Rough Living

by Vago Damitio

  They paid the bill without question even though Kane had doubled the prices from those on the menu. He’d figured they wouldn’t notice.

  They got up and left the room saying pointless goodbyes to the first group who brightened up as they left.

  “What a fucking jerk.” Chris was the first to speak. “That’s why I hate my country. People like him. My country is full of people like him. Maybe the reason the Chinese limit visa’s to 30 days is because they don’t like assholes sticking around too long,” the whole group broke up in laughter.

  Kane opened a beer and sat down in the seat Carl had left at their table. “I see a lot of people like them in here.”

  “Too bad for you,” Johnny told him. “Did you guys catch that bit about America having to deal with Chinese peasants? What fucking arrogance. It’s American pricks like that who come to Europe thinking they can see the whole culture in two weeks. No offense mate,” he motioned to Chris,” but I hate bloody Americans.”

  “Me, too,” Chris seemed gloomier than before. “Did you hear him? Asking questions just so he could tell us about his $100 grand a year job, his high rent, and his $45 5-star hotel room.”

  Keith laughed. “Stupid ass. He could get an even better room for half that if he stayed in a Chinese hotel instead of the Hilton. Hey Kane, how much is a Heineken normally here?”

  It was Kane’s turn to laugh. He hadn’t known they had noticed his price gouging. “25 yuan. I’d like to buy you guys a round of Singhas for not giving me away.” They all laughed in appreciation, accepted the beers, and then drifted out by themselves and in pairs.

  It was only then that Kane looked to see what book Carl had taken. The Let’s Go was gone. That was a $20 book. The son of a bitch had left a free tourist guide and taken Kane’s only current customer reference book.

  Kane was going to get it back. He put the free book in his pocket, locked up the café and hailed a cab, directing the driver to take him to the Hilton.

  He looked in the lounge first. A couple of the MBA’s were sitting at the bar, but Carl had already left.

  “Excuse me,” he asked the girl who missed her parents. “Do you know what room Carl is in? He left something in my restaurant.”

  “Oh, you’re the guy from earlier… yeah, Carl is in room 425. It’s so nice of you to come down here to give him what he forgot. Chinese people are so sweet.” She was drunk, her eyes glazed over in that ‘I’m either going to pass out or throw up’ way.

  Kane used the house phone to call Carl’s room. “Hello?” He sounded as if he was already sleeping.

  “Hi, this is Kane from the café earlier. You left something at my place earlier and I’ve brought it back to you.”

  “What are you talking about?” Carl’s voice sounded nervous. “I have everything. It must belong to someone else.”

  “Yes, but you also took something of mine and I want it back.”

  “What are you talking about? I didn’t take anything from you.” Anger was starting to mix with the nervousness. “That sign said one book for another book. I only traded books.”

  “You took a book that wasn’t there to be traded and left me a free tourist guide. I want my book back.” Kane didn’t have to be the polite host anymore. “If you don’t want to bring it to me, I will be up to your room with the police in a few minutes.”

  “You can’t do that. I’m American, that sign said one book for one book. You made the deal. I know my rights.”

  Kane laughed, “Your rights? Your American rights? You’re in China, you have no rights except the right to bring my book down to the lounge or the right to go to jail for being a thief. It’s a crime to steal here. I’m pretty sure it’s a crime to steal in your country too. Bring my book to me.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. “I’m going to call the American Embassy tomorrow and report this. Now go home before you get in trouble.”

  “You don’t seem to understand,” Kane said, “America has no authority here. This is China. I am Chinese. You have my book and I want you to return it…now.”

  Another pause. “I’ll bring it down in a minute…just hold on. It’s just a book.”

  Kane hung up the phone. The girl next to him tapped his shoulder.

  “I’m sure he didn’t mean to steal it, I mean he’s a jerk, but he’s not a thief. He’s rich, why should he steal anything from you? I’m sure it was an accident. “She hiccuped and reached for a Marlboro from her pack on the bar. “You want a cigarette?”

  “No, I don’t smoke.” He did, but he wasn’t in the mood to accept anything from these people.

  It was only a few minutes before Carl came down. His North Face fleece over his bare white chest.

  “Here’s your book…” he slammed it on the counter and turned to leave.

  “Wait…” Kane picked up his book and held out the tourist guide.

  “Maybe the reason us third world peasants limit you to a 30-day visa is because you rich Americans are a bunch of assholes.”

  He didn’t wait for a reply but turned and walked outside where a taxi was waiting to take him back to his café.

  This is the whole gang from our side at Genghis Kane’s Cafe. The next day we all bought souvenir tourist yellow hats and went to see the famous tombs of Xian and the Terra Cotta Warriors. From Top left to right — Sasha, Chris (Vago), Jane, Kay, Johnny, and Keith. No MBA’s were hurt in the shooting of this picture.

  A Walk in the Park

  “Chris… economically, the world has to work on separate monetary systems. If England becomes a part of the Euro, it will lead to an eventual one world currency which will definitely be worth less than either the pound or the dollar are today…”

  “I agree Johnny, the one thing that will lock the world into disaster is to have all the economies tied so tightly together that when one has a problem, they all suffer decline…”

  It’s no easy thing solving the problems of the world, but that’s what Johnny and I were doing…at least in our own minds.We were sitting at a table in a Chinese tea house tossing high-minded ideas back and forth.

  Occasionally, the ear cleaning man would come close to us and strike his ear pick with a tiny hammer making a high pitched vibrating sound, then catching our attention he would indicate that he would like to clean our ears. Perhaps he was aware that we were not listening to each other, just waiting for a new pause to pontificate.

  The ear cleaner had a proud manner that denied the scruffiness of his shoes and clothing. The blooming plum and cherry blossoms which carpeted the peoples park made his office an elegant place. The two of us were polite in our refusals to have our ears cleaned at first, but as the cleaner became more insistent, we became more and more rude.

  Perhaps his command of English was strong enough to understand the boorishness of our conversation and he could not understand how two men with good hearing could engage in such snobbery- or maybe he simply saw us as rich potential clients. Either way his golden tools came more and more frequently and finally his dark hands grabbed Johnny’s shoulders and began to massage even as the Englishman was beginning a diatribe against the economics of Adam Smith and the fallacy of a free market economy.

  By the time Johnny had chased him off, the conversation had shifted to a monologue from me on the value of pornography in a technological society, the need for less morality, and the ultimate good that came from a sexually open worldview.

  The waitress brought a second pot of tea and sighed as she heard Johnny begin a long winded appraisal of the need for the Chinese people to be led and how the return of a monarchy or emperorship was the proper method of curing the countries humanitarian record, she moved away quickly.

  I agreed and used my agreement to launch a completely new topic on the legalization of narcotic substances and several programs I had heard of which seemed to offer a more enlightened view of addiction….and so it went for two and a half hours. The Chinese people around us were thankful that they didn’t underst
and English if only to avoid the American discussing the need for more privacy and less morality and the Englishman lecturing on the superiority of the parliamentary system.

  Dogma chased catma and even though language was the fundamental barrier, the Chinese looked on the two of us with distaste easily picturing a British officer in India and an American aristocrat in Africa despite our casual dress and unshaven faces.

  Our assumed Lordly manner was offensive to the Chinese who preferred modesty, decorum, cunning, and ritual to puffed up airs. Finally, much to the relief of the ear picker, who was becoming frantic over our constant refusals to have him vibrate the wax from our ears, we got up and strolled through the park with our hands put behind our backs and our noses high in the air, satisfied that the world would laud us for the great solutions we had worked out for solving its problems.

  We continued to talk as we passed the old men playing mah jong in their blue Chairman Mao suits. We paused for a moment as the middle aged women practiced their middle-aged dance moves in the public square. We laughed lightly as we saw Chinese teenagers riding in rusty Ferris wheel cars and having a great time doing it. We felt nervous and edgy when those same teens came down and began to practice their karate moves. But still the discussion carried the same weighty language and high-minded priggishness.

  It carried us through the bonsai garden where neither Johnny nor I felt superior enough to take an educational tone and so we admired the ancient tiny trees in silence missing out on what information we might have shared. The light began to fade as we came to a fork in the path. One fork led upward and along a ridge-top while the other skirted the bottom edge, rimming the small lake shore. We chose the bottom path and had only walked a few meters when we heard a noise that made us stop.

  “Oh, arrha, ohhh…” the moans sounded as if they were close by… I looked up and recognized the sound as coming form the top of the ridge, the bright sky behind obscuring the figure on the bench in shadow while my eyes readjusted to pick out the details. My mind conjured up images of saving a woman who had been stabbed, helping a sick child, or discouraging a crime. High-minded stuff indeed.

  Instead, what I saw when my eyes adjusted was a 15 or 16-year-old Chinese boy lying on the bench doing something…what was he doing? It took a few moments more before I combined the hand motion with the moans and recognized the teenager for the masturbator he was.

  “Oh my God….” I turned away but not before I had a moment of sympathy for the Chinese lad’s tiny cock….

  Johnny’s eyes were slower to adjust…”What is he doing? Hey..mate…,” he called up to the boy and apparently at that moment saw the masturbation…the boy’s head turned and his eyes met Johnny’s for a moment, but he was too close to orgasm to see the big pale Englishman. He was locked inside the fantasy that had brought him this far. “Good God man! He’s wanking!” The moment of eye contact took away every bit of dignity from Johnny and I couldn’t help feeling low-minded at the filthy image that was imprinted on my brain. Never mind what I’d been saying before.

  “Let’s go….,” I said and began walking away.

  “Right….” Johnny looked back at the boy who was now sitting up from the bench, “Oh my God, Chris, he’s following us…he’s coming from the bench, “Oh my God, Chris, he’s following us… he’s coming after us!"

  A teenage masturbator was coming after us. Neither of us took the time to consider that teenagers in China have nowhere to go to relieve the new sexual urges that grip them. Privacy to masturbate was a thing we overlooked in cultural blindness. With all our high minded ideals and talk, neither the American nor the Englishman considered that the youth was embarrassed at being caught and making a hasty exit which happened to lie in our general direction but further to the right.

  No instead both of us were gripped by a terrible fear and we ran from the park certain that the terrible 15-year-old wanker was after us and by the time we reached the guesthouse we’d already forgotten all the solutions to the worlds problems. Instead we told everyone about what we’d seen in the park.

  The Tiger Hunters

  I looked through the candlelight and saw the hand reaching out from under mosquito netting. The half bottle of Jack Daniels it held was causing strange amber shadows to flicker in the room. Lightly, I lifted my own netting, captured the proffered bottle, and lifted it to my lips.

  “Thanks Mate.” The whiskey was better than good. It was magnificent. The first decent drink we’d had in more than a month. It’s hard to find good whiskey in China and when we saw the dusty bottle in the duty free shop as we crossed into Laos, $12 American didn’t seem too much to pay for a fifth.

  Lao whiskey was about a tenth of the cost, but it tasted like rubbing alcohol with a couple of cigarette butts.

  “Chris, do you think there are tigers in Laos?” Johnny asked me in a low whisper.

  The room was stiflingly hot. We hid under our mosquito netting, passing the bottle back and forth as the single candle lit the tiny room. The village of Maung Singh was deep in slumber five hours after the mandatory blackout that occurred each evening at 6 PM. The swampy rice paddies surrounding the guesthouse were alive with splashings and croakings however, and sometimes the startlingly loud voice of a gecko lizard would come from within the room itself in a sort of birdsong “gehhhhh-kooooo”.

  “Tigers? Sure, I bet there are some tigers here still. They probably come out at night and eat anything foolish enough to go outside the city limits. They probably are out there waiting right now.” I couldn’t tell whether the Englishman across the room was making a joke or whether he were actually as concerned about tigers as he sounded. I really had no idea if there were tigers in Laos, but I doubted it.

  “Yeah, seems like I read about some villager getting eaten around here not too long ago… maybe we should shut the window.”

  “Can tigers climb to the second floor?” It sounded like a joke, but English blokes are so damn weird to Americans with their high sounding accents and strange cultural traditions, it wouldn’t surprise me if Johnny were actually concerned about a tiger coming through the window.

  “Shhhh, mate did you hear that? I think I heard a tiger outside?”

  “Here,” I handed the bottle under the netting, ”You better drink this… it’ll help keep em away.”

  “Right! Good Show!” Johnny gulped from the bottle “Hey…did you hear it that time?”

  I actually had heard the noise that time…it sounded near and it sounded like…a bullfrog. Maybe it was a tiger though…

  “Come on. Let’s go see if we can spot the tiger.” I stepped out of the netting in my boxer shorts and slipped my feet into my boots.” If there’s no tiger we can always catch us a frog.” Funny how a bit of the Southern accent came out when I was pretending to be doing something stupid. Or when I was doing something stupid.

  “Frogs? What are you talking about frogs? Those noises are from a tiger…or maybe a few of them…Right! Let’s go check it out.” Johnny donned his tiger hunting uniform of boxers and boots and we unlocked the door with the tiny skeleton key.

  Johnny carried the protective bottle of JD and I carried the thin candle.

  An uncontrollable giggle escaped from Johnny and we were trying to keep from waking the other people sleeping in the guesthouse. We tiptoed down the corridor and struggled to keep from laughing as the wooden staircase made noises like some exaggerated Alfred Hitchcock movie set.

  Stepping outside we looked to the left and the right. Both directions showed dark fields covered with water and loud tigers huffing and puffing into the humid night.

  “Which way?” I decided to leave it to Johnny.

  “This way. Follow me.” Johnny stepped into the six-inch mud to the left, then stopped to remove his boots and put them on the guesthouse doorstep. “These boots are too loud, they’ll scare off all the tigers.” I pulled my boots off too. “

  Hey, I just remembered something… wait here” Barefoot the stairs made less noise. I st
epped back into the room and grabbed one of the half dozen joints I’d rolled earlier after buying about an ounce of Lao weed from a 90-year-old Yao tribeswoman who was selling hand made bracelets, opium, and giant bags of weed. It cost an amazing 70 cents and had us both stoned enough to be drunkenly hunting tigers in our underwear.

  Back down the steps and bringing the light to the doorway I found that Johnny had stepped off into the muck a good twenty feet and was creeping further despite the immense dark. “ Come on mate…blow out that candle and the stars soon light the way.” I lit the joint and blew out the candle.

  “Here…trade me that bottle for this” I handed the joint to my partner and received the quarter full bottle in return. Hitting and swigging we continued further into the ooze with the stars gradually lighting the way.

  The noise nearly always stopped as we neared it.

  “Tigers are smart,” I said, “ They want to lure us away from civilization.”

  “Crap…that’s the end of the whiskey,” Johnny hurled the empty bottle out into the dark. It made the expected splash in the expected direction and seconds later a second splash, much closer accompanied by a deep grunt in the opposite direction.

  We turned, seeing the large four-legged shape approaching us. It’s large body moving with grace through the mud. We stepped towards the guesthouse and broke into a run, side by side, feeling the pulse pound in our heads, hoping that the beast would allow us to make it back to the safety of our room. Leaving our boots at the front door and tracking mud up the stairs and through the corridor until, finally, we were behind the closed door, locking it, and breathing heavily.

  Lighting another joint, Johnny also lit a candle. We were covered in filthy mud with our boxers simply another gray brown patch on our bodies. We looked at each other and began to laugh. We shared stories about the terrible tiger until the false dawn when looking out the window; we realized the horrible truth of our situation.