Chapter 27 – Fap & The Norwegians
When the bus came to a stop on one of the two nights I spent on the thirty-five hour nightmare of a trip from Hanoi, Vietnam, to Luang Prabang, Laos, not taking into consideration the welfare of those around me, for dinner I selfishly decided to consume a Doner kebab I’d bought off some random-ass street vendor. And when all the other passengers had been getting back on the bus, I too resumed my seat at the very front just behind the driver and fell right asleep.
Sometime in the middle of the night, I was awoken by a sharp pain in my stomach that’d no doubt been caused by that greasy-ass meat sandwich I consumed. Not willing to hold in my gas for the sake of those around me, I pushed out as many farts as I could to ease the building pressure in my gut. Whereas none of the passengers in the vicinity had remained awake to smell these vile productions, about ten seconds after each fart I’d let out, the bus driver would suddenly start coughing, pull his shirt over his face then temporarily open the door as well as the window next to him to get a cross breeze going that would suck the hot stinky fart cloud out into the jungle. When his breathing space had been satisfactorily purified, he’d shut the door and the window until the next time I put one in the air whereupon he’d repeat the process.
On my first afternoon in Luang Prabang, I went wandering down around an area where there’d been a bunch of restaurants along the poo-brown waters of the Mekong River on which skinny shirtless local dudes had been transporting bundles of crops by means of homemade bamboo rafts. At one of these restaurants, seated at a table on an outdoor patio had been three Norwegian fellows who not only had been on the bus with me when I’d been stinking it up with farts, but also occupied beds in the same dorm at the same hostel as me. As they had at every stop on that thirty-five hour bus trip, they’d been chain-smoking cigarettes as they pounded some early afternoon beers. I approached them to see what was up.
Following a brief chat about our respective agendas for the rest of the day, I made plans to meet them back at the hostel around dinnertime whereupon we’d chow some chow and drink some drinks. Before parting ways to go do my own thing, however, one of them offered me a caveat.
“Do you know how every bar you go to, it’s always easy to spot the drunkest guys at the place?”
“Yeah.”
“The three of us are always those guys.”
“Great,” I laughed. “I happen to be one of those guys myself. So, we should get along just fine.”
After visiting a few temples, going for a boat ride in the Mekong and checking out a few art shops, I returned to the hostel around six to take a shower and get ready for the evening. After reconvening with the dudes, we took a walk through a night market and then ended up at some bar called Utopia that’d been recommended to us by hostel employees.
From what I remember, Utopia was an open-air establishment that’d been covered by a large bamboo pavilion suspended about fifteen feet over a trendy interior that – in addition to several standard-looking tables – offered a bunch of lounge chairs and bean bags for customers to just lay around on. When we got there around eight o’clock, hardly anyone else was there. Nevertheless, we assumed a table and got the evening started by doing what we do best.
While sippin’ drinks and pickin’ at appetizers, I learned the names of the three guys had been Martin, Amatz and Fap.
“Fap?” I asked of the six-foot-four-inch tree of a man. “What kinda name is that? You masturbate a lot or somethin’?”
As they all appeared confused by my seemingly unwarranted mention of auto-eroticism, I felt compelled to elaborate.
“Ah, I can see none of you know what the fuck I’m talkin’ about here. In America, ‘fapping’ is synonymous with jerking off. I thought since your English is really good that you knew what fapping was and that maybe Fap used to get caught jerking off a lot when he was a kid or something and that’s why people call him Fap.”
“No, no,” said Martin who had long blonde hair and a hilarious handlebar mustache, “when Fap gets horny, Fap doesn’t masturbate. Fap just finds himself prostitutes. Isn’t that right Fap?”
Fap just sat back and smiled.
“A couple weeks ago, the three of us were up in southern China,” Martin said, looking back at me. “We spent all night at a bar and Amatz and I noticed that Fap had disappeared on us. And none of us have phones or anything so we had no way of contacting him or him contacting us. Well, it turns out he left with a pair of hookers and was having sex with both of them in the back of a taxi while driving around the city.”
“What? And the driver didn’t care?”
“Apparently not. It seems that westerners can get away with pretty much anything in these countries.”
“That shit’s ridiculous,” I said to Fap. “But you’re a pretty big dude, right. And boning in the backseat of a car is hard enough as it is with two normal-sized people. Like, how’d you pull that shit off? What were the logistics of this operation?”
“Fap,” Martin said, “tell him how you did it.”
“Well,” Fap began, “I just told them to both bend over in doggy style position, each leaning out one of the windows with me in the middle. And I’d go like this,” he mimed a serious of thrusts and pumps in one direction, “and then I’d switch it over to the other girl and do her like this,” he started pumping in the opposite direction. “And then I’d switch back and forth until I was done.”
“Shit man, that’s fuckin’ legendary. A buddy from my neighborhood used to tell everyone that when he was on an airplane he’d once seen Mark Grace – this professional baseball player – bend a stewardess over the snack cart and fuck her in the ass before turning around and boning a second one without even wiping his dick off. But, I mean, that was just a made-up bullshit story. And this…I don’t know, man. This shit’s fuckin’ special. Really. Congratulations on your accomplishment.”
“Yeah, it’s good,” Martin agreed, “but that’s not the end of the story. Tell him what happened next.”
“After sex with the girls, I had the driver drop me back off at the guesthouse where I was staying. It was a two-story place with a roof that seemed to be made out of bamboo. It was kind of like the roof here at this bar. And I had no idea what time it was but the other guys weren’t back yet and they had the key so I couldn’t get in the room. But I was tired after all that fucking and wanted to go to bed. So I decided to climb up the wall with the gutter to the roof so I could hop down onto our balcony and get into our room.
“After successfully climbing onto the roof, I started crawling along the bamboo towards the top to get over to the other side. This is when I started to hear some creaking noises and I could feel it sinking inward beneath my body weight. Right there I froze. I tried to keep very still, hoping it would stop and I could continue on my way but the fucking roof ended up collapsing and I fell straight down into the guesthouse and landed about halfway up a flight of stairs leading to the second floor.”
“Jesus! Were you fucked up at all? Did you get hurt?”
“Yeah, yeah,” he nodded. “I broke several ribs from landing on the stairs like that.”
“Fuck. Did you hafta go to the hospital?”
“No, I didn’t go to the hospital.”
“What? So they’re still broken?”
“Oh yeah,” he added then lifted up his shirt to show me a massive black and blue welt on the side of his torso, “still very broken.”
“And you just keep partying?”
He nodded.
“You’re a madman,” I said. “So what happened after you fell?”
“Well, there was then a massive hole in the roof and a great big mess everywhere that I was lying in the middle of. And the woman from the front desk comes running over to see if I’m okay and it was a big ordeal and I had to give them some money for the damage and I don’t think I’ll be trying to get back in my hotel room that way in the future.”
As the night went on, Utopia became more and more crowded while we sat there getting more and more wasted. Right around the time the bar closed – I believe it was at eleven because Luang Prabang shuts down ridiculously early – as prophesized, the four of us were hands-down the drunkest guys at the bar.
While staggering outta the place, some other travelers informed us that the only other drinking establishment open any later had been a bowling alley on the outskirts of town which we unanimously decided to go check out. On the walk over there, we smoked a joint that we bought from some shady rickshaw driver we met in an alley earlier on our way to Utopia. The weed pretty much finished me off and, aside from getting in a fight with some Australian guy who was offended when I called him a “bogan” – bogan being the term they use Down Under to describe dim-witted redneck retards – I remember very little of the whole bowling alley experience and blacked out the rest of the night.
Since Luang Prabang is a tourist town, they have no shortage of stalls selling homemade handicrafts of all different sorts – wood, metal, other shit. And when I was on autopilot mode sometime in the early morning, I guess I wandered into some random thatch-roof Laotian home where some of those metallic handicrafts are produced. I arrived at this conclusion because, when I emerged from said blackout, I’d been standing next to and stirring a cauldron filled with molten metal which sat atop a blazing hot fire, surrounded by several local guys and women who’d been hard at work just as the sun began to rise.
When I became coherent enough to understand how dangerous what I’d been doing had really been and that I easily could’ve suffered a Johnny Tremain style, hand-mutilating accident, I stepped away from the pot of liquid metal, walked out of the home, found my way back to the hostel and passed the fuck out. I awoke around three the following afternoon, lying face down on the tile floor next to my bed. By that time, Fap and the Norwegians had already checked out. I never got a chance to ask them their version of what’d happened the evening previous.