All Terrain Thinking

A Compendium of things I think are Important

Wonderful strange stories from around the world

Jungle Fever

Like many others, I have traveled to seek the rare, the remarkable, and the unrepeatable. My only rule is to avoid going to countries which have had a recent name change. If you hadn't already noticed, Thailand is practically surrounded by them.

Yet here in this enclave of safety, there is the Thailand we want, the Thailand we get, and the Thailand that is. One never really knows quite where one is in this labyrinth of realities, as the one thing reality never is-is, well, realistic.

I woke up very early the other day because Pol Pot, my dog, needed to pee and nibble flesh. I had one leg in my jeans and the other in his mouth when the phone rang.

A clipped English accent said, " You look tired."

I knew that voice. It was the voice that had once sent a desperate letter begging me to place a message in a personal column in Bangkok. It had read: "Drunken, insincere extrovert who flies light aircraft, seeks unconventional, tattooed woman with a good body and a sick mind for GIN QUAFFING, passion, and ironing. To share walks, talks, cuddles, and eventually perhaps, a duvet. Own school uniform would help."

I had faxed him immediately with a curt, " No way. Suffer."

It was Hugh and he was back. Sometimes you don't have to travel at all for the unbelievable to come to you.

He wasn't drunk when he arrived at my place later, he was marinated-and crossed the room like a frog on amphetamines; chatting, bulbous, hopping, and quite mad. I was so pleased to see him. He settled into a large chair and gurgled his gin contentedly. He snoozed, he doodled, and laughed out loud at nothing. He reminded me of me.

What had he been doing the last few years? He remembered being caught in a fierce storm and spending the night lip reading The Muppets on Mongolian TV. He had been "up north" in a country where heroin had raised its seductive and dangerous head. He had spent time in India, "a country saturated in prayer," and in the Himalayas, where, "It was so cold you could hear the monasteries sigh with devotion." He had even been in Turkey, where he had taught young men to yoke Armenian tigers with an exhaust pipe.

Then he sheepishly admitted that he'd actually been in town for four days before contacting me. He'd arrived on a Buddhist holiday. The bars were closed. Undeterred, he had roamed the city and found a drink down a dubious alley in a notorious neighborhood- and hours later woke up in a jungle. And that was just the beginning.

He came to with his a head lodged in the divine fulcrum of a female lap, and its owner was drip-feeding him Sang Thip whiskey through a straw. He had glanced down and discovered his toenails were being cut by an entirely different women. And where were those damn drums coming from…?

Then he suddenly asked me, "Do you remember the famous scene in Apocalypse Now when Marlon Brando was staggering around in that Khmer temple, slapping his head and muttering, "The horror, the horror?"

Sure."

"I've always had a problem with it. I mean Kurtz and Conrad never actually said what the horror was. I always thought that Brando had inadvertently caught sight of himself in the mirror."

He got up, waddled to the door, gave me a wonderful smile, and said, "Wait till you see my girlfriend."

They came back that night. She was a troubled vision in lipstick with a face like crumpled linen, and a hairdo that had once wrecked a ceiling fan.

Oh well, you can't make appointments with emotion. I thought they were rather well suited; lost in a wet fog of mutual incomprehension.

"She speaks English. Say something darling," he encouraged her.

She hesitated and said, " You can reach me on my mobile."

And that was it. The following silence was so deafening you could have heard a dog bark in Burma.

Hugh beamed with pride and said, "She knows the word for wealth in several languages but can't pronounce it in any of them. We're working on it."

Then she asked me how my girlfriend was.

"She lives in two worlds. She eats fried locusts for breakfast and is using my computer by noon. Sometimes we drive to a national park. To me, it's a sanctuary of nature. To her, it's a forest brimming with edible wildlife. If we do happen to glimpse a rare animal, I gaze at it in wonder and awe. She points at it and yells, " EAT!!"

"She sounds wonderful. Where did you meet her?"

"In a jungle."

We went out to a restaurant, and after an evening of calm and rather expensive enjoyment, Hugh turned to me over his third brandy and said,

"Do you know what pataphysics means?'

I didn't.

"It is the science of imagining solutions."

"That's a perfect description of this city."

"I thought so too. Perhaps we could rename it Patakok."

Maybe, but I think he should ask the owners first.

By Roger Beaumont

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