by Randy Ross
Some clubs charge exorbitant, unadvertised cover fees. Failure to pay can result in violence.
Another thirty minutes pass and I’m lost and surrounded by asphalt. It’s too late to take a train and I’ve sworn off cabs.
Police have been known to raid bars and force patrons to provide urine tests. Anyone who tests positive for drugs is arrested.
Now we have a real problem. My blood is 50 percent Lunesta. I decide to turn around and walk back to the dorm.
I reach the hostel at one A.M., sufficiently tired, and hop into my bunk. One guy I don’t recognize is asleep on the bunk below me. An hour later, two guys come in talking in their outside voices:
“Shitehawk.”
“Wanker.”
They slam the door behind them and scramble into their bunks. One coughs, then sneezes. The other yawns, then scratches. Each moves around in his respective bunk bed trying to find a comfortable spot that he’s never going to find. The metal beds creak like door hinges, click like ratchets, clink like chain link, clang like metal coat hangers, and cachink like coins dropping into a metal bucket, an auspicious metal bucket. Fucking Brits.
I lie there waiting for the snoring to begin. I don’t care what it costs. This is the last time I sleep with strangers—at least ones I don’t choose.
At five A.M., another roommate cracks the door open, rummages around in his backpack, grabs something, and then leaves, slamming the door. Adler?
I go to the bathroom to take a leak. In one of the stalls, I hear someone breathing. I look at his sneakers. Too large for Adler. More likely a Brit. Then I hear “vvhhht, vvvhhht, vvvvhhht,” like something being squirted from a tube. I finish, flush, and hurry toward the door, not wanting to hear another “vvhhht, vvvhhht, vvvvhhht.”
I’m grateful to the State Department. If I had made it to Soi Cowboy, I’d probably be broke, incarcerated, or snapping the rooster in a hostel bathroom like this guy.
I think of my spreadsheet of women and the droughts, the longest of which was a year with no sex, a record I equaled this morning.
No job.
No friends.
No luck with women.
Recently Moody mentioned something called “middle-age drift.”
“Fifty is a weird age,” Moody said.
“But I’m only forty-eight.”
“For some people it starts earlier.”
“What does?”
“Apathy, detachment, and isolation. Singles give up on dating. Relationships die of natural causes. Friends stop calling. Middle-age people hibernate to gather their strength for the fourth quarter.”
Sounds like a plan.
The next afternoon, I pack, and then check the hostel computer to confirm my flight to Hanoi: twenty dollars for a two-hour flight that leaves at nine P.M. Then I see an advertisement from farescrooge.com: Bangkok to Boston, $1,100 for a twenty-five-hour flight that leaves at nine P.M. Either way, I’ve got time to decide.
Outside the hostel, there’s a new soup establishment, a metal cart surrounded by several bar stools. Lined up to order is the tallest Asian woman I’ve ever seen. She’s arm in arm with a little blond guy holding a guidebook. Adler.
“How’s the soup,” I ask him.
“Great, and it’s cheap, twenty-five baht. Can I buy you one?”
“I got it, but thanks anyway.”
The woman and I both wait for Adler to introduce us, but he doesn’t.
“I’m Randy,” I say and reach to shake her hand. She has perfect breasts and a firm grip. She says nothing. Adler says nothing.
I break the silence. “I’m flying out of Bangkok tonight and . . .”
Adler cuts me off: “We’re really sorry for kicking you out of your single room last night. I hope you got some sleep. It was great meeting you. Have a good trip.”
I watch the two of them walk off with their soups.
The soup proprietress motions to me. “Sawadi,” she says.
I look into her pot of dark, boiling liquid. It has a musty smell I can’t place. There’s no menu or sign.
Let’s do this.
“How much? I say.
“Forty baht.”
“Twenty-five baht,” I say.
“Thirty-five baht.”
I try Pittman’s travel tip: negotiating down instead of up. “Twenty baht,” I say.
She smiles, clucks, and turns to another customer.
“OK, OK,” I say.
I try to justify my fleecing: This cart has metal counters—fewer bacteria.
A local guy in his twenties serves me. The soup contains noodles with gray, chewy, fishy balls. I eat and slurp and fume because I know I’m being overcharged.
I finish the meal, and the guy collects my bowl. The proprietress is nowhere in sight.
“How much?” I ask him.
“Twenty-five baht,” he says.
I pay quickly and leave.
On the way back to the hostel, I pass the proprietress. She smiles. I smile.
That’s right lady, Bangkok is for closers.
The Chronic Single’s Handbook
Chapter Three: Personality Test: Are You Better Off Alone?
I. Give yourself one point for each answer that applies.
1)As a child, when other kids were out playing, you spent your time:
•Shoplifting.
•Wetting your bed.
•Running away from home.
•Setting fire to roadkill squirrels.
2)Your favorite comedy movies:
•Caligula.
•The Exorcist.
•Leaving Las Vegas.
•A Clockwork Orange.
3)Your favorite celebrities:
•OJ.
•Fatty Arbuckle.
•Tonya Harding.
•Nurse Ratched.
4)You favorite quote:
•“So it goes.”
•“Everybody lies.”
•“Hell is other people.”
•“Stop me before I kill again.”
5)If you had a boy, you would name him:
•Ebenezer.
•Holden.
•House.
•Sue.
6)Favorite foods:
•Steak tartare.
•Carpaccio.
•Sushi.
•Vicodin.
7)Favorite colors:
•Black.
•White.
8)At a friend’s dinner party, you typically:
•Open the refrigerator, take one bite of every item, and put it all back.
•Stuff a used tissue in the spinach dip.
•Steal the salt shakers.
•Ask for a doggy bag.
9)Which best describes your social style?
•Aloof.
•Reticent.
•Boorish.
•None of your fucking business.
10)You invite your elderly mother to dinner in a bad part of town. You show up:
•Fifteen minutes late.
•One hour late.
•Five hours late.
•Never.
II. True or False:
Give yourself one point for each True answer.
1)You need time alone, the way you need sleep: At least eight hours a day or you get grumpy.
2)You shun perpetually cheerful people: kids, reformed alcoholics, and anyone who sells real estate.
3)Your closest friend is the one buried under your floorboards.
III. Scoring: Add up Multiple Choice and True/False
•One to Five points: Introvert
•Six to Ten points: Misanthrope
•Eleven to Fifteen points: Sociopath
•Sixteen points or more: Verizon customer service rep
CHAPTER SIX: VIETNAM
In darkness, be not unkempt by life’s cacophonous hex.
—W. PITTMAN
Two hours after leaving Bangkok, my flight lands at eleven p.m. in Hanoi’s Noi Bai airport. Like Thailand, Vietnam is a Buddhist country. But w
hen I scan the terminal there are no smirking deities or sexy, welcoming statues. The decor is late Soviet Union: no billboards, advertising, or color. The walls are painted in a palette of olive drab and olive drabber. Exposed metal beams adorn the ceiling. The room looks like a hangar or a detention center.
A grim, uniformed man scrutinizes my papers. According to the guidebook, my passport will be popular reading in Vietnam. When I check into a hostel or hotel, I’ll have to surrender it for review by the local authorities. When I check out, it will hopefully be returned.
Unlike Thailand, Vietnam is a communist country. I think of police states and labor camps. I think of China and North Korea. Creepy. Invasive. Titillating. I feel an adrenaline rush. Counterphobia.
Exiting immigration, I spot an Asian guy holding a sign that says “Burns.” In Venezuela, I was “Mr. Randall Burns.” In South Africa, “Randy Burns.” Now I’m just “Burns.” A reflective person might think: I’m just a vestige of the man I once was. I think: Let’s do this, Charlie.
I follow the guy outside the terminal.
He points to the curb. “You wait me here.”
There are few lights outside the building and fewer people. Leaves rustle, humidity swirls. Beyond the parking lot, I imagine chest-high elephant grass, rice paddies, and palm trees, lots of palms trees. Not the clean-cut, lawn ornaments that grow in Florida. Southeast Asian palm trees, jammed together and unkempt, fronds shooting off in all directions like a punky, jungle hairdo. I imagine running around in this jungle with cousin Joey, flamethrowers on our backs.
As kids, Joey and I played war after school. Our jungle was the woods behind my house. We were heavily armed with air guns, cap guns, squirt guns, ray guns, tommy guns, guns that could shoot around corners, guns that launched Styrofoam grenades. We watched Combat and The Rat Patrol.
For my tenth birthday, I got a chemistry set. The gunpowder recipe didn’t work, so Joey and I filled the Pyrex beakers with household chemicals and lit them on fire. For his tenth birthday, Joey got a model rocket kit with engines and fuses. We lit the projectiles on fire and launched them flaming into the woods. Take that, you Krauts. Eat shit, you Japs.
No one in our family had ever seen action in the military, but we were going to be airborne rangers, parachuting into enemy territory, dispensing death from above. But along the way to our eighteenth birthdays, we got distracted with daring daylight raids of his parents’ medicine cabinet for Valium and Seconal and that was it. But to this day, Joey and I never miss a war movie.
In addition to the war, Vietnam has other attractions:
• Wine made from fermented cobras.
• Six-hundred-pound catfish that locals catch using dead dogs for bait.
• The most beautiful women in the world. The guidebook says so. Steve from Sidney says so. Joey says so: “The chicks are all wands, thin as reeds, just the way you like them.” Too bad I’m taking a break from women.
I check my watch: Ten minutes have elapsed. The driver was supposedly sent by the Hanoi hostel I prebooked. I amuse myself humming a few bars of the Ride of the Valkyries.
A car pulls up and a tired Asian guy gets out. I don’t recognize him. He’s smaller, lighter-skinned, and for lack of a better word, squintier than the Thai cab drivers.
He opens the trunk and grabs my backpack.
“Me hepp you.”
“How much to Phu Vu Street in Hanoi?” I ask.
“Sorry, sorry.” He opens the car door.
“How much? How much?”
“Sorry, sorry.”
“Are you from the Loose Goose Hostel?”
“Sorry, sorry.”
“Are you from the Hanoi Hilton?”
“Sorry, sorry.”
According to the guidebook, the Vietnamese are sensitive to the “colonial attitudes” of condescending Westerners, so diplomacy and politeness are essential when dealing with locals.
I check my watch: midnight. I don’t see any other cabs, so I do the diplomatic, polite thing and climb in.
He stomps on the gas. The taxi careens onto a poorly lit highway crammed with hundreds of little motorcycles that dart across lanes, in and out of traffic, and between trucks.
Some motorcycles carry four people. Some carry bales of hay. Some carry plump, pink, pig corpses strapped across the backseat. Don’t these people sleep?
The drivers honk constantly using a staccato series of blasts.
No one is wearing a helmet.
Twenty minutes pass and I’ve yet to see a stoplight, a traffic signal, or a sign for a town I recognize. I notice the driver watching me in his rearview mirror. His eyes are small, black, and lifeless.
Pittman says to trust your gut in dangerous situations. But my gut isn’t feeling very trustworthy because I’m in a country we bombed and invaded. If interrogated, I’ll say I’m from Newfoundland.
I see the driver looking at me again in the mirror.
My gut churns. What would John McCain do?
The next time this guy slows down, I’m going to bolt. He probably has an AK-47 under his seat. Good thing Joey and I trained for something just like this. I’ll run in a weaving motion like a drunken wide receiver. AK-47s aren’t known for their accuracy.
I tie and retie my shoes, and then move my wallet and passport into a zip-up pocket. He can have my backpack.
There’s an accident up ahead.
The driver slows down.
I finger the door handle.
We pass a sign that says Hanoi.
“Hanoi, Hanoi?” I ask in the squeaky voice of someone who wouldn’t last one night in captivity without his Ambien.
The driver smiles in the mirror and says, “Yes, yes.”
A more evolved person might think: OK, sometimes I overreact.
But I think: Was this Vietcong joker messing with me the whole time?
Loose Goose Backpackers is located on a narrow street in Hanoi’s Old Quarter. The three-story building is pastel yellow with scrolly metal balconies that would be ideal for throwing Mardi Gras beads. The scene reminds me of the Bonobo in Cape Town without the teenagers in security smocks.
By now, when I check into a facility with a Saturday-morning-cartoon name, I know what to expect. The Loose Goose lobby: Sweaty kids in cargo shorts and beige ski hats. A guy in a T-shirt that says “#Twat.” A girl in a hoodie that says “#Dickhead.”
A blackboard lists activities, including kayaking in Ha Long Bay, a coastal bus tour, and a rooftop barbecue. I surrender my passport to the desk clerk and head upstairs.
My room is spare, Sukhumvit-like, and Soviet-inspired. The floor and walls are concrete. By the bed stands a mirror with a jagged crack. Above the bed a ceiling fan spins. Whirling fan blades. Whop, whop, whop. Vietnamese miscellanea ricochet inside my head like small-arms fire: Tonkin, Khe Sanh, Da Nang, Mekong, pongee sticks, spring rolls.
I sleep till ten the next morning, miss the free hostel breakfast, and hit Phu Vu Street, a guidebook recommendation, in search of food. The signs are in Vietnamese, which uses English characters with Jackson Pollack spatterings around the letters. Stores sell red dragon kites, purple silk lanterns, and lacquer rice bowls. Bicycles and little motorcycles whip around the two-lane street. Female drivers wear opera gloves to protect their skin from the sun and surgeon-style masks to protect their lungs from the pollution.
In Bangkok, I developed an appreciation for particulate matter. Taking a deep breath was like having a cigarette whenever you wanted one—for free. Hanoi seems less polluted. I inhale a few times. No Bangkok coughing fit, just a relaxing buzz, a soot-light.
A few blocks away, a local woman on a corner squats next to a covered wooden bucket. She’s wearing a conical straw hat that obscures her face. Her tush is almost touching the ground. Some guys might notice her champion squatting form, reedlike figure, or snug Vietnamese pajamas pants. Have I mentioned that I’m done with women? I focus on the food and brace myself for yet another Southeast Asian transaction.
Th
e woman opens the bucket cover and flashes a rice mixture that includes small green things that could be raisins, peas, or aphids.
I take a hit of sooty air, exhale slowly, and then give her a little bow. “How much?”
She opens her hand wide: Five fingers.
Does she think I was born yesterday?
I counter with four fingers.
She nods OK.
That was easy, but what did we agree to? Four dollars or 4,000 Vietnamese dong?
“Dong?” I ask, a little embarrassed.
She nods in agreement.
Four thousand dong, twenty cents for lunch. She’s speaking my language.
I whip out my dong and hand her four bills.
She scoops some rice with her bare hands and wraps the mixture in a page from today’s edition of Nhan Dan. A wet spot forms on the single sheet of newsprint. I open the paper and wolf down the flavorless mixture. During the walk home, I run the numbers: eighteen dollars a night for a queen room at the hostel, three meals a day for less than a dollar. For $7,000 I could live here for a year. What’s a little emphysema at those prices?
Later that afternoon, the lobby is crowded with beige ski hats. The air temperature is eighty-five degrees. A group of kids is signing up for the bus tour down the coast to Saigon.
That’s 1,100 miles, the distance from New York to New Orleans—for twenty-five dollars, the price of a Boston cab to the airport.
The tour leaves at six thirty tonight and stops at noon tomorrow at a coastal town called Hoi An.
That’s nearly eighteen hours on a bus.
Pittman’s guidebook describes this bus tour as “rough and tumble, the cheapest way to see Vietnam.”
“Cheap” is always good. “Cheapest” is always a concern. But since arriving in Southeast Asia my pricing metrics have changed. Yesterday’s concern has become today’s good. I’ve discovered that rock bottom has a bargain basement and I like it down here: Red-eye flights and five-hour layovers? Half the price of a direct flight? Buy now. Rooms just wide enough for a bed? Fine. No TV? No windows? A few bugs? Did I hear twenty dollars a night?
That evening, a bus pulls up in front of the hostel and I think: greyhound. Not Greyhound as in the bus company, but greyhound as in the sad, anemic, former racing animals that end up in public school lunches if no one adopts them.
Greyhound buses have two sets of wheels in the back for a smooth ride. This greyhound has only one set. Greyhound buses have large tinted windows. This greyhound has small, rusting windows that look like crusted eyes in need of an antibiotic. I’m in.
