Entry Wounds. Episode 12: “Are you crazy God damnit? Don't you think it’s a little risky for some R&R?”

56 days late. That’s how late this episode is. 56 days late, hmmm, well on the upside I’m not a female teen. At 56 days late, I’ve probably told the drunken one night stand that I’m late and that he should start working a double shift at Red Rooster to pay support. He’s probably told me to terminate. I’ve probably talked to family planning, but not my own family, and now given my economic status I’ve given up on the idea of a lady in a white coat, and am now contemplating the coat-hanger.
          Ahh, the murder of the innocent unborn; a good jar to your morality to kick start proceedings, insurance that anything that follows probably won’t delve so low, and confusing enough to your cognitive functions to make you forget why we’re discussing this at all.

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Times flows relentlessly and moments come and go, however sometimes it grinds and stutters, in fact sometimes it has more in common with passing a gallstone than a babbling brook. This gallstone came in the form of my parent’s six day visit, but that can wait. In advance of this I must slap myself around the head for my clumsy use of words last episode. On re-reading the episode I noticed how much of an absolute snobby-wanker facet of myself was laid to bare when I said I couldn’t get around to writing personal emails. I also discovered that it isn’t that I don’t like writing emails; on the contrary I do. It’s the steaming hot internet café’s and the glacially slow computers and the dirty keyboards with the grime of 100,000 filthy backpacker fingertips, the keys dark brown around the edges, fading to tan in the centre. Ugh!
Fortunately I’m lucky enough to have friends that won’t let me get away with such pathetic excuses, and reassured me that I was a complete twat for trying to weasel my way out of it. So in conclusion: Fuck me! I can go give myself a battle-mace enema!

In celebration of this revelation, I re-entered the communications revolution with the purchase of a new phone. Although the fact that I had to hold my old phone together with my hands to make it work, was also a factor. Another factor was also the fact that the vibrator was broken (and lets face it, life just aint the same with a faulty vibrator), and perhaps it was the mocking laughs of would-be-muggers and the street urchins who scoffed at the size of my ‘barely-mobile’ Nokia 3 something. I made the switch to Sony Ericsson, a T230. The model name was reminiscent of the Terminator movies but in truth there was another more legitimate reason as to why I bought it. It was the sales lady’s English.   
She was a typical Vietnamese sales girl, that is, an ass you could fit in a tea-cup but a crammed toothy grin with all the order and proportion of a Picasso.

**Phonetically approximated transcript**
“Can I helph you sir?”
-          “Yes I want a new phone.”
“What typhe?”
-          “What do you have?”
“We have Nokia, OlwG, Panashonit, Shamsun, and Sunny-Erec-Shon.”
A smirk tugs at my lips.
      -   “Uh-huh and what do you like?”
“I like Nokia and Sunny-Erec-shons, they are good.”
-          “Hmmm, I’m familiar with Nokia, can you show me any Sunny-Erec-shons?”
She looks startled for a split second and I fear she has cottoned on to my mocking, but quickly I recognise that I have overloaded her language recognition circuits with such complex vocabulary. I forge on.
-          “ I want to see the Sunny-Erec-shons.”
“Oh.. look here.”
-          “Are these all the Erecshons you have?”
“Yes, many good Erecshons, very good! Very cheap!”
-          “Really, well which ones are good?”
“All Erecshons are good!”

Really? All? I reminisce for a moment. What about when I was 13 and all those ‘traveling rogers’ that would form on the school bus. They were torture, they needed no motivation, nor gave any warning. Pointless provocations from my hypothalamus. And what about the time I bounded out of bed to answer a knock at the door, only to greet the Census lady with a raging morning-glory protruding from the fly on my boxers? That wasn’t good by any means, Poor old Irene the septuagenarian from Ascot Vale didn’t deserve that. Upon these musings I took the sale-girls advice with a grain of salt.

-          “How much are these Erec-shons?”
“Erechons cheap!”
No shit.
-          “OK, but what price?”
She reels off a list of six figure numbers and I try to do the exchange rate. After what can possibly be recorded in geological timeframes, my feeble mathematics provides a rough estimate of figures, give or take a decimal point. I find the one in my price range, i.e. the cheapest, and point to it.
“You want this Erecshon?”
-          “Yes”
With a sales pitch like that, who could refuse?
“You want me to put it in box?
-          “Ahh.. well I wanted to play with it first.”
“No battery, no go, you have to charge it first”
Charge it first? This is unlike any Erecshon I’ve heard of, aren’t they by definition, charged?
I relent.
- “OK, then in a box please.”
“OK, tankyou, if you have problem, come here” She says pointing to the floor.
-          “OK, well I’ll try to make it in time. Thankyou goodbye.”

I now have the problem that every time I get a phone call I have to hold my Erecshon to my head, my imagination plagues me. Good thing I didn’t get a Siemens.

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31/05/04       2.00pm         HCMC-International Airport             ‘Closing the Gap’
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          I sit at the HCMC Airport; a backpack and a beer in hand, in the domestic departure lounge. My phone chirps to life in my pocket and a mild female voice proceeds to tell me that my plane will not fly for another two hours. Ugh! Not enough time to head back home, too much time to bare pleasurably. All I have at my disposal are Heinekens a bunch of toothpicks and a selection of Vietnamese magazines that I can’t read. So I sit, and the locals stare at me, and I stare back picking my teeth till the toothpicks stain red.
          I count the minutes, but I don’t count the beers, but I’m sober while sitting. Finally my time comes to board and I stand up. The booze floods my limbs and I suddenly realize I’m legless. I float to the boarding gate and then am led out of it and onto the tarmac, where I have to walk to the plane.
In Vietnam people are unaware, or at least unwilling to adhere to the idea of lining up. So when boarding transport, or lining up at a bank or indeed anywhere, foreigners are always left at the back of the pack, abhorring the lack of decorum.
          On board the plane it’s hectic, none of the locals can reach the overhead compartments without standing on seats, in combination with this no-one waits for anyone else and only have concern for their own affairs. The hostesses stand-by and watch the chaos right itself. I’m drunk, belligerent and unsympathetic, so I get along fine, pushing and shoving. The flight is non-descript, and I’m dehydrated. Two hours pass slowly and we land at the capital, Hanoi International Airport. Chaos erupts again as the doors open. I have a bladder holding back a bunch of beer and the subsequent water I drank to combat the dehydration. For a spectator I must have resembled a Sherman tank, head lowered and bulldozing anything in my path, kicking bags and liberal with elbows. As expected none of the locals saw my actions as impolite.

          I find the toilets and upon exiting I realise the airport is near empty. Just a few young guys (I later found out were a pickpocket team) and staff. Wagga Wagga Airport is busier than this! I must wait another two hours at the airport, so I find the only bar and teach the bartender how to make a ‘Scotch on the rocks’ and I remind myself, you gotta love a country where you can buy Johnny Walker Black for $3.50 in an airport lounge. So one turns into four and then I see them. Their body language broadcasts anxiousness, desperately trying to keep one eye on their luggage, one on their pockets and another on what’s going on around them. They’re my parents and they’re in Vietnam after a 3 week stint in Norway with my Dad’s brothers, sisters, Aunties and Uncles.
Mum’s small and frantic as always, but looks more fragile. Her sudden diagnosis and even more sudden recovery from cancer in March had given her skin a slightly more translucent quality, making her seem even more tenacious. Dad looks small, robust and in calm control of the situation as per usual. I’m rolly-polly drunk by now, and too numb to over think the situation. Hug Mum, shake Dad’s hand, nod, and say ‘Welcome’ and hop into the taxi. It’s 45 minutes from the Airport to the city and my Mum talks relentlessly about the Scando relos, and I’m glad the focus is off me, fearing my drunken tongue might reveal too much. I’m out of practice at living dual lives and weaving webs of misinformation. What do they know? What don’t they know? Shit! I should have pre-empted this!
          We arrive at our hotel, and I cringe. Mum and Dad had a family friend in the travel agency cut them a deal. One night in the Hanoi-Hilton Opera. It was imposing and alien to my senses. The foyer was massive, with shimmering marble floors, and three gargantuan marble pillars rising three stories. Giant chandeliers hung from the ceiling and everything was bordered by gold. My jaw dropped in awe and in unison to the sound of a guy playing a grand piano in the foyer lounge. I’ve been living amongst second and third world squalor for six months, so this sudden opulence created an epic contrast. I immediately felt guilt for myself and loathing for the establishment, my father concurred, and we agreed to find more modest accommodation in the morning.
          We go out to dinner and eat Indian of all things. My mother doesn’t like foods with strong flavours, so she begrudgingly eats her fill. I pace my beers so as to avoid criticism but I’m still drinking at a three to one ratio to my parents. Mum and Dad tell stories of my relatives whom I don’t know. Some fascinating, some not. One of my uncles built his own observatory by hand, 300 km south of the Arctic Circle and spends his evenings star gazing. I found it comforting to know that my geeky eccentricities have a genetic basis. Although, a cause for concern was the fact that dyslexia follows the males in the family every few generation. So all my suspicious as to why it takes me months to remember a phone number, or why I get completely confounded by simple mental arithmetic had validity. This redirection of blame to my DNA was soon replaced by a feeling of helplessness, so there was no net gain to my self-esteem.
          The food made us all tired so we made our way back to our room. Mum and Dad were instantly asleep and this was confirmed by Dad’s guttural and phlegmatic snoring and my mothers thirty minutes later. I lay in my bed and wrapped a pillow around my head, but within ten minutes I’d lost circulation to my arms and had to relent. After two hours of this, I was at my wits end. I took tissues wetted them and stuffed them in my ears. They were mildly successful and I nodded off. Three hours later it’s 5am, and the tissues have fallen out, but thankfully there’s no snoring. Instead I’m woken by the sound of rustling plastic. It’s Mum and she’s fossicking around. I ignore it for some ten to fifteen minutes until I snap and grumble into the morning light; “What are you doing?”
-          “I’m just packing some things.”
“Why are you doing it now?”
-          “I’m just organizing things.”
Impatiently I bark “You don’t have to do it now! Stop it!”
-          “Stop complaining, just go to sleep.”
“I’m trying to! Its 5am stop it!”
She then launches into a lecture about how things must be done and how I complain too much. I sit up and survey the room. There on the floor of the room, my mother has emptied all five suitcases onto the floor, and she is refolding and repacking every item and placing it back into its appropriate plastic zip lock bag. Some cases are repacked several times. She has been doing this for ten minutes and continues to do it until 7.30am.
          At this point  I am transported back in time to the age of 16 my pulse races , my blood pressure soars, my chest tightens and I feel that long-forgotten psychotic anger return, and the reasons why I was so eager to leave home become crystal clear.
Let me state for the record:  Having an obsessive-compulsive mother is the definition of torture. Give me the Gin & Tonic wench any day; at least she always has liquor on hand.

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23/06/04                 Death to Canada
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          Ron the Canadian was a neighbour. Ron the Canadian left because he couldn’t stand the bullshit it takes to get laid in this country. Ron went to China. Ron was well-informed and a dynamo on a trivia team, and he hated Americans. Ron gave me book; Harlot’s Ghost, by Norman Mailer. A mock-biography of a CIA agent with fact and fiction melded as one. Consequently its 1300 pages of tiny print. It took me one and a half months of ‘on and off’ reading to get through it. Then, at 3.40am on a Thursday I came to the last page and the bottom line read: “To be continued”
FUCK CANADIANS!
FUCK NORMAN MAILER!

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02/06/04       Hanoi – HaLong Bay            Oriental Orientation
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          After a night in a $30 dollar a night hotel and my prior purchase of sanity saving ear plugs, we boarded a bus to the city of Haiphong (Nam’s third largest city) the gateway to Ha Long Bay.
          Ha Long Bay is a UNSECO World Heritage Site, where giant limestone pillars rise from the sea.  These pillars are bare on their vertical sides, but sport an ‘afro’ of plants on every horizontal surface. It’s like those paintings on the wall divider at your local Chinese restaurant, but 360º and seemingly endless, over 3000 islands only 1100 named.
          We boarded a 12 person rickshaw and slowly made our way into the labyrinth on a two day cruise. The highlight was a perfect sunset over a singular pillar standing out of the water, with a small, open Buddhst pagoda on top. A second highlight was kayaking into a cave of one of these pillars, only to emerge on the inside where it was open to the sky.
          Pictures tell a thousand words, and it would take at least ten pictures to give you an idea of the expanse of beauty this place has, so I’ll spare you the eye-strain and myself the key tapping and just say, Ha Long Bay……Wow!

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03/06/04       Hanoi            A C0mmunst Canberra
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          Back in the capital, we do some exploring by foot. A task that is immeasurably easier in comparison to HCMC because the hot summer air isn’t laden with energy sapping humidity. Hanoi is a quieter and more docile city, and feels more like a large town than a city, having only one or two high-rises visible from the city centre. We find the Temple of Literature, a sprawling ancient construction. It somehow avoided all the bombs in the American-Vietnam war, and the revolt against the French colonialists prior, and the Chinese invasions centuries before that. In fact this C0nfusan centre of learning has stood since 1066, and at its time was a hallmark of human cultural achievement. At the same time whitey was crusading across the middle-east and about to enter the dark ages, here however illuminated spiritual scholars were trying to perfect peace. Interestingly this library does not contain books. Instead it has rows of tombstone like rock pillars. The faces of these structures are finely engraved with text. The brilliant simplicity of this design allowed anyone to make a copy of any text by simply overlaying it with paper and rubbing charcoal over the face, as one man was, while we were there. He was using a text that had been used countless times before, for 938 years. Quite a mental spin out for my temporal perspective, coming from a culture with only 217 years of history. ( I’m aware that Australia has a history of over 60,000 years, but I can’t claim to have cultural links to Aboriginal Australia, I’m just another boat person.)
          Afterwards we trundled down alleyways and along narrow streets. We had a list of things to do but achieved nothing as a consequence of my mother entering every shop with a painting for sale. She bought in total one small cloth painting and a greeting card.
          One last night in Hanoi was uneventful but civil, the next day we made a 40 minute taxi ride to the airport and my mother berated me with a relentless “what are you doing with out life?”, “When are you going to get a real job?” interrogation. Fortunately my plane seat was in a different side of the plane and from my window I saw an amazing sight.  The entire coastline of Vietnam from Hanoi to HCMC from 20,000 feet. The royal blue South China Sea, glistening in the sun. A golden hairline of beach, intermittently broken by townships and behind it, dark green forests, steaming away in the tropical heat generating giant cumulonimbus pillars that towered well above our altitude.
 I again fell in love with Nam and my foul mood dissolved.

          The plane lands and the door opens; Thwack! Saigon air….. it’s thick and chunky, you could carve it. The familiar stream of sweat instantly making its way down my back confirms that I’m back in my town. I dump Mum and Dad in the same hooker hotel I offered Julez, and return to my place. An evening out in the city, and the following day, a taxi to the Cu Chi tunnels.  

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05/06/04       Chu Chi Tunnels        Bombs, Blood, Mud and Murder.
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          At this point we’re going to attempt some willing suspension of disbelief. Take all the most chaotic images of war you have (think Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Band of Brothers, and Forrest Gump) and multiply them by a factor of ten. Now imagine this, you and your platoon of allied forced are battling your way though thick steamy rainforest in Southern Nam. Enemies seemingly materialise then vanish around you, picking off your partners at a rapid pace. You follow some footprints, but they too vanish into the leaf litter. Brushing the leaves aside you find a small hatch, twelve by six inches in diameter. Opening it with trepidation you discover a tunnel. Your platoon inspects the hole, but size prevents anyone from entering it armed. It also happens that you are the smallest, so you strip down to pants and shirt, even your general issue boots must be shed. Entering head first you carry your only viable weapon, a hunting knife, between your teeth. It pitch black dark and the hole is too small to crawl in, instead you must wriggle on your belly in the dark, listening, smelling and feeling your way.
          You have now entered the Cu Chi tunnels, a rabbit warren of over 200 km of interconnected tunnels, filled with Vietnamese soldiers, explosives and booby traps.
In the darkness your ears prick to the muffled noises of talking and activity, but their position isn’t revealed, rather it’s obscured. As you progress you hear the more distinct and closer sounds of movement. Lying dead still this sound closes to within a metre of you. There is no escape from here, and making the first strike could be crucial, so taking your hunting knife in your hand, you make an awkward and swift strike into the darkness. Its strikes nothing, but the source of the other sounds falls silent. Seconds later the air is cut by another invisible knife in retaliation. As you are lying on your stomach, head first, arms out-stretched in front of you, moving backwards is almost impossible. Given your confines, you and your opponent can strike using only the lower arm, and so that is how the fight ensues. In a one foot, by half foot hole, face to face, in the pitch black, a knife fight to the death. After a minute of frantic slashes you strike lucky and take the opportunity to close the kill, but the only body parts on offer are the arms and the face, so doing what you must, you thrust repeatedly forward, stabbing into where you estimate the face to be.
          Finally his arms stop flailing and he is quiet. You attempt to push the body but its mass is limp and lead-like. So retreat you must. Several metres back you feel the entrance to another tunnel and shuffling into position, you enter. Edging your way into this branch of the tunnel you feel wood amongst the dirt. But by then it’s too late and you’ve passed over the half way point. The wooden planks are suspended over a pit, one half supported, one half not, and mounted in the middle on a swivel bar. As the wood plank rapidly descends, you begin to slide, increasing in speed and angle, falling face first into the dark. The bed of bamboo stakes pierce your flesh easily, sliding through your entire torso in some cases. Others have slices and stabbed your face, and for the next few minutes you wait in anxious agony as the blood drains from your body, and the inevitable cold comes.

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06/06/04       12pm  HCMC           Umbilical Cord Jettison
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          My parent’s final day in HCMC is short and rain soaked, so at 11am I stuff them into a taxi and in an afternoon monsoonal downpour, wave them goodbye and developed a unholy hunger for debauchery.
          B is arriving in a couple of weeks, but I can’t wait.

 
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16/06/04                 HCMC Fuck Karaoke!
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For the record, may I state: Fuck Karaoke!

          It’s the fourth time I’ve accepted the invitation despite the last three times I’ve exited the booth, hating life.               I’m trying to be open minded.
Corbet the Irishman and his posse convinced me this time, and despite my protests an hour later I’m in a booth and they’re saying to me “Go on, choose a song.”
          I open the booklet with a sense of anticipation, 30 something pages later and a sense of dread emerges within me.
No! to Richard Marxx
No! to The BeeGees
No! to Micheal Bolton
No! to Lynard Skynard
No No No! The Eagles, Hotel California can go and fornicate itself with a white hot iron poker!
Don’t spit on Sinatra’s grave with your screaming, you banshee! You’ve never been to New York, New York!

“Just let go….. get into it.”
-          “But they’re shit songs, and the electronic keyboard backing robs any half decent song of any of its soul.”
“It doesn’t matter how it sounds.”
-          “It’s music! If how it sounds doesn’t matter, then what the fuck does?
“It’s about letting go.”
-          “Let go! Honey, I’m barely hanging on, letting go isn’t a problem!”
Has it ever occurred to you that I don’t need to release whatever it is that you do, and that if I do, I do it in a form which doesn’t constitute noise pollution.
-          “Understand this…. You can’t sing. You sound shit! That m’dear in combination with cheese-ball love ballads is cancer to my fucking mind!”

I finally settle on Marvin Gaye – ‘Let’s get it on’ and Sly and the Family Stone – ‘It’s a family affair’ to break from the rock ballads (and a version of ‘Old MacDonald had a Farm’… what the?), but when it comes on there’s no soothing bass lines, it’s just a plastic sounding synthesizer melody. I now begin to hate life.

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21/06/04                 HCMC I’m in Bat Country.
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          It’s a Monday, and it’s my birthday. I worked from 1.30 till 9.30pm and spent half an hour trying to use a towel to catch a bat doing frantic laps of my room. I repeat the process two hours later.

 
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22/06/04                 HCMC           B-Day is better than B’day.
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Back at HCMC airport, domestic terminal, I purchase 3 Heinekens and wait patiently. I finish the first then eye off the other two. At that point I’m distracted by a smile. It may sound strange, but in Nam smiles on adults are rare (it’s a saving face thing). Anyway this smile is big and bright and familiar. It is of course B, bronzed and brown from a few days at Ha Long Bay. Up until this point B has continually updated me on her progress referring to ‘we’. This I assumed meant she had a traveling partner, but seeing her alone raises my greatest suspicion; she has developed a split personality. So between me and her, it’ll be a full taxi. Suddenly her split personality materializes and is carrying all the luggage. Wow! I wish I could get mine to do that! All I can manage from mine is suburban hedge-burning. It introduces itself as Justine, and predictably we get along fine from that instant onwards. This was also facilitated by Justine’s dislike of beer, thus I inherited her Heineken. The moral: ‘Good things come to those who wait.’

          Eager to offer them the ‘hooker hotel’ they alert me to the fact that this won’t be necessary as they have reservations at The Majestic. Entering the foyer I quickly realise that this is a hooker free venue. Too clean, spacious and well … majestic, for whores. Marble floors, chandeliers, men in suits, concierges with fancy fez inspired hats, and us three in sweat laden clothes, backpacks and beers in hand. Did someone say ‘yobbo’?
          After finding the majestic room, we decide on a dip in the magestic pool. Showing a similar disregard for the majestic nature of the hotel, I strip down to my ‘Winnie the Pooh’ boxer shorts. And I suddenly realize, I’ve had these for far too long, especially considering I don’t know how I acquired them. I hate Winnie the Pooh, that wimp. I’m sure behind the scenes he’s a little S&M submissive doughboy gimp. “Thankyou Piglet, can I have some more.”
“I’ll be your honey pot Tigger.”

After sundown we roam the streets and find the Ben Thanh market and eat our fill of delicious foods.  Nearby in ‘shoe street’ we purchase some local produce; slave labour sneakers (Puma, Adidas, Nike) the same as those in stores across the world, just one tenth the price.

I’m sporadically giggling like a school girl because at last I get to release all the local currency jokes I’ve been holding back since arriving.
B and Justine lead the way;
“Do you take dong?”
“Can I have some dong?”
“Do you want some dong?”
“Nah…. I’ve got plenty of dong?”
“Shit. That’s a lot of dong.”
“Jeeze you just think you can go around flashing ya dong and everyone will do whatever you want, don’t you.”
“Everyone wants dong.”
“Hey, lay some dong on me.”
“You can never have too much dong.”
“You blew all that dong!”
“Yeah, I blew all my dong, I need more dong!”

Next day B and J are on a plane to Nam’s coastal resort Mecca, Nha Trang, and I resume my barely working week.

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25/06/04       HCMC           I-BOX Bar
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          Friday arrives and I’m eager to finally get drunk for a justifiable reason; my birthday. In a funky out of the way bar that doubles as a cluttered, kitsch, designer, furniture, gallery we relax on leopard skin couches and crushed velvet cushions. I order bottles of Australian and Chilean Red with haste and do my best to not screw up the introductions. Within an hour about twenty people have arrived and I’ve eaten half of a devastatingly strong mull cookie that I was advised to eat in quarters. At this point B alerts me to the fact that there are only four guys amongst this group of twenty. Obviously my sub-conscious played a part in deciding who to invite, and a lack of competition was a priority. Its short sightedness was evident in the fact that every girl there was taken. No loss, it now means I can dedicate my time to drinking this delicious red wine, and mustering the strength to navigate this deranged cloak of canniboid confusion.

          It’s 5am, I’m in a bar called ‘Lost in Saigon’ drinking a Vodka-Red Bull, the Red Bull provides me with no energy and the vodka robs me of any remaining motor coordination.  
          Swaying erratically near the dance floor, I fumble around in a time-lapse vision groping into my top pocket. Too pissed for uni-digit dexterity, I retrieve a fistful of joints I’ve somehow appropriated throughout the night, and the second of two mull cookies. I light a j, eat half a cookie, leave my half-empty Vodka-Red bull on a step or something and start drinking from a half-full beer on the table next to me, which may also be one of mine. I turn to the two Danes, and the Australian/New Guinean who made it this far with me, and attempt to raise my glass. It has of course vanished and is now probably sitting on a toilet cistern by now. I grab an icey glass from the nearest table, and garble a cheers and swig….mmm… Gin and Tonic, good choice.
          At that point, I realise I’m over being ‘lost in Saigon’ and would like to find my way home. Evidently I did.

Bouncing back from the evening with remarkable vigor, I join a bunch of Swedes for an afternoon lunch. They’re excited about their Euro-cup soccer game occurring later that evening. They try hard to convince me that my surname ensures I too must invest pride in the Swedish team.
At 5 pm we start drinking schnapps. We eat a lot of cheese. We drink more Vodka, and less schnapps. Several hours later I become aware that for the last half hour the schnapps has been an unhappy housemate for the vodka. I broach the issue of soccer. “When is the game starting?”
          - “1:45am” They reply in unison. I glance at my watch, but the hands seem to be swaying in disagreement on the time.  

The game happened, I was in front of the TV, but I didn’t see any of it. Sweden lost. I don’t care.

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28/06/04                 HCMC          
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B and Justine return from the Mekong, and I finally get my chance to book them into the ‘hooker hotel’. So on a Monday night, our last night together, we sip beers in the most tragic bar available, a.k.a. Guns’n’Roses.  We of course demand Gunners anthems from the DJ and he is wholly despondent to us. Instead he broadcasts an aura of loathing and resentment for that is living and plays R&B instead.
I leave them at midnight and join them again in the morning. They look sharp considering their 4am finish, and yet again B seems another shade browner.
A hug and a kiss, and a wave goodbye and I’m left with that familiar pang of homesickness, and buoyed by mateship.

Later that day I get a phone call from Seanny; “I’m coming over.”

Let the show roll on.

Yours unruly,
MentalOxide

~
Willard: Saigon, shit, I'm still only in Saigon. Every time I think I'm gonna wake up back in the jungle. Apocalypse Now
~