey Burns,

  Sorry if some of my previous e-mails were a little edgy. My therapist says I have an anger problem. Who me? Ha! We’re trying a different medication, something that’s supposed to boost the sex drive. Eat your heart out.

  You remember my dachshund, Wiener, with the little wheelchair for his paralyzed back legs? The dog you called Ironside? He died yesterday. Hope you’re happy.

  —RRRRRR

  Why does she keep writing? And why am I attracted to women like her?

  I know why: Fish genes.

  In a session with Moody two years ago. I’m looking at the wall clock. At $125 for fifty minutes, I’m paying this guy two dollars and fifty cents a minute.

  Five dollars pass. Moody breaks the silence. “So, Randall, why do you think you’re still single after all these years?”

  “I’m at a loss. That’s why I’m here.”

  “You must have some theories. Give me a metaphor, tell me a story.”

  He takes out a fresh legal pad, pen poised.

  “Ever been fishing?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  “So you know, fish aren’t attracted to bait that is healthy and moving smoothly through the water. Fish are attracted to bait that jumps, quivers, and zigzags due to some type of distress. I must have some fish genes because I’m only attracted to erratic, ziggy women who have moods that flop around like a mackerel on a hot sidewalk.”

  He scribbles and underlines. I wait and burn through another two dollars and fifty cents, and then continue.

  “Over the years, I’ve dated some stable women, but I just never got hooked. Like Dani and then Karen.”

  “I remember Karen.”

  “After two months, I was fed up with Karen’s constant cheerfulness, which seemed phony. Her moods never zigged or zagged. You kept telling me to stick with her and sit with the discomfort. But being with her was like trying to see how long I could hold my breath, which brings us back to the fish genes.

  “Anyway, when she put her arm around me, I didn’t feel a thing. After sex, I had nothing to say to her. I felt guilty, angry, and was having trouble sleeping. But you kept saying to ‘give it another week’ and wrote me my first prescription for Ambien.”