“When I was a young man, I carried my pack, and I lived the free life of a rover.”
That line from The Pogues’ The Band Played Waltzing Matilda. The second I heard Shane MacGowan belt it out I knew I had to live it.
In 1992, I did just that. I lived the hippy dream. I was gone from the western world for 360 days. I started reading Jack Kerouac’s On The Road on Khao San Road in Bangkok.
Today, in 2020 during this coronavirus lockdown, a robin plucks worms from the grass at the back of my house. An efficient hunter. Hop, hop. A peck of the beak and he’s wolfing a steak.
I’m trying to focus on work but I’m daydreaming at the drizzle. The whole world is in isolation. Sequestrated. Airplanes are grounded. Nobody’s going anywhere.
How free I once was. Lucky. Privileged. But I was no fool. I knew I owed myself a year of free-human living, to get out of the machine. A young man’s thirst for adventure. Call me Ishmael.
The road was a spiritual pursuit. A delicious and righteous reward for many past torturous lives. Dead in the trenches, age 19. A slave building the pyramids. A faceless drone working in a warehouse. Who’s to say.
First, I was a tourist. Then I got lost. So beautifully far gone.
Now stuck at home, my thoughts turn to when I was most free, where I was the most far-away. The outer expanse of my blessed life’s elastic stretch.
Cambodia, August 21-27, 1992. Kompong Som – Kampot – Kep.
I was a punk. ‘What you need my son is a Holiday in Cambodia!’ sang Jello Biafra of The Dead Kennedys. I took that advice. The U.N. was rebuilding the country with plans for free and safe elections. White SUVs with the U.N. emblem and American dollars were everywhere in Phnom Penh.
I went to the seaside ghost town of Kompong Som, otherwise known as Sihanoukville.
From the station the only taxis were guys on 50cc mopeds wearing flip-flops and fedoras. The driver took me to the bombed-out Hilton on the Hill. It was a towering concrete shell. The place was completely deserted and I was the only western person. Nobody spoke English. A wiry man etched with Buddhist tattoos was the custodian. He was pure hard menace. His lithe muscles were covered with drawings of temples and Khmer writing.
I’d heard that the Buddhists believed if they went against the promises written on their skin, needles would pierce through from the inside. It may have been the dark low clouds or my generalized paranoia but there was no way I was being led alone into that deserted hotel by this scary looking dude. Plus, he wanted $15 U.S. for the night. We reached a stalemate and squatted down for a while. A chubby whore started to cuss me out and yanked hard on my nose. Its fleshy protrusion an abomination. It really hurt, like she wanted to rip it off my face.
The taxi driver took sympathy and whisked me away on the moped and through muddy streets to an abandoned concrete police barracks about a mile out of town. It was huge and empty.
An older, kinder-looking concierge took me on a tour through cavernous hallways. We got to one room with a four-poster queen-sized bed. It had heavy doors with big metal bolts. It was a good price at 4$.
A day on the beach during the southwest monsoon. I lay on the sand as the wind whipped across my body. The waves were angry gargoyles flailing and pounding and punching the land. My purple-checkered Cambodian scarf was a magic carpet. I lay on it riding the entire spin of the earth. All by myself. My body lifted up and I soared over the ocean. Just human and earth.
That night, a raucous group of men laughed somewhere in the darkness. It was getting rowdy and sounded close. I did not know if they knew I was there in the barracks. The only other white person in this place was a French mercenary about 20 rooms over, who was flying an UNTAC flag outside his room.
The chef de hotel was knocking on my door, ‘messieur, messieur’.
‘Demain matin’ I shouted.
No way I was unbolting that door until daylight.
In the morning the chef de hotel returned and I opened the door to the bright sunshine. He shuffled into the room and unbolted the door to the hallway behind. He gestured for me to follow. He showed me to a big stainless-steel basin where white sheets were soaking in water and bleach and we laughed. That was all he had wanted. To get to the sheets.
Nevertheless, I shifted locations that day to be in town and found a room in a family’s house. The walls of the room were bamboo curtains with see-through slats. The children peaked in at me like I was a creature in a zoo and giggled. They couldn’t quite understand why my hair was long like a woman’s. We ate together sitting on the floor.
It was a Saturday night so I wandered through the dark town looking for a bar. I saw Christmas lights in a field and heard music. I got to an institutional-looking gateway arch and walked through it up a driveway towards the lights and there were more and more people. I handed out candies to the children to win hearts and minds, like some lost ghost clown. In stoned meditation I let the scene unwrap like layers being torn off a Christmas present.
It was a carnival. A Cambodian speakeasy. An improvised Las Vegas.
A model of an F-111 jet hung under a triangle roof surrounded by flashing lights. Men crowded around a tabletop covered in photographs of passenger jets from different airlines and fighters. Each photo was assigned a number, 1 to 12. The men slapped greasy plasticized cards down on the photos with hard smacks to stick their luck with conviction.
When all bets were placed the lights flashed some more and a buzzer went off. The croupier opened up the F-111’s bomb-bay doors and pulled out a hidden card. Whoever had bet on that card was the winner.
There was much banter and laughter and pushing and the men smoked and swapped cigarettes. Some turned and saw me and gave me the same stunned look: ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ ‘Man are you lost?’. They mostly did not smile. I knew to keep my mouth shut and not speak English. In Cambodia it seemed people did not like you speaking if they did not understand. Better to be a strange spirit, like a supernatural apparition or drunken hallucination. Best left unacknowledged. The men quickly turned their attentions back to winning Riel.
Under another triangle roof, a long white board covered in small nails was tilted under the lights. The nails were stuck in patterned rows and the board was covered with see-through Perspex. Numbered ping pong balls were lined up at the top starting gate. One ball in the middle had a star painted on it. The men slapped cards on the table and the balls were released, tumbling downwards, bouncing off the nails. The men shouted at the balls until the winning ball entered a triangular trap at the bottom of the board.
At the next table, electronic-gizmo lights numbered 1-to-12 winked in a line above a painting of two tigers fighting.
Women tried to sell me cigarettes and peanuts and candies as I drifted away into the darkness.
On the dark walk back to my room I stopped at a hut bar and drank a whisky and coke with a U.N. soldier from Ghana. He said he wanted to take me as his friend. His eyes were bloodshot yellow yolks.
*****************
I woke up the next morning in the fuzz that comes with smoking boo and resolved that it was time to grow some sideburns and buy a fedora like all the moped taxi drivers wore. I crammed all my stuff back in my pack and hopped on the back of a moped to the train station.
The station’s long and flat platform was set against the backdrop of lush green jungle hills. The train was a freight train and it jolted forward. The people were in the cattle cars and some were on the roof. They wore Khmer scarves with the checkers in different colours. The women carried plastic handbags stuffed with things to eat and sell. The men were shirtless with vinyl tote bags and cheap sunglasses. They all turned towards me as I took some quick steps towards the train. The stationmaster intercepted me diagonally across the platform. He was a smiley gentleman in a green uniform.
He escorted me to the executive class boxcar where all the conductors ride. Primo treatment. One guy was stringing up a hammock.
The stationmaster asked me in pigeon French if I had eaten.
‘Non, je vais seulement à Kampot.’
‘Mais arrive midi,’ he said pointing at his silver wristwatch.
‘Ok, Ok.’
I hopped off the train and he called out behind me: ‘Ça part a six-heure-et demi.’
Glancing at his watch I saw it was already after 6:30. Still he followed me down the platform and arranged a soup for me. The squatting mamma san was thrilled and resplendent to be feeding me. I pointed at everything.
‘Cinq cent Riel,’ she nodded.
The train began to move away as she served up the soup. I ran towards it again, confused, and chased it down a few cars to get back to my spot on the executive class boxcar. Then the train stopped.
I guessed it was just re-aligning or whatever so I went back to my soup.
I squat on my haunches Khmer style and slurped and gulped at the rice noodles in the familiar OXO-bouillon broth. I nibbled chunks of the gelatin-cube liver sausage, trying to ignore the fossil imprints of tiny ventricles.
I had an audience the entire length of the train. Faces from inside the crowded boxcars and the roof beamed at me and nodded and laughed at the gusto with which I slurped up the soup. Some dribbled down my chin and the people stared and jabbered excitedly.
‘Le train vous attendez.’ The stationmaster appeared above me smiling.
I swaggered down the platform to my boxcar.
The diesel engine barfed smoke and the train lumbered forward. It pulled out slowly past fishing huts. Children waved tiny hands from the huts and the banks along the tracks. We followed the seashore and then behind some hills into a shrub jungle.
The train slithered through the deep green foliage, like a snake hunting. Past shanty villages with a handful of huts and the bombed-out concrete remains of train stations. It stopped at one and I took my chance to climb onto the roof. It was my dream to ride the rooftop of a third-world train. To live the Woody Guthrie hobo mythology. I scraped my stomach on the corrugated steel on the way up but soon all the men on top were my friends.
‘Excussh me you spik Engleesh?’
Earnest young men. I gave them cigarettes and we smoked and watched the flowing scenery of God’s majestic film.
The tree tops were the same level as the roof of the train and the jungle was a steaming green sea. Rubbery thick leaves and vines lapped close to the tracks. The hills rolled like giant humpbacks.
The sky got dark and sheets of rain slid down the hills towards us. An army officer poked his head out from inside the boxcar. He gestured at me to get down off the roof and pointed to the approaching rain. The dark grey sheets were tumbling down the mountainside, swallowing up the greenery. I looked for a safe spot to clamber down but then the conductor poked his head out and gestured to stay. The train was now shimmying side to side and it was not safe. Everyone was concerned for my welfare. It began to pour.
‘Ut Peng Ha,’ I said.
The rain was cool. It tasted like percolated jungle but faintly salty. The conductor poked his head out again and passed our huddled group a sheet of plastic. We draped it over five of us and became a meditative commune as the rain drummed and tore. The rain stopped and started and we lowered and raised the plastic strip.
Time passed and then we were out of the jungle and rice paddies stretched on either side of us. The clouds had broken up and were galloping away and the blue sky and clouds were reflected in the rice paddy pools.
Children were riding water buffalos and tapping them with little sticks. People wearing straw sampan hats were planting rice in the water. The train tracks ran straight through the middle of the shining tapestry all the way to the horizon. The train clickety clacked gently across the patchwork of mirrors. The earth was the sky and the sky was the earth. It was a vision of heaven. (This is my place of peace. I go back there often in meditation. It also features in my song The Black Boots of Coltrane.)
*****************
At Kampot I got a horse and cart for 500 Riel. I patted the horse on the nose and the driver gestured for me to get on the flat wooden cart.
He whipped at the poor horse with a long baton and we lurched away without taking on any other passengers. The wooden wheels careened through the mud ruts and down craters and I almost bounced off at every bump as he beat the shit out of the horse. My arms flailed at the air as I held on with my ass cheeks. There was nothing to hold on to on the flat wood and my fat pack bounced like a baby on a father’s knee. I started to feel bad and sick about the horse.
The driver flogged the stubborn animal so hard that it stopped and refused to go down into a muddy crater. The driver responded by jumping off and kicking the horse hard in the ass and flogging it some more. The cart also hit the horse on the back legs when it went down a crater.
‘Je ne suis pas pressé,’ I said. ‘Take your time.’
But the driver just cursed and sweat and beat the horse some more and we careened again along the bumpy road. That man had an unnatural hate for the animal. He was obsessive, almost frothing. I was just an excuse for him to manifest his anger.
It started to rain again. I held on for dear life. I felt like I was the ball attached to an elastic string getting smacked repeatedly by a paddle. I was soaked and getting my ass beaten and started to laugh at the absurd scene and yelled at the guy to stop but he didn’t stop and my kidneys jolted against my spleen and my teeth rattled and finally the horse stopped dead at the lip of another crater and the cart smacked into its legs. I was glad for the stop and jumped off the cart.
The rain was falling harder now and I couldn’t take the beating, of my ass or the horse. I gave the driver the 500 Riel and said OK and started to walk towards the town. After a while I flagged down a guy on a motorbike and he let me get on the back and we soon roared into the town in style.
That night I got a long, concrete room for $7 with a weeping wet ceiling at the local whorehouse hotel. It too had a four-poster queen-sized bed and the room was swarming with mosquitos. The room was cavernous and at the end there was a drain surrounded by a concrete curb and a big plastic drum filled with water and a small pail for washing.
In the early evening a discordant band began to sound check and feedback screeched and howled. Davee knocked on the door and pushed her way in. She was caked in make-up and the bulge of her bladder was squeezed into baby-blue jeans. She said it was 100 Riel per dance. I said maybe later and sat down to write.
I emptied the tobacco from a Marlboro and delicately pinched boo from my stash, picking out the stems and seeds. I dropped the boo into the empty tube and carefully tramped it down with a stick and then added more, pinching the tip and flipping it from side to side to compact the grass until it was full like a cigarette. It was the only way to smoke that raunchy ganja; through a cigarette filter.
Davee knocked on my door a few more times but I had barricaded it shut with a chair by now.
The party raged as the bassline wandered aimlessly into the twilight zone of no return. A syrupy guitar twinkled fumbling Hendrix drivel. Now a demon was screaming over and over: ‘Do you feel like I do in my neighbourhood, do you feel like I do just like I knew you would….Be Bop A Doo Doo Doo.’ Et Cetera.
The mad exorcism echoed through the hollow-squalid room. Loi Tet. No money for even a beer. Otherwise I would be observing more directly. I had a grand total of $16 U.S. in my money belt.
The nasal strains of a woman singing a ballad hovered above looming feedback. The electronic keyboard picked up the melody and wambled and waffled some depressing romantic Khmer love whine. UNTAC soldiers crazed on Cobra-Tonic whiskey barf Ramen noodles in the parking lot as a perky Rumba goes nutso.
*****************
The next day was yet another wonderful day of offering myself like a fleshy sacrifice to the asphalt altar of the road. I did not have to get up at any particular time nor go any particular place.
An amputee locust fluttered on the floor. I had inadvertently pulled off its hind leg trying to shoo it out of the mosquito net. It flew spastically and panicked across the room, rocketing in the air in some random diagonal direction. It bashed against the wall. Strangely I couldn’t seem to bring myself to put it out of its misery.
Out I wandered with purple bags under my bleary eyes through the colonial breakdown of the town. I was hungry and agitated about the locust and the dark circles and I could not find the market until a young policeman in a green uniform and flip-flops took me there on his Cub 50cc.
‘You dollah money or Riel,’ he asked.
I knew what he was asking but played dumb.
‘You buy market…um dollar…What you buy?’
Now it could be that he just wants to take me to his money changer buddy to get a kick back on the action of the black-market currency exchange. Or it could be that he’s an ambitious young copper who wants to arrest his first westerner for changing U.S. dollars for Riel on the black-market, which in theory is illegal.
He was a smiling kid but I decided to play it safe and got off and quickly split through the market.
Sure enough, he drove around and entered the market the other end and spotted me just as I was counting dusty bills of Riel at the jewelry counter like a mafioso.
He mumbled something: ‘Oh … you … money … dollah!’
He looked like he was wrestling to explain but his English was so bad he was stuttering and confused.
I asked him if he wanted something to eat and we went to a noodle stall and I slurped up some cold fishy curry gruel. This was breakfast. He would not eat. He said he made 200 Riel a day, 5,000 a month.
Later I gave him the slip for good and bought a shirt with magical golden lotus-paisleys on it. This was the shirt I had been looking for. Like the one Dylan is wearing on the cover of Highway 61 Revisted. Same vibe, but golden.
I wore that same shirt at my gig at the Bar du Parc in August, the same night an apartment and pickup truck on my street got torched and a baby boy died.
After a series of mishaps getting out of town and a lot of walking, I travelled the 24 kms to Kep on the back of a motorcycle in the rain.
Kep was a seaside resort for the French colonialist elites founded in 1908 along a 6-km cove shaded by palm trees. It used to be a playground for the rich for skin-diving and water-skiing and spear-fishing and gambling until the Khmer Rouge destroyed all the luxury villas.
I’m not sure what drove my macabre sense of curiosity. Maybe I wanted to see what the agrarian revolution looked like. To see for myself the knock-on, after-effect of the U.S. systematically opening the B-52 bomb-bay doors over Cambodia in the hopes of hitting the hidden Viet Cong but not really giving a shit of what erupted and bled in the land beneath.
Terror begets more terror. Idealism hung by the neck, twisting in the howling darkness of human nature. This animal cannot seem to be tamed. Who would not long for the Shangri La of the Garden of Eden, to reset to Year Zero and be self-sufficient and live off the land?
I had drifted like an invisible time traveller through the 1,000-year old ruins of Angkor Wat. Mesmerized by the rich story of Shiva, then Vishnu, then an offshoot of Mahayana Buddhism carved into the cool stone. The ornate depictions of Mount Meru, the temple mountain. Some believed the temples had appeared over night, delivered by a divine architect. Japanese pilgrims voyaged here in the 17th century, believing it to be the famed Jetavana Garden of Buddha. I had the entire complex to myself for days, except for the odd sighting of a teenaged soldier or a couple of other travellers or NGO staff.
I climbed up a temple to see the sun rise over the jungle and meditated across the tops of the trees. I spent an afternoon at the Bayon with its multiple faces of Avalokitesvara. I saw how the banyan trees choked the ancient stone corridors with their roots. It was mystifying to run my hands across the cool textured figures churning the sea of milk, a smooth bas-relief carved a millenia ago.
The ruins of Kep were just 15 years old. It was like a scene from Planet of the Apes. Bombed out villas were entrenched in the jungle like pillbox bunkers. Gaping windows and doorframes and bullet-hole pock marks ran deep across every crumbled wall.
I could see hammocks slung inside the husk of a once grand colonial mansion. A family had taken possession and were squatting inside the once exclusive beachfront property. Cows chewed in the front garden and pigs rutted by the front gates. It was like a post-apocalyptic Malibu Beach.
It was eerie to be walking through this future. Time and the jungle had laid it all to waste without prejudice. The strangely familiar bare bones of the architecture highlighted the impermanence.
On the way out of town I stopped at the old Shell station. The Khmer Rouge had dug up the reservoir tanks and turned the gaping hole into a mass grave. Between concrete slabs on the ground, deep stagnant pools of water swarmed with tadpoles.
Two Bulgarians in a white UNTAC Toyota stopped and gave me a lift back to Kampot.
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