"I have to go back to Holland every muntz or so to collect my pension," Rudi said. "Dey won't send it to me. Also to see my grandchildren. But always I come back here."
"Bumpity-bump," Miles said, reddening.
"Beer is cheaper in Laos," Rudi said. "So we go dere. Go down the river. Drink beer. Eat sumsing. Ferry nice."
"Pip-pip," Miles said. He was dressed as though for an outing in Brighton with the bowling club, sweating profusely, smoke coming out of his ears and nose. He was a life-of-the-party type who told jokes in funny foreign accents. "Sap-songg!"
He squinted as he twanged the words, straining and pursing his lips. Was this Thai? If so, his wife, or girlfriend, didn't get it. She smiled and twisted her face in embarrassment.
"Sip-bip-bip!"
Now she hid her face in her hands.
But Miles just snorted and puffed his cigarette and said, "Can't beat it. Makes things so much easier. Kap-ko!"
He grimaced in the heat, dabbing at his dripping forehead with a gray hanky. His tight shirt collar was sodden. The Dutchman too was sweating in his T-shirt and black biker jeans. When Miles started up again, tittering and cheeping with his explosive syllables, the three women fled to the shade of a mango tree.
"Take my advice—what did you say your name was?"
"Paul."
"Paul. You won't get anywhere if you don't bip-kai-bip, kap-ko." I had finished my noodles and was waiting for my passport, which Alex, in the shed, soon gave me.
"Is that
"A little bit. But it's rude to say
My last time here I had walked down a path to the Mekong and been ferried over in a small sampan propelled by a farting outboard motor, and my passport had been stamped under a tree on the far bank. Today we were taken in Alex's van across the Friendship Bridge, from Thailand to Laos, over the wide river, and to the border post. There was hardly any traffic.
The decadent Vientiane of Vietnam War days, which had catered to servicemen on furlough, had become a sleepy place, a capital yet hardly a city, more of a backwater than it could have been a hundred years ago. I remembered it as a wide-open town: whores gathered in hotel lobbies who greeted new arrivals by smiling and snatching at them. In Vientiane, the very word "hotel" was a euphemism for a cathouse, and the debauchery in the bars was celebrated throughout Southeast Asia—the live sex shows, the nude dancers, the stark-naked waitresses who managed amazing feats with cigarettes. At the White Rose, the most notorious bar, I saw a drunken man flicking his Zippo and setting fire to a waitress's pubic hair. She slapped herself with one hand and pushed him away with the other, demanded a tip, then moved on to the next table.
Vientiane had not grown any bigger, yet the contrast could not have been greater. The change was a testament to what the Vietnam War had done to Laos. I saw Vientiane then (and described it) as the most corrupt and dissolute place I'd ever traveled to. Diminutive Laotian whores and big whooping American soldiers dominated the place. Drugs were easy to buy, and so was porno. "Anything you want," pedicab drivers said. "What you want, Joe?"
But the riotous Americans who had sexualized the place, turning Vientiane into a fleshpot, had left, and it was now a sleepy town on the banks of the muddy river, famous for its cheap beer, attractive to backpackers. One of the characteristics of backpackers—careful with their money, socially conscious on the whole—is that they have sex with each other and resist the locals. Vientiane's streets were mostly empty, so were its shops, and its bars could not have been more sedate. Just 25-cent beers and $3 hotel rooms, pedestrian-friendly with quiet, hospitable folks, yet strangely colorless.
"Mistah?"
Two Lao girls approached me as I was taking an evening stroll by the river. They were so slender-hipped and grubby they might have been boys. They did not speak English except for one unambiguous verb.
"Where do you live?"
They giggled and tugged my arms and tried to tempt me by pointing to a grove of trees at the riverbank, an obvious haunt of rats and snakes.
They recognized the futility of tempting me and didn't persist. I kept walking. Vientiane still proclaimed itself a capital, yet it was no more than a dusty riverside town, with warm weather and friendly people and a government with obscure intentions. Its glory was its temples, dating from the early nineteenth century, not ancient but built in an ancient style, with bonnet-like triple-pitched roofs, sometimes five or six of them overlapping, and amateurish murals inside, in courtyards with glazed tile walls. Children played outside while their parents were inside, devout in their prostrations, imploring the gold Buddhas with incense sticks and flower petals.
