IAmJacksUserName
Bluelighter
Reckless Debauchery
19.11.09
The coast looked stunningly tranquil that morning from the second-floor window of Jimmy’s Place. There was a cool sea breeze that complimented the gentle crashing waves, with the palm trees gently waving in the house’s front yard. Jimmy stood gazing out the window toward the water; the grayish-blue sea was almost the same color as the cloudy sky, and save for the few small islands that dotted the horizon, the water and sky almost looked fused in the distance as the rising sun illuminated the Gulf of Thailand. The smell of salty sea air blew into the upstairs lounge, mingling with the shroud of putrid vapors that were constantly being produced in that room.
It wasn’t a bad place to own a small oceanside hostel. The beach here was a half hour drive from downtown Sihanokville, away from the hordes of motor-taxi drivers and souvenir-touting children in the town. At that time of morning, the only people out were a couple of Jimmy’s customers sunbathing on the beach and a few Cambodian fishermen going out to sea in ramshackle wooden boats, each with Cambodia’s red and blue flag flapping in the morning wind. The coastal enclave lacked the chaos of the city, and better yet, there was no police around to make customers paranoid.
The night had never ended at Jimmy’s place. Several of his most loyal regulars were still in the room, the sun’s early light finally rousing their attention. They were spread out on the sofas in the living room, surrounding the central coffee-table covered with bits of burnt tin foil, broken lighters and little plastic baggies containing white powders of various consistencies. The first customer to wake up was Tim.
“Morning, sunshine,” said Jimmy endearingly. Tim glared briefly before producing a thin smile. He went straight to work, grabbing a piece of tinfoil and dropping a few crystal shards onto the metal. He heated the pile of crystal under a lighter and sucked in the smoke with a drinking straw.
“Fuck it, man,” said Tim. A hole had formed where he had held the lighter, and the tiny pile of meth fell right through.
Tim was a middle-aged American with a head that was almost completely bald, but he was uncharacteristically skinny for a man his age. That was about all Jimmy knew about Tim or any of his other customers, and sometimes he didn’t even know that much.
Another of Jimmy’s customers, a young Australian who everyone called Trip, was sunk into the couch with his eyes squinted shut and his chest lifting slightly. That was the other extreme, the chilled-out smack heads who nodded off quietly in the corner while the meth heads blabbered incessantly. Jimmy always preferred the quiet ones to the ones who were jacked up. People high on heroin were subdued, peaceful and generally in a good mood. They didn’t want to bother anyone, and they were happy staring at the ceiling in their own euphoric bubbles. Meth heads, on the other hand, tended to be loud, demanding and volatile when they overdid their drug of choice. Constant chatter, unwarranted emotional responses and paranoia got old very fast. The only advantage the tweakers had over the smack heads was that they didn’t have the same tendency of nodding off in their hammocks and never waking up (with the local purity, this was a real concern). But in any case, they were all Jimmy’s customers, and he didn’t feel it was his place to judge them. Besides, he was the last person to complain about other’s drug habits; he was the worst offender of all.
Deciding it was time for a smoke of his own, Jimmy set to work constructing a makeshift pipe. He carefully cut a narrow strip of aluminum, and shaped it around the body of a lighter, folding it at the end to give it the appearance of a canoe. He then sprinkled a pinch of the ice - not too much - and applied a tiny flame to the foil and sucked the vapors through a straw. The crystals sizzled as Jimmy sucked in, and the white vapors spiraled through the pipe in the shape of a ring as the meth dripped slowly down the titled tube. He held the bitter vapors and exhaled a poof of the bright white smoke... Stimulation. Meth was the jet fuel, an his head was an F-16.
That was ordinary routine at Jimmy’s Place. Thanks to the sweetest drug connection imaginable, he had everything for sale - skunk, acid, coke, E pills, smack, ice, ketamine, and whatever else his friends at the Royal Cambodian Customs Office could get their hands on. After being in business for a few years, he had built bridges with all the local authorities, and for a their share of the pie they were happy to look the other way. As long as everyone played their role of discretion, no one got angry at anyone else, and Jimmy had his magical spot on the beach.
No one ever asked Jimmy any more questions than they had to. He was a tall, skinny man, whose civility shifted with the drugs. On a good day, he was happily tweaked and amiable, making polite conversation and offering brotherly advice to inexperienced travelers. People who visited on these days left with a good impression of the man, realizing that not every drug addict was a bad person. But on other days he would be irrational, and on other days yet he would be downright psychotic. These days often followed several days awake on methamphetamine, marathons where he binged relentlessly to put off the inevitable crash for a few more hours. He starred at the center of his own freak show, sometimes bringing out the more insane sides of his customers as well. He could be a pure scumbag on those days, and most of his regular customers had long learned to be wary of him, even if they pretended to like him.
But there was one question on everyone’s mind who stopped at his place, not matter what day they encountered him, that no one had the courage to ask - who the hell was Jimmy? How did an American guy who evidently had enough money to travel go from whatever life he was living to running a drug den in Cambodia? That wasn’t a path that many others had considered following. Surely, whether you thought he was a friend, a monster, or a bit of both, everyone wondered what the story was.
Jimmy enjoyed his status as an enigma. He didn’t particularly want to admit that he had once been a typical American dolt who had dropped out of college and had only worked a series of shit jobs before going over to Southeast Asia. The past was a collection of bullshit, a long phase of mundanity in his life that Jimmy preferred not relating to. He had come from a dull background, the life of a middle-class suburban kid expected to go to college. He was the Prozac kid in high school, anti-social and not particularly warm to people he didn’t care about. Maybe the problem was that everything was too easy; what satisfaction was there in having everything handed to you? What was life without any obstacles? They weakened his instincts, he thought in retrospect. “Do you know how powerful I’d have been if I had been born in one of these bamboo huts?” he had once shouted to his mother on a long-distance Skype call during a particularly intense meth bender.
The day came when Jimmy packed up and left America. He had about $3,000 saved up, plenty for a plane ticket to anywhere. But where was there to go? Europe was too much like America, Latin America was too upbeat, Africa was too fucked, and the Middle East was too religious. That left Asia. Minimal Internet research and a couple Lonely Planet Guidebooks made that seem feasible.
He read about Thailand and he liked the sounds of it; the legendary insanity of the Bangkok nightlife, the drug-fueled Full Moon Parties at Koh Phangan, the Pattaya go-go bars- the whole country seemed like a party. And the Thais seemed like a tolerable - laid back and always smiling, he had heard. He liked the prospect of year-round warm weather too; he had grown up in the cold, and looked forward to sandy beaches with frozen Margaritas.
He arrived in Bangkok on September 22, 2003. The first several weeks were all absorption on the Khao San Road (Bangkok’s premier street for cheap western backpackers). He had never been to Asia before, and there were things that shocked him. He came expecting poverty, but the experience of having a child in torn clothes clutching his stomach and begging for food wasn’t something he could really prepare for, and the constant buzzes and odors emitting from that Third World city were something to get used to, for they created odd emotional associations and added to the sense of distance from home. The photos, books and anecdotes passed onto him before didn’t convey the entire message - drowning yourself in the reality of Southeast Asia and defining your own experience in that strange cultural labyrinth was something else.
Overtime, that reality stopped being a fleeting moment of novelty and turned into something more permanent. Consequently, Jimmy grew bored and began to realize that his earliest, exotic impressions of the place were becoming obsolete, and the excitement began to wane. With all the talk of beautiful golden palaces and monks clad in saffron robes, how did one explain the McDonalds and 7-11s? But the issue wasn’t western cultural erosion or any innate problem with Thailand. Jimmy’s days on Khao San Road disillusioned him from the sense of individuality he had obtained by venturing to that far off land as Bangkok increasingly appeared to be a sandbox for the West, a melting pot of international youth culture. There were Americans, Brits, Aussies, Israelis, French, Germans, Canadians, Kiwis; every country in the western world was represented by someone. They were all after the same thing that Jimmy was - something new, an adventure - a taste of the exotic in the Oriental playground. After a few weeks of drinking and strip shows, he had enough of that - all the things he loathed about home were repackaged in an Asian parcel. Jimmy had enough, so he boarded the bus to the Cambodian border.
His first impression of Cambodia came from the small border town that lay opposite the Thai side. Before even having his passport stamped, Jimmy knew that Cambodia would be different. Whereas the Thai side of the border was in a mild-state of poverty, the road leading to the gateway to Cambodia gave way that something worse was lying on the other side. He was still technically in Thailand when the swarms of Cambodian beggar children swarmed him; tiny little kids, holding even smaller children in their grasps, noses red from glue sniffing, their large brown eyes playing on the sympathy of tourists naive enough to think they can make a difference by handing the child a dollar. They flanked the sides of the road that crossed between the two country’s border stations, standing ironically outside the five-star hotels and casinos that took advantage of the legal limbo of being in no-mans-land to attract wealthy gamblers from Bangkok. It was a juxtaposition that Jimmy wouldn’t forget- absolute poverty adjacent to the capitalists’ toilet seats.
He made his way to Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital city that, to Jimmy’s relief, resembled Bangkok only slightly. Whereas Bangkok had all the signs of a rising Third World tiger, the Penh was left in the past. The ride from the bus terminal was proof enough- there were no skyscrapers, Burger King, or even taxi cabs- the city streets were instead lined with dilapidated colonial architecture and alive with motorbikes, cyclos and the occasional Hummer or Landcruiser. Roads were crumbling, even in the capital, and the occasional presence of modernity seemed only incidental. The city had an edge that Bangkok lacked- less order, more anarchy, and an abundance of spontaneity.
He found a hostel and whiled away for a few months. There were plenty of other people around- backpackers mostly- and he spent nights staying awake over spliffs and beers mingling with the travelers coming through. No matter where they originally came from, they were all like him- folks on a mission of self-discovery in an alien land. They talked about trivial things- where to get a Vietnamese visa, the best fried noodle stands in the neighborhood, and strange occurrences of crime and corruption that popped up in the local English language newspapers. Strange things happened in that city- people getting murdered over $.10 worth of milk, stories of jealous wives dousing the faces of their husbands‘ mistresses with corrosive acid, and the occasional gang-related decapitation. It was to this darker side of Phnom Penh that Jimmy was the most attracted to, and he indulged in it; by day he taught English at a second-rate foreign language school, and his nights out were spent singing karaoke in slums, clubbing in hangouts for the Cambodian gangster elite, and drunken inebriation at the city’s girlie bars. Removed observation was enough for him- he found that the struggles he had always craved were best experienced vicariously.
Jimmy didn’t have the contentment with life he was searching for, and his job teaching English wasn’t any more interesting than his old jobs, but Cambodia at least gave Jimmy something he never felt he had before: uncertainty. Walking out into the streets was a mindfuck in itself, full of little nuances that he would never understand dictated by a culture that just didn’t make sense. Best of all was his removal from the world around him; he was a foreigner, a tall white guy who could walk down the streets and act like a madman for all anyone cared, and people would brush it off as normal barang bullshit. None of them could evaluate, appraise or judge his actions. He was just his own self wherever he went, and he soon discovered himself to be a mad person. Sitting on the back of a motorbike driving down the street he would howler random names to pedestrians and sing songs to confused locals. Walking around the streets smiling at everyone, all totally oblivious to the LSD he just swallowed. None of the old cultural norms from home applied over there, and he could put himself out as whoever he wanted to be.
All of this, of course, became old after awhile too. The undiscovered had become the discovered, and he found himself a little too familiar with the locality. What more was there he could do? He clinched onto every stimulation, every hedonistic act that struck his fancy. Drugs, prostitutes, and all forms of indulgence became the order of the day. He had put himself out into the world as a person who didn’t have reservations about such things; he could have stuck to the morals and ethics he was used to, but what was the point of that? Why should he follow his instincts to the grave when he could produce a far more interesting journey for himself? And what value were other people anyway?
He quit his job and moved to the beaches at Sihanoukville on the southern coast. Phnom Penh had its fair of sleaze, but Sihanoukville was the ultimate collection plate for human driftwood. It was a town populated with like-minded people; self-imposed exiles, abandoners of their home cultures, and pioneers of new values based around the pursuit of reckless debauchery. There were all sorts of flotsam there - old sex-pats from America and Europe who stayed in Cambodia because they had forgotten how to get laid without paying for it, Russian Mafiosos who used the town to escape from the cold and launder some cash, and drug addicts who saved big money by slamming up the highly pure Burmese heroin that came in. No pathetic act or miserable life that Jimmy could potentially fall into would be of particular noteworthiness here.
When he wasn’t putting forth an abysmal attempt to teach English, Jimmy spent his days lying on the beach, drinking in bars and taking drugs. Methamphetamine was his favorite - he thought of it as the cure for incompetence. For days at a time he would sit around living rooms with his friends passing foil after foil of the sickly stimulant like college students celebrating 4.20 with marathons of bong-hits. Everything in his head worked far better on meth - he thought faster, experienced heavier emotions, and all traces of boredom were vanished in his highs- feelings of shame and self-loathing were rendered moot after smoking a good bag of ice.
English teaching was a vehicle to enjoy these things, so he kept at it for awhile, but he soon rejected that completely and bought a little business for himself. He had his first guesthouse in the center of town and attracted a wide range of cheap travelers coming through town. Ganja, of course, was readily available, and before long he discovered that not every clean, respectable-seeming person in the world was above getting into hard shit, so he began selling that to curious tourists looking for a bit of exhilaration. Ultimately, the police started to pay attention, but it was remedied by money, of course. The police controlled the drug trade in the country anyway, and they had no interest in arresting their customers, thus they played their role by tolerating Jimmy. But having a public drug den in the middle of town didn’t go over well with everyone, so just to be safe, he sold that property and bought a little house on stilts next to the water outside of town.
He was soon the most popular drug dealer in town amongst the foreigners. People always came over to get high, and he soon became the center of the local drug culture. There was a constant stream of drugs in the place - and all the sorts who used them. Some of the guests were just experimenters, people looking to get a taste of the dreaded heroin or crystal meth on their trip to the other side of the world. These people came and went, returning to whatever lives they came from in the West much the way they left them, if perhaps with a few extra confessions to make about their recreational drug use. Others were folks like Jimmy, self-appointed architects of the new life they were craving, one where hard drugs were just another past-time. He charged fair prices, so people grew to like him, and his house soon became the epicenter of the Sihanoukville drug-pat community.
The first six months turned into a year, and the years multiplied. Now, six years after he left America for the last time, he finally realized he could never escape reality, for now this was reality. He couldn’t convey it to anyone back home - his mom and dad had given up, his sister had no interest in her younger brother anymore, and his old friends could have all been dead for all he cared. He had no interest in hearing sermons about his immoralities - what was moral anyway? He had his life now, and the only people he had to share it with were the ones drugged up on his couches. He was the sole judge of his own life, and even he had no interest in that responsibility anymore.
Jimmy took the last hit from his foil. The room was empty, save for Trip, who had been in that same crooked position since the previous night, with a sheet of aluminum foil spread on his chest, his lighter still gripped in his fist. Jimmy knew before he even examined the body that he was dead. It wasn’t that he could be bothered to grieve for the guy - he should have known the reality of his own life, and he had fucked up - but it would be a hassle and a couple thousand dollars to keep the cops from asking too many questions. Trip’s death shouldn’t be his burden; Trip, of all people, ought to have understood this- guys like him were the fodder for drug-related deaths in Sihanoukville, a heroin-addicted youth in the one place where Mom and Dad wouldn’t come around to check up. Now, to no one’s surprise, Trip was dead- an unintentional but self-inflicted demise.
Jimmy carefully took the foil and lighter out of Trip’s grip and positioned his body on the couch with his head facing the cushion. Comatose, drugged-up bodies were no outrageous sight in that room, and no obvious glance would reveal that the boy was dead. He lay there all day, with people casually sitting around him and no one caring to show any bother to his health. When darkness came, Jimmy carefully carried Trip’s body to the beach, dragged him into the surf, and let go. His room would be vacated, his possessions quietly taken. Jimmy had already slipped Trip’s passport into his the back pocket of his jeans before burying him at sea, just in case his body was recovered and some mom or dad somewhere could at least be given a bit of closure. It was a senseless risk for Jimmy to leave an identifiable document on him, but even he had one last ounce of pity to spare on Trip. Otherwise, there was no remorse to be felt; even in death, Trip had to respect the rules of the playground. Sihanoukville was a refuge for the indulgent, the debauchers, and the amoral. The rest of the world could have their values, so long as the dissenters had somewhere to go, a sanctuary where they asked for no help and accepted no responsibility.
19.11.09
The coast looked stunningly tranquil that morning from the second-floor window of Jimmy’s Place. There was a cool sea breeze that complimented the gentle crashing waves, with the palm trees gently waving in the house’s front yard. Jimmy stood gazing out the window toward the water; the grayish-blue sea was almost the same color as the cloudy sky, and save for the few small islands that dotted the horizon, the water and sky almost looked fused in the distance as the rising sun illuminated the Gulf of Thailand. The smell of salty sea air blew into the upstairs lounge, mingling with the shroud of putrid vapors that were constantly being produced in that room.
It wasn’t a bad place to own a small oceanside hostel. The beach here was a half hour drive from downtown Sihanokville, away from the hordes of motor-taxi drivers and souvenir-touting children in the town. At that time of morning, the only people out were a couple of Jimmy’s customers sunbathing on the beach and a few Cambodian fishermen going out to sea in ramshackle wooden boats, each with Cambodia’s red and blue flag flapping in the morning wind. The coastal enclave lacked the chaos of the city, and better yet, there was no police around to make customers paranoid.
The night had never ended at Jimmy’s place. Several of his most loyal regulars were still in the room, the sun’s early light finally rousing their attention. They were spread out on the sofas in the living room, surrounding the central coffee-table covered with bits of burnt tin foil, broken lighters and little plastic baggies containing white powders of various consistencies. The first customer to wake up was Tim.
“Morning, sunshine,” said Jimmy endearingly. Tim glared briefly before producing a thin smile. He went straight to work, grabbing a piece of tinfoil and dropping a few crystal shards onto the metal. He heated the pile of crystal under a lighter and sucked in the smoke with a drinking straw.
“Fuck it, man,” said Tim. A hole had formed where he had held the lighter, and the tiny pile of meth fell right through.
Tim was a middle-aged American with a head that was almost completely bald, but he was uncharacteristically skinny for a man his age. That was about all Jimmy knew about Tim or any of his other customers, and sometimes he didn’t even know that much.
Another of Jimmy’s customers, a young Australian who everyone called Trip, was sunk into the couch with his eyes squinted shut and his chest lifting slightly. That was the other extreme, the chilled-out smack heads who nodded off quietly in the corner while the meth heads blabbered incessantly. Jimmy always preferred the quiet ones to the ones who were jacked up. People high on heroin were subdued, peaceful and generally in a good mood. They didn’t want to bother anyone, and they were happy staring at the ceiling in their own euphoric bubbles. Meth heads, on the other hand, tended to be loud, demanding and volatile when they overdid their drug of choice. Constant chatter, unwarranted emotional responses and paranoia got old very fast. The only advantage the tweakers had over the smack heads was that they didn’t have the same tendency of nodding off in their hammocks and never waking up (with the local purity, this was a real concern). But in any case, they were all Jimmy’s customers, and he didn’t feel it was his place to judge them. Besides, he was the last person to complain about other’s drug habits; he was the worst offender of all.
Deciding it was time for a smoke of his own, Jimmy set to work constructing a makeshift pipe. He carefully cut a narrow strip of aluminum, and shaped it around the body of a lighter, folding it at the end to give it the appearance of a canoe. He then sprinkled a pinch of the ice - not too much - and applied a tiny flame to the foil and sucked the vapors through a straw. The crystals sizzled as Jimmy sucked in, and the white vapors spiraled through the pipe in the shape of a ring as the meth dripped slowly down the titled tube. He held the bitter vapors and exhaled a poof of the bright white smoke... Stimulation. Meth was the jet fuel, an his head was an F-16.
That was ordinary routine at Jimmy’s Place. Thanks to the sweetest drug connection imaginable, he had everything for sale - skunk, acid, coke, E pills, smack, ice, ketamine, and whatever else his friends at the Royal Cambodian Customs Office could get their hands on. After being in business for a few years, he had built bridges with all the local authorities, and for a their share of the pie they were happy to look the other way. As long as everyone played their role of discretion, no one got angry at anyone else, and Jimmy had his magical spot on the beach.
No one ever asked Jimmy any more questions than they had to. He was a tall, skinny man, whose civility shifted with the drugs. On a good day, he was happily tweaked and amiable, making polite conversation and offering brotherly advice to inexperienced travelers. People who visited on these days left with a good impression of the man, realizing that not every drug addict was a bad person. But on other days he would be irrational, and on other days yet he would be downright psychotic. These days often followed several days awake on methamphetamine, marathons where he binged relentlessly to put off the inevitable crash for a few more hours. He starred at the center of his own freak show, sometimes bringing out the more insane sides of his customers as well. He could be a pure scumbag on those days, and most of his regular customers had long learned to be wary of him, even if they pretended to like him.
But there was one question on everyone’s mind who stopped at his place, not matter what day they encountered him, that no one had the courage to ask - who the hell was Jimmy? How did an American guy who evidently had enough money to travel go from whatever life he was living to running a drug den in Cambodia? That wasn’t a path that many others had considered following. Surely, whether you thought he was a friend, a monster, or a bit of both, everyone wondered what the story was.
Jimmy enjoyed his status as an enigma. He didn’t particularly want to admit that he had once been a typical American dolt who had dropped out of college and had only worked a series of shit jobs before going over to Southeast Asia. The past was a collection of bullshit, a long phase of mundanity in his life that Jimmy preferred not relating to. He had come from a dull background, the life of a middle-class suburban kid expected to go to college. He was the Prozac kid in high school, anti-social and not particularly warm to people he didn’t care about. Maybe the problem was that everything was too easy; what satisfaction was there in having everything handed to you? What was life without any obstacles? They weakened his instincts, he thought in retrospect. “Do you know how powerful I’d have been if I had been born in one of these bamboo huts?” he had once shouted to his mother on a long-distance Skype call during a particularly intense meth bender.
The day came when Jimmy packed up and left America. He had about $3,000 saved up, plenty for a plane ticket to anywhere. But where was there to go? Europe was too much like America, Latin America was too upbeat, Africa was too fucked, and the Middle East was too religious. That left Asia. Minimal Internet research and a couple Lonely Planet Guidebooks made that seem feasible.
He read about Thailand and he liked the sounds of it; the legendary insanity of the Bangkok nightlife, the drug-fueled Full Moon Parties at Koh Phangan, the Pattaya go-go bars- the whole country seemed like a party. And the Thais seemed like a tolerable - laid back and always smiling, he had heard. He liked the prospect of year-round warm weather too; he had grown up in the cold, and looked forward to sandy beaches with frozen Margaritas.
He arrived in Bangkok on September 22, 2003. The first several weeks were all absorption on the Khao San Road (Bangkok’s premier street for cheap western backpackers). He had never been to Asia before, and there were things that shocked him. He came expecting poverty, but the experience of having a child in torn clothes clutching his stomach and begging for food wasn’t something he could really prepare for, and the constant buzzes and odors emitting from that Third World city were something to get used to, for they created odd emotional associations and added to the sense of distance from home. The photos, books and anecdotes passed onto him before didn’t convey the entire message - drowning yourself in the reality of Southeast Asia and defining your own experience in that strange cultural labyrinth was something else.
Overtime, that reality stopped being a fleeting moment of novelty and turned into something more permanent. Consequently, Jimmy grew bored and began to realize that his earliest, exotic impressions of the place were becoming obsolete, and the excitement began to wane. With all the talk of beautiful golden palaces and monks clad in saffron robes, how did one explain the McDonalds and 7-11s? But the issue wasn’t western cultural erosion or any innate problem with Thailand. Jimmy’s days on Khao San Road disillusioned him from the sense of individuality he had obtained by venturing to that far off land as Bangkok increasingly appeared to be a sandbox for the West, a melting pot of international youth culture. There were Americans, Brits, Aussies, Israelis, French, Germans, Canadians, Kiwis; every country in the western world was represented by someone. They were all after the same thing that Jimmy was - something new, an adventure - a taste of the exotic in the Oriental playground. After a few weeks of drinking and strip shows, he had enough of that - all the things he loathed about home were repackaged in an Asian parcel. Jimmy had enough, so he boarded the bus to the Cambodian border.
His first impression of Cambodia came from the small border town that lay opposite the Thai side. Before even having his passport stamped, Jimmy knew that Cambodia would be different. Whereas the Thai side of the border was in a mild-state of poverty, the road leading to the gateway to Cambodia gave way that something worse was lying on the other side. He was still technically in Thailand when the swarms of Cambodian beggar children swarmed him; tiny little kids, holding even smaller children in their grasps, noses red from glue sniffing, their large brown eyes playing on the sympathy of tourists naive enough to think they can make a difference by handing the child a dollar. They flanked the sides of the road that crossed between the two country’s border stations, standing ironically outside the five-star hotels and casinos that took advantage of the legal limbo of being in no-mans-land to attract wealthy gamblers from Bangkok. It was a juxtaposition that Jimmy wouldn’t forget- absolute poverty adjacent to the capitalists’ toilet seats.
He made his way to Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital city that, to Jimmy’s relief, resembled Bangkok only slightly. Whereas Bangkok had all the signs of a rising Third World tiger, the Penh was left in the past. The ride from the bus terminal was proof enough- there were no skyscrapers, Burger King, or even taxi cabs- the city streets were instead lined with dilapidated colonial architecture and alive with motorbikes, cyclos and the occasional Hummer or Landcruiser. Roads were crumbling, even in the capital, and the occasional presence of modernity seemed only incidental. The city had an edge that Bangkok lacked- less order, more anarchy, and an abundance of spontaneity.
He found a hostel and whiled away for a few months. There were plenty of other people around- backpackers mostly- and he spent nights staying awake over spliffs and beers mingling with the travelers coming through. No matter where they originally came from, they were all like him- folks on a mission of self-discovery in an alien land. They talked about trivial things- where to get a Vietnamese visa, the best fried noodle stands in the neighborhood, and strange occurrences of crime and corruption that popped up in the local English language newspapers. Strange things happened in that city- people getting murdered over $.10 worth of milk, stories of jealous wives dousing the faces of their husbands‘ mistresses with corrosive acid, and the occasional gang-related decapitation. It was to this darker side of Phnom Penh that Jimmy was the most attracted to, and he indulged in it; by day he taught English at a second-rate foreign language school, and his nights out were spent singing karaoke in slums, clubbing in hangouts for the Cambodian gangster elite, and drunken inebriation at the city’s girlie bars. Removed observation was enough for him- he found that the struggles he had always craved were best experienced vicariously.
Jimmy didn’t have the contentment with life he was searching for, and his job teaching English wasn’t any more interesting than his old jobs, but Cambodia at least gave Jimmy something he never felt he had before: uncertainty. Walking out into the streets was a mindfuck in itself, full of little nuances that he would never understand dictated by a culture that just didn’t make sense. Best of all was his removal from the world around him; he was a foreigner, a tall white guy who could walk down the streets and act like a madman for all anyone cared, and people would brush it off as normal barang bullshit. None of them could evaluate, appraise or judge his actions. He was just his own self wherever he went, and he soon discovered himself to be a mad person. Sitting on the back of a motorbike driving down the street he would howler random names to pedestrians and sing songs to confused locals. Walking around the streets smiling at everyone, all totally oblivious to the LSD he just swallowed. None of the old cultural norms from home applied over there, and he could put himself out as whoever he wanted to be.
All of this, of course, became old after awhile too. The undiscovered had become the discovered, and he found himself a little too familiar with the locality. What more was there he could do? He clinched onto every stimulation, every hedonistic act that struck his fancy. Drugs, prostitutes, and all forms of indulgence became the order of the day. He had put himself out into the world as a person who didn’t have reservations about such things; he could have stuck to the morals and ethics he was used to, but what was the point of that? Why should he follow his instincts to the grave when he could produce a far more interesting journey for himself? And what value were other people anyway?
He quit his job and moved to the beaches at Sihanoukville on the southern coast. Phnom Penh had its fair of sleaze, but Sihanoukville was the ultimate collection plate for human driftwood. It was a town populated with like-minded people; self-imposed exiles, abandoners of their home cultures, and pioneers of new values based around the pursuit of reckless debauchery. There were all sorts of flotsam there - old sex-pats from America and Europe who stayed in Cambodia because they had forgotten how to get laid without paying for it, Russian Mafiosos who used the town to escape from the cold and launder some cash, and drug addicts who saved big money by slamming up the highly pure Burmese heroin that came in. No pathetic act or miserable life that Jimmy could potentially fall into would be of particular noteworthiness here.
When he wasn’t putting forth an abysmal attempt to teach English, Jimmy spent his days lying on the beach, drinking in bars and taking drugs. Methamphetamine was his favorite - he thought of it as the cure for incompetence. For days at a time he would sit around living rooms with his friends passing foil after foil of the sickly stimulant like college students celebrating 4.20 with marathons of bong-hits. Everything in his head worked far better on meth - he thought faster, experienced heavier emotions, and all traces of boredom were vanished in his highs- feelings of shame and self-loathing were rendered moot after smoking a good bag of ice.
English teaching was a vehicle to enjoy these things, so he kept at it for awhile, but he soon rejected that completely and bought a little business for himself. He had his first guesthouse in the center of town and attracted a wide range of cheap travelers coming through town. Ganja, of course, was readily available, and before long he discovered that not every clean, respectable-seeming person in the world was above getting into hard shit, so he began selling that to curious tourists looking for a bit of exhilaration. Ultimately, the police started to pay attention, but it was remedied by money, of course. The police controlled the drug trade in the country anyway, and they had no interest in arresting their customers, thus they played their role by tolerating Jimmy. But having a public drug den in the middle of town didn’t go over well with everyone, so just to be safe, he sold that property and bought a little house on stilts next to the water outside of town.
He was soon the most popular drug dealer in town amongst the foreigners. People always came over to get high, and he soon became the center of the local drug culture. There was a constant stream of drugs in the place - and all the sorts who used them. Some of the guests were just experimenters, people looking to get a taste of the dreaded heroin or crystal meth on their trip to the other side of the world. These people came and went, returning to whatever lives they came from in the West much the way they left them, if perhaps with a few extra confessions to make about their recreational drug use. Others were folks like Jimmy, self-appointed architects of the new life they were craving, one where hard drugs were just another past-time. He charged fair prices, so people grew to like him, and his house soon became the epicenter of the Sihanoukville drug-pat community.
The first six months turned into a year, and the years multiplied. Now, six years after he left America for the last time, he finally realized he could never escape reality, for now this was reality. He couldn’t convey it to anyone back home - his mom and dad had given up, his sister had no interest in her younger brother anymore, and his old friends could have all been dead for all he cared. He had no interest in hearing sermons about his immoralities - what was moral anyway? He had his life now, and the only people he had to share it with were the ones drugged up on his couches. He was the sole judge of his own life, and even he had no interest in that responsibility anymore.
Jimmy took the last hit from his foil. The room was empty, save for Trip, who had been in that same crooked position since the previous night, with a sheet of aluminum foil spread on his chest, his lighter still gripped in his fist. Jimmy knew before he even examined the body that he was dead. It wasn’t that he could be bothered to grieve for the guy - he should have known the reality of his own life, and he had fucked up - but it would be a hassle and a couple thousand dollars to keep the cops from asking too many questions. Trip’s death shouldn’t be his burden; Trip, of all people, ought to have understood this- guys like him were the fodder for drug-related deaths in Sihanoukville, a heroin-addicted youth in the one place where Mom and Dad wouldn’t come around to check up. Now, to no one’s surprise, Trip was dead- an unintentional but self-inflicted demise.
Jimmy carefully took the foil and lighter out of Trip’s grip and positioned his body on the couch with his head facing the cushion. Comatose, drugged-up bodies were no outrageous sight in that room, and no obvious glance would reveal that the boy was dead. He lay there all day, with people casually sitting around him and no one caring to show any bother to his health. When darkness came, Jimmy carefully carried Trip’s body to the beach, dragged him into the surf, and let go. His room would be vacated, his possessions quietly taken. Jimmy had already slipped Trip’s passport into his the back pocket of his jeans before burying him at sea, just in case his body was recovered and some mom or dad somewhere could at least be given a bit of closure. It was a senseless risk for Jimmy to leave an identifiable document on him, but even he had one last ounce of pity to spare on Trip. Otherwise, there was no remorse to be felt; even in death, Trip had to respect the rules of the playground. Sihanoukville was a refuge for the indulgent, the debauchers, and the amoral. The rest of the world could have their values, so long as the dissenters had somewhere to go, a sanctuary where they asked for no help and accepted no responsibility.
