HAPPY PIZZA AND MACHINE GUNS:  THE $600 VISA RUN

January, 1999

The world was about to end.  I had to get ready.

After my escape from New York, I took a backpacking holiday to Europe.  Former Teacher Q and I were set to meet up in Turkey and go to Israel and Egypt together.  He got sidelined in Amsterdam, however, and knowing he had plenty of drug abuse to get out of his system before he would meet me, I decided to give in to my sudden inclination to return to Thailand.

I spent a week in Bangkok, where I celebrated Halloween by getting drunk with my former colleagues and getting a tattoo of a dragon on my left arm.  Then I spent three weeks on the beach in Ko Samui relaxing during the day and living it up at night. 

I made one horrible discovery -- the entire coral reef system around Ko Samui was more or less dead.  All the coral was bleached and crumbling, covered with seaweeds and grass.  I'd first visited Samui in 1994. I don't know how much time I spent there total between 1994 and 1998 -- maybe 9 or 10 months.  I spent hours on end snorkeling peacefully on the reef, delirious with the colors and textures. 

And now, like so many things, it was fucked.  Finished.  They said it was because the water temperature had gone up, but I suspected the huge drainage canal built for wastewater from the ever multiplying hotels probably had something to do with it.

For some reason that decided me.  I had to see the world before it was completely ruined.  So what if I was approaching thirty?  There will be time for being settled in the grave!  (To misquote Ben Franklin.)  I decided not to return to that shithole New York. 

So I went back to Turkey, met up with English Teacher Q, and we explored Israel and Egypt.   I somewhat regretfully returned to America for Christmas with my family.  The first thing I did when I got back was get on the Internet and find a one-way ticket to Bangkok on January 15.

So there I was, back in the Big Sleazy.

I was overjoyed. 

The old gang was happy to see me.  Things had changed in Thailand -- the currency had collapsed, losing nearly half its value, and the country owed zillions of dollars to the IMF.  The school had contracted a bit -- classes were smaller -- and the students seemed to be more motivated now that the bubble had popped and they actually needed English to get jobs.  The guys rarely ventured down to the go-go bars anymore.  Partly they couldn't afford it, partly they were just tired of it.  The city was a lot cleaner, thanks to strict policing of anti-littering ordinances.

Nonetheless, the alcohol and the stories still flowed around the tables of the outdoor beer bars in the evening.  I had more fun in my first two weeks back in Bangkok than in an entire year in New York.

I was offered a job -- the school only hired teachers part-time now, at about $6 an hour.  I'd only gotten a one-month tourist visa on arrival at the airport however -- I needed to get a three-month one.  That meant a Visa Run.

Visa-running was an old Bangkok tradition for most foreign workers.  At that time the most popular place was Penang, in Malaysia.  It was about a 17-hour train ride each way.  Any number of store-front travel agencies offered the service -- you'd arrive, give them your passport, go get drunk on Tiger Beer, pick it up the next day, and then get back on the train in the evening and get back to Bangkok.  You tended to see the same people again and again -- your visa-run drinking buddies.   

It wasn't an unpleasant journey, particularly, though it got a bit tedious repeated many times.  I'd done it about five times, I think, and I decided to do something different. 

I decided to hit Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Anybody that tells you that Bangkok is a sleazy, dirty, immoral shithole has never been to Phnom Penh.  Phnom Penh's main tourist attractions include a pyramid of human skulls left as a memorial to the many victims of the Khmer Rouge, a school that was used as a concentration camp by the Khmer Rouge, and a museum offering excruciating details of the tortures and massacres committed by the Khmer Rouge.

Apart from this cheeful backdrop, in 1999 the city had a few other interesting offerings.  There was a restaurant that served marijuana pizza, and a bar that offered free pot on big silver trays.  There were several shooting ranges where you could fire machine guns and rocket launchers.  And of course, the prostitute villages where you could get hookers for as little as three dollars.

I spent three days there.  I flew in from Bangkok on a one-way ticket.

I spent $50 at the shooting range -- I fired an M-60 machine gun, an AK-47, a Chinese 9mm pistol, and finally an M-79 grenade launcher.  That was a treat, the M-79.  Like firing a BB gun -- the gentlest of "plops" when you pull the trigger -- but then suddenly a huge explosion hundreds of yards away.

I spent about $6 at Happy Pizza.  I'd ordered the pizza "a little happy" but if that was a little happy, I'd hate to see a very happy pizza.  I staggered across the filthy moped-clogged streets back to my guest house, reeling, stoned out of my mind, under a purple and orange sunset.  At one point I found myself lying on the ground in a small park without really realizing how I got there.  I finally made it back, got into bed and lay inert for around eleven hours.

I spent about $10 at a prostitute city.  I'd hired a young guy on a moped to take me to see some different tourist attractions around the city, and then he suggested we go to one of the prostitute villages.  I just kind of wanted to see it.  The wooden shacks were all tightly grouped together underneath a huge billboard, in English and Khmer and Thai and Chinese, reminding all visitors to have fun, but use condoms.

The guy took me into a shack where I was suddenly surrounded by squawking young women.  None of them were attractive, they were all lumpy young farm girls. I don't know how old they were -- one would like to assume they were 18, at least they all claimed to be. They were all dressed in jeans and t-shirts, nothing glamorous.   I drank a couple of beers with my moped driver and finally for appearances sake took a girl into her room. She was a little less lumpy than the others, but nothing much to crow about.

The room was tiny.  She had some pictures of South-East Asian pop singers on the walls, and I think maybe the Backstreet Boys or somebody like that.  She didn't speak any English.  She undressed, and I found I had not the slightest urge to have sex with her.  We lay together for a while, and after some prefunctory stroking, I just gave her $8 and thanked her.  She smiled radiantly.   

My moped driver complimented me on my "power" when I went back to the central room.  "When I go woman, only two minutes maybe."  We drank another beer together.

If there's anyplace I've ever seen that made me want to have sex LESS than Phnom Penh, Cambodia, I can't recall it. Maybe a public toilet during Mardi Gras in New Orleans. HERE is the place where you saw the pre-teen girls standing outside of shacks damn near in the middle of Phnom Penh offering blow jobs for $2. THIS was the scuzzy Asian sexslave hellhole I'd always heard legends about. I wouldn't even want to speculate on the ages of some of the hookers I saw in Phnom Penh -- fucking young.