John the John

The Red Fox is a “smoking bar” as opposed to a "girlie bar." By that I mean that while marijuana is not sold on the premises, its patrons get together to share a joint at the bar on a regular basis. It’s only later that some local girls come in to draw customers, sell drinks for tips and, if they feel so inclined, spend the night with their benefactor. I just happened to show up just before The Simpson’s came on at 5 o’clock. Simpson’s time was smoking time at the Red Fox and although it had been a long while since I’d last smoked weed, I felt it was the polite thing to do. So I accepted some patrons' offer to join them in a toke or two. Whether that was a big mistake or not I’ll never be sure, but from that point on things got interesting.

Brett, the Australian owner of the Red Fox, is an affable guy who explained to me when I asked him why he decided to open a bar in Phnom Penh that “it was either this or go to work in a factory in Adelaide.” That was all he said, but it spoke volumes. I asked him where there was an “interesting” place to go for dinner and he suggested with a grin that I try Sharky’s, just up the road.

I didn’t realize how stoned I was until I got off the barstool. I had only taken three tokes, for God’s sake, and had only one (or was it two?) beer. But the floor felt like a waterbed beneath my feet and as I made my way out onto the street, I thought about a line in Gilboa’s book where he says that not a night in Phnom Penh went by without gunfire. But it wasn’t far to my destination and before paranoia got the better of me I was “safely” inside Sharky’s.

I immediately understood the deep inner meaning behind Brett’s grin: Sharky’s was a girlie bar. A real girlie bar. The kind you go to for only one reason: to get laid. While I’m sure that he was trying to do me a favour, sex with a prostitute was not high on my Cambodian “to do” list. I’m not that young and lurking behind my free-spirited veneer there still beat a heart filled with Calvinistic cultural conditioning and, I like to think, just plain human decency. But I was there. I was hungry. And I didn’t know what else to do. So I sat down at the bar, ordered a beer and asked for a menu. I was proud of my accomplishment. As stoned as I was, coherent speech was an effort.

But at least with me, coherent speech was a possibility. Before my beer had arrived I was flanked by two girls. One of them, a pretty Vietnamese, spoke not a word of English. The other, a rough looking Cambodian, couldn’t speak at all. She was a deaf mute, but an ironically verbose deaf mute, who began trying desperately with hand gestures and grunts to get a message across to me. I tried to be polite. Really I did. I tried, but it only made things worse. She got more and more agitated until her grunts became shouts. I looked to the Vietnamese girl for support, moral or otherwise, but all she did was smile sweetly. I looked around the bar for help, but it was as if nothing unusual at all was going on. The bartender casually continued casually washing glasses, her back turned indifferently to me. The girls on the floor chatted amongst themselves or played pool. To me it was as if the Columbine massacre was taking place right there and no one was taking any notice. I was freaking out. My stupid, uncomprehending smiles and apologies were just making things worse. Finally I just took some money out of my wallet, laid it down on the bar and walked out.

Sometimes fate lends a hand when all else fails - and this is where John comes into the story. He was just an acquaintance from my hotel. An unabashed sex tourist, after three months in Pattaya he had gotten too close to one of his girlfriends and decided it was time to move on. I had kind of been avoiding him, having tired within thirty minutes of meeting him of the endless and explicit tales of his sexual exploits, but at that moment in time he looked like the reincarnation of Jesus Christ to me. You see, I was lost. Remember, I was stoned in a strange city, amongst strange people who spoke a strange language and who (according to the guidebooks) were all out to get me and it was getting dark, or so I thought. I poured my heart out to John. He laughed so hard he had to wipe back tears.

As it turned out, I was only a couple of blocks from our hotel and, unbelievably, it wasn’t yet six o’clock – still early enough for even the most trepidatious traveler. My entire epic adventure had lasted less than an hour! John advised me to go back to my room and get some rest. We’d meet in the hotel restaurant at nine for dinner and then go back to Sharky’s. John liked the sound of the place. I was hesitant, but I owed him. I agreed.

We met as planned and no sooner had we sat down than a pretty, lively-looking young woman joined us uninvited at our barstool. I was still feeling the effects of the marijuana, but I was functional and when she started speaking in English instead of grunts, I offered to buy her a drink. I reckoned she'd be a much more interesting dinner companion than John. Technically, my having bought her a drink made her "mine" for the evening, so when she called a couple of her friends over to join us, the assumption was that John would choose one of them and she would be "his." But John wasn't interested and when he had not bought either of them a drink after 10 minutes they walked away and Dah resumed telling us the story of her life - the made-up version as it turned out.

At twenty-four, Dah was a single mother to a five-year-old girl. The father disappeared before she was even born. In order to cobble together a life for herself and her child, Dah went to work in the bars in and around Saigon. She saved her money and worked her way through beauty school, becoming a qualified hairdresser. Her dream was to own her own beauty salon, she said, but the money she could earn from the foreigners in bars was much better than that of a hairdresser, so she put her ambitions on hold. After one of the periodic crackdowns on Vietnamese brothels and girlie bars, Dah left her daughter in the care of her parents and traveled to Phnom Penh to work the bars there. She learned English from her clients, but not before she perfected a repertoire of gestures and facial expressions to rival those of Charlie Chaplin. Between her wicked sense of humour, her delivery and her fluent English, Dah was the consummate bargirl.

John was smitten. I was impressed, but something inside me was wary. Dah listened with detached interest while John and I discussed which one of us would take her home that night. After repeatedly assuring him that he was welcome to her, it was settled,and Dah snuggled up to him like a familiar lover. Eventually our food arrived. I ate ravenously and then, almost cross-eyed with fatigue, I excused myself and went back to my room and fell into a coma-like slumber.

 

"Remember one thing and you'll be alright," a doctor in Phnom Penh told me. "In Cambodia, nothing is real." By that he meant: no one is necessarily who they say they are - a doctor may or may not be a doctor, a lawyer a lawyer, a policeman a policeman, etc. etc. The medicine you buy at the pharmacy may or may not be the one that's written on the label. The person who just sold you a house may or may not be its actual owner. Later I learned that the information you read in guidebooks or hear from ex-pats and travelers is equally unreal, but that's another story.

In a world where nothing is real, the best way to cope is to make up a comfortable illusion - better your own than someone else's. In John's case, he bought the ones Dah made up for him. Had she been just another one-night-stand things might have turned out differently. But he got hooked. They say "love is blind." In John's case it was deaf, dumb and blind. Then again, maybe his karma just caught up with him. But all of this I learned later.

I'd had enough of Phnom Penh, so I left. John and Dah were just anecdotes of my travels. A lot had happened and they were almost forgotten. Almost but not quite. When Sopheak arrived in Phnom Penh for the Water Festival a day before her family, I got this foolish idea in my head that she might like some female company for dinner. I gave John a call. Yes, he and Dah were still together and yes, they would be happy to meet us at our hotel for dinner. After our meal Dah suggested we all go to the fairgrounds. We rode the bumpercars and threw darts at balloons and just basically had a great time. Afterwards, Sopheak commented, "She Vietnam girl but maybe not bad." I had not yet learned how deep her mistrust of the Vietnamese ran, so it's only in retrospect that I can appreciate just how good at deception Dah really was. Sopheak is generally an uncanny judge of character.

Or maybe at that point in time Dah was genuinely in love with John. She certainly seemed happy with him and he was obviously in love with her. He told us proudly how she had already saved enough money to buy a salon - only days before she had paid $6000 cash for a fully equipped salon with a two-year renewable lease. And she had told John she didn't want him to pay her for her companionship anymore: they were officially a couple. Later he confided in me that he had given her the $6000, but Dah had asked him to tell me she had earned it. "In Cambodia, nothing is real."

We spent most of the next three days with John and Dah, enjoying the Water Festival. I guess I should have gotten suspicious even then. Dah was definitely cashed up - she even had enough money to give some to Sopheak to buy me a shirt. But she never went to work. Even John was a little bemused by this. He found it amazing that all she had to do was go to the salon at the end of the day and collect the day's profits. How was she to know that her girls weren't ripping her off if she wasn't there to keep an eye on things? Wasn't her expertise the drawcard that was to make her salon a success?

"If you're worried, why don't you go to the salon yourself and have a look," I suggested. 'And why do you care?' I thought, since as long as she is independent it shouldn't matter. How green and foolish I was.

"She won't tell me where it is," John explained. "She says if they see a barang (foreigner) they'll think she's rich and rip her off." I could see the hole in that argument (how was the staff to know that a random barang amongst hundreds of others just happened to be Dah's lover?), but it wasn't my problem so I let it slide. We were all having a great time together and that's all I cared about.

Water Festival ended and we went our separate ways. I went back to Australia to tie up some loose ends and by the time I returned to Cambodia I had forgotten all about John and Dah. I was too busy starting my new life with Sopheak in Sihanoukville.

Then one day out of the blue I got a call from Mama Dada, proprietor of Dada's Guesthouse. A 'friend' had just arrived in Sihanoukville and was looking for us. It was Dah. Neither Sopheak nor I had spoken to her in over three months. How had she found us? And why? The 'how' was that she remembered me mentioning Dada's in passing. 'Why' was a little more complex, but all she seemed to want was for me to call John in England. "You are his only friend in Cambodia," she told me. "I want him to come back." It was a little sad that I was the closest thing to a friend he had, but not surprising. On the few occasions we had been together I had heard the story of his life and exploits several times, but he knew next to nothing about me. Though he claimed to hate drugs, he was like a speed-freak, endlessly talking, changing topic mid-stream and going back to old but rarely interesting stories about himself again and again. I don't know how many times he told me about his dog-training skills, but it was more than twice and the first time was more than enough. And he was always rude to the natives: his first assumption was that they were out to get him and he wasn't gonna be a sucker for a scam. Funny, that one. Life is full of irony.

She only stayed for a day, but she left both of us feeling uneasy. Sopheak wondered aloud why she claimed to have never been to Sville before but also knew where everything was and how to get there. And I wondered why she had come all this way just to ask me to call John. It was weird.

I never did call John. I was happy to have him and Dah out of my life. And Sopheak didn't answer her phone when Dah's name came up on the screen. But that didn't stop them from checking in at Dada's andt getting her to call us on their behalf three months later.

Karma has a way of catching up to you and John's had caught up fast. After a year of living off the rent he was getting from his house in England and screwing every bargirl in Asia, John's number had finally come up. It had in fact come up way back at the Water Festival, but neither he nor I knew it then.

He had gone to an ATM and been told by the screen that he had no available funds. He didn't consider it a problem at the time - just a glitch in the system that he'd take care of as soon as the bank re-opened after Water Festival. He still had enough cash to get by and Dah had plenty of income from her salon.

Well, it wasn't a glitch in the system. John had been shut out, his account frozen by the police department back in England. While he was busy falling in love in Phnom Penh his disgruntled tenants back home had been busy burning down his house and leaving town. It was obvious arson - petrol had been poured all over the floor and the building was reduced to rubble. The neighbours' houses on either side had been badly damaged as well and they were seeking damages. And the story gets worse.

Version One, the story John told me, is that his insurance had lapsed because he had not been in England to receive a renewal notice from his insurer. They needed his written approval to continue taking automatic payments from his bank account because his monthly premiums had risen slightly in the new financial year. Version Two, the story he told my friend Joe in my presence (typical John, he'd already forgotten Version One), was that his insurance didn't cover arson. I have a feeling V1 was the truth, but sounded too much like negligence on John's part. At any rate, his house was uninsured and he had been threatened with a law suit.

In the end, John was able to sell his scorched parcel of land for just enough to pay his lawyer, his debts and his neighbours, with either four thousand dollars or four thousand pounds (his stories varied) to spare, which he used to return to Cambodia - and Dah. And Dah had given him the solution to his problems: she had leased another premises for a second beauty salon and John had contributed two thousand dollars to the enterprise for equipment. They were to be business partners.

But more tragedy befell the hapless couple! After buying the equipment and moving it into the new shop the owners renaged on her lease and the equipment had been stolen from the vacant premises. Had John witnessed any of this? No. Once again, if a barang was known to be involved it would just make things more complicated and expensive. Dah was handling everything. In the meantime, though, she had scored a job working for a hairdresser in Sihanoukville. Her skills were in such demand that she could make a hundred dollars a day doing hair and nails for her friend's wealthy clientele.

I got John away from Dah long enough to take him to a friend's cafe for a heart-to-heart. It didn't take a seasoned veteran to figure out that Dah was taking him for a ride. I explained to him that she couldn't possibly make that much money as a hairdresser and my friend backed me up. The whole hairdressing and makeup team for his three-day wedding celebration had cost only $300. "But she showed me the cash!" he protested. "It was probably your cash, John," I told him bluntly. It was time for him to know the truth, before he was left completely broke - or worse.

But, incredibly, he still didn't get it. Why would she still be stringing him along now that he was broke? I didn't have the answer to that one yet. But the answer came the following day. He still had money in England, in a CD he didn't want to touch. It was all he had left in the world. If he used it now it would attract a stiff early-withdrawal penalty. At this point in his financial career, the ten thousand pounds plus interest was all he had to look forward to in two years when the account matured was John's entire future and at forty-five years of age it was a little late to be starting over from scratch. There would have to be a damned good reason for him to take it out early - and Dah had found one! Another friend knew all about property in Sihanoukville. She had found a house and land for only $6000 and she had taken him to see it. The owner was desperate to sell. They could buy it and live there and she would support them both with her hairdressing money.

We could not convince John that there was no longer land, much less a land and home for sale in Sihanoukville for $6000. Sixty thousand, yes, but he was a couple of years late for a bargain like that. Something finally must have sunk in, because that same day he had the presence of mind to record a heated telephone call Dah was having in their room . . . to be continued