America's Finest Ambassador Chapter 37 – A Rude Awakening

Chapter 37 – A Rude Awakening

Following the night out in Bangkok with Schmit and the O’Shaughnessy’s, every part of me felt like it’d just been steamrolled – like my body was on the verge of a total breakdown. I was shaking, sweating, throwing up and had had liquid shit blasting out my ass like a goddam volcano.

Despite my passive pleas not to, my three friends decided that a Pizza Hut brunch was the best way to start our day. With the exception of when I was under the age of ten and too naive to recognize I’d been being served the culinary equivalent of dog shit, I’ve always hated Pizza Hut. Not only does it taste like a “three decker sauerkraut and toadstool sandwich with arsenic sauce,” but my body rejects it every time. Nevertheless, I was feeling too shitty that morning to split from the group and come up with my own meal itinerary.

I forget the exact names of the foul dishes I’d put into my body, but I know I’d crushed a whole bunch of pasta in addition to a large helping of some imitation pizza bullshit. As soon as we finished stuffing our faces and had been walking out the front door of the establishment, I could feel the contents of my alcoholically abused crap factory beginning to rumble around. It was at that point I knew there was no stopping the cookies that sat on the verge of being tossed.

To spare them of the vile display, I galloped ahead of my homies and scurried down the largest flight of obese-person-repelling stairs I’d ever seen leading into a fast food restaurant. Once I’d gotten down to the sidewalk, I collapsed to my knees and began exorcising my demons. It was a busy time of day in a busy part of town and there was virtually nothing I could do to conceal the stomachful of food coming up my throat and out of my mouth in a dry solid log due to lack of hydration. Looking as if I were taking a red-colored shit out my face, shoppers, businessmen, tourists and ladyboys alike had all been repulsed while my buddies stood nearby and laughed at my expense. Although that would be far from the last time I’d barf on the trip, that was the last time I’d do so in front of a trio consisting of Tim, Kathleen and Schmit.

That afternoon, a Saturday, Kathleen caught a flight back to America to resume her real life responsibilities. In spite of how messed up I’d been feeling, Tim and I spent the night getting shithoused with Schmit in Bangkok before flying back to Singapore the following morning in anticipation of the upcoming workweek. During said workweek, while Osh slaved away in the office and Schmit had been imparting his wisdom unto Thai college students, my plan had been to just hang out in Singapore, take it easy and recover – with no intake of alcohol whatsoever – for the upcoming weekend. This did not happen and I instead ended up sitting by the pool every day drinking a whole mess of Tiger beers and not allowing my body to get any of the much-needed rest that it required.

That Thursday night I hopped on a plane to Koh Samui, Thailand, in anticipation of one of the island’s world-renowned Full Moon Parties that was to occur on Saturday. Flights from Singapore to Koh Samui only depart once daily at around eight in the evening. Since Tim’d had work the next day, he could not join me on the Thursday night flight and said he’d meet me late on Friday at the hostel I’d booked. Schmit had also planned on joining us for the festivities but would only arrive Friday morning after taking an overnight bus from Bangkok on Thursday evening followed by a crack-of-dawn ferry from the mainland to Koh Samui. Whether or not “Teacha Brian” cared to join me after living out his nightmarish travel itinerary, in my mind I’d had plans of utilizing that glorious Friday morning on the island paradise to go scuba diving or to do some exploring. As it happens, I’d soon find out that the bottle’d had other plans for me.

Towards the end of a normal-ass ninety minute plane ride, the Thai girl who’d been sitting next to me pulled out a pen and began filling out her customs slip. Since I hadn’t been equipped with a pen of my own, I waited until she was finished then asked to borrow hers. After formally declaring that I had nothing to declare, I returned the writing utensil to its rightful owner with whom I’d ended up holding a conversation that lasted from fifteen minutes before landing, through immigration and all the way up to baggage claim. During this time she told me she’d been living in Australia for the past seven months and was in Koh Samui to visit her sister who’d just had a baby. After asking at which hostel I’d made reservations, she suggested we split a cab because both our destinations had been near an area called Chaweng Beach. She was young, she was cute and she spoke pretty good English. I found no reason not to join her.

Following a short ride on what seemed to be the island’s main road, we arrived at the Thai girl’s destination.

“If you like, you can come meet me tonight at a bar called Green Mango,” she suggested.

“Oh yeah? Where’s that at?”

“It’s just down the road a bit. Would you like to have a few drinks?”

“Possibly. What’s your plan?”

“I take a shower then go,” she said then stepped out of the cab. “I be wearing jeans. You come find me. We drink and dance, okay?”

“Yeah, okay. Maybe I’ll see ya there.”

The cab dropped me off at a place I’d booked called Penzy Guesthouse on Soi Alibaba – a location I’ll never forget. Upon checking in I was offered the option of taking complimentary DVDs up to my room. The collection was kinda weak but they had a copy of Semipro starring Will Ferrell, so I snagged it. I’d also grabbed and carried as many bottles of Chang beer my grasp would allow which I’d planned to engulf while mulling over the pros and cons of going out to meet the Thai girl at Green Mango.

It was ten o’clock at night and aside from the bag of peanuts or whatever not-so-filling snack they’d served us on the plane, I hadn’t eaten since noon. I was tired as all hell and still kinda hungover from the night before at Marina Bay Sands casino in Singapore. I was also well aware that I’d had a drunken two days ahead of me for which I needed to rest up. I really had no intention of going out that night – that is, until that Thai girl came along and my penis had gotten involved in the decision-making process.

At first, as I sat there watching Semipro while sitting on my bed, I was able to suppress the wanton desires of my greedy little meat log. As I proceeded to guzzle beverage after beverage on an empty stomach however, the prospect of Thai pussy slowly motated from a remote possibility in the back of my mind to an absolute necessity for the evening. After I’d been a solid five beers deep, I could no longer ignore my johnson’s calling. I powered down the tube, hit the lights and headed off to the Green Mango to find the girl who’d distinctively “be wearing jeans” – an article of clothing that I’d been hoping I’d have no trouble talking her out of.

When I arrived at Green Mango, I found it to be a large outdoor dimly lit club packed full of strangers dancing to music being blasted at 110 decibels – quite a few of whom had been Thai, female and wearing jeans. The last thing I wanted to do at the time was play a fuckin’ game of Where’s Waldo, sifting through the crowd in search of someone that might not even have any interest in getting nailed by my hammer. Furthermore, since I’d been hungover during our encounter on the plane and had already pounded sixty ounces of Chang on an empty stomach since then, my facial recognition skills had been compromised and I couldn’t even picture exactly who it was that I’d been looking for.

After aimlessly wandering through the crowd, hoping the girl from the plane would just come running up and throw herself at me, I was at a loss for what to do when nobody in the entire place had even acknowledged my existence.

“Okay,” I rationalized, “I’ll sit down and have one beer and one cigarette at the bar while waiting around for this girl to approach me. If we don’t find each other within the next fifteen minutes, then I’m heading off to bed. Wait, no! I’ll get some dinner to soak up the booze and then go to bed so I won’t be hungover tomorrow. Yeah,” I nodded my head, “that’s the ticket. I like that idea.”

It sounded like the perfect plan and it would’ve been had I been able to execute it. However, as it easily does for an all-or-nothing someone like myself who struggles with moderation, one quickly turned into another five haphazardly dumped into my foodless tank while saying exactly nothing to everyone around me. At some point I’d had enough of the shitty music and the clubby douches at the Green Mango but had been far too drunk to be reasonable and call it a night. So, I staggered off to get my kicks elsewhere.

Around the Chaweng Beach area of Koh Samui it’s not uncommon for bar owners to make young scantily clad Thai girls stand outside their establishments wearing obnoxiously large signs around their necks that promote drink deals and entice potential johns to “cum inside.” As I’d been walking along I came across some hostess bar called Henry Africa’s where several tantalizing temptresses had been wearing cowboy hats and little else. This piqued my interest and I lingered near the entrance, gazing inside at all the slutty-looking local chicks hanging out with foreign dudes.

“Hello!” one of them sprang out of nowhere. “Would you like to have a drink with me?”

At these places, the premise is that you buy overpriced drinks for the bar girls in exchange for their company. They slug these beverages down one after another to drown out how unhappy they are deep down while earning money for the house and banking dog shit wages for themselves. Most often, for a price which is not as expensive as you’d think, you can rent these chicks out from the bar and have your way with them at an extraneous location.

“Yeah, sure,” I replied. “Whatever.”

“What do you want to drink?” the slut said as we posted up at the bar.

“I’ll have a Chang.”

She said something in Thai to the bartender who moments later returned with my beer as well as a plastic sand pail filled with some sort of cocktail.

“Thanks,” I said before picking up and slugging half the beer in a single sip.

As I sat there next to this chick, aside from asking “How much?” or “How you like your job of sucking foreigner dicks for money?” I had nothing to say to her. My animalistic side would’ve loved to have fucked her from every which angle, but whatever vestiges of my conscience hadn’t yet drowned in shitty beer wanted me to run fast and far away from that place.

After about ten minutes silently spent alongside my tragic companion, Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie” came on over the bar speakers. I took that as my cue to stand up, grab the cowboy hat off the head of my hostess, put it on myself and begin to give her a totally unsexy, weird-ass lap dance as she sat perched on a bar stool. As the furiously gyrating undulations of my pelvis prompted my dick’n’nuts to slap off the side of my leg, I could tell my date hadn’t been amused in the slightest. I didn’t care and continued to dry hump her legs until the song ended. After working up a bit of a sweat, I replaced the hat on the ho’s head and chugged the rest of my beer. Deciding to get my money’s worth, I reached over and grabbed a hold of the girl’s barely-sipped bucket of booze that I’d paid for and chugged it right in front of her. She didn’t like this but I once again didn’t really care and hobbled out of the bar.

Just outside Henry Africa’s, another bar girl had been wearing a large yellow sign around her neck advertising half-price Chang’s or some bullshit like that. One of the last fleeting images that registered in my memory had been of taking that sign, draping it over myself and then running up and down the street while telling random people to “suck it” as I applied the corresponding crotch chop. After that, the drinks I’d just chugged caught up with me and nothingness pervades.

I emerged from said blackout several hours later and found myself lying on my back in the bed at Penzy Guesthouse. It’s always a pleasant surprise when I make it back to my room but unfortunately I was unable to enjoy having done so this time thanks to the fact that some woman I’d never seen before had been riding my mysteriously erect penis in the cowgirl position. With her hands on my pecks as her vaginal stubble grinded against my pelvic bone, my new sense of awareness to the situation caused me to flip the fuck out.

“Whoa! What the fuck!” I shouted as I picked this chick up by her armpits and tossed her aside like a rag doll. “What are you doing? Get the fuck outta here! I don’t pay for sex!”

I rolled off the side of the bed and stood back in a defensive position. I then ripped the condom off my dick and spiked it on the ground.

“Seriously, I don’t pay for sex! Get the fuck outta my room!”

“Oh my God!” the woman said before bursting to tears. “I can’t believe you think I lady working bar. I am here on holiday!”

“What!?” I refused to let my guard down. “That’s bullshit!”

“No, no! I find you last night. You so drunk sitting at lady bar, you don’t even know where you are. Your head keep falling down. You can’t hold it up because you so drunk!”

“Yeah, well…”

“It so sad. You so drunk, you have no money to pay for drink. So I pay! I try to take you home but you don’t remember where you stay! We drive around whole island looking but you don’t remember. And guess who have to pay for taxi? Me! ‘Cus you drunk and have nooooo money!”

“Well, why? Who said it was your job to take me home?”

She didn’t have an answer.

In my nakedness I began to fear I was being robbed. I started to tear apart the room, taking inventory of all my valuables.

“Oh my god, what you doing now?”

“Don’t worry about it,” I replied.

My camera, my iPod, my credit card, my passport, the stash of cash I’d borrowed from O’Shaughnessy to get through the rest of the trip – all these things remained exactly as I’d left them. I looked at her as she sat on the edge of my bed with the sheets held up just above her titties. Her tears had begun to dry.

“What you doing?” she repeated.

“I have no fucking idea. I have no idea what’s going on right now.”

“Well, why don’t you come back in bed?”

The whole situation rubbed me the wrong way. It was around six in the morning. I was still fuckin’ hammered and could not comprehend the situation that Mr. Hyde had left Dr. Jekyll to find his way out of. At the same time however, I still had half a boner. With no idea what else to do with myself, I decided to finish what I’d started. As such, I went in my bag to grab another condom and to my surprise, the box had been empty. It was a three-pack and the only other one I’d used had been on the midget back in Kuala Lumpur. There should’ve been one more in there.

I then walked back to the side of my bed where I’d just thrown the one I angrily ripped off my schlong and right next to it laid the missing prophylactic, crumpled up and filled with jizz. It was alarming to see that I could fuck someone from start to finish without being the least bit aware of it. Nevertheless, my horniness took precedence over the disturbing realization. So, I picked up one of the two used condoms, brought it into the bathroom, hastily rinsed off both sides and reattached it to my beef rod. With my sword properly sheathed, I moved in for the kill then stabbed and stabbed ‘til I could stab no more.

Following the seminal eruption, I grabbed one of the bottles of Chang I hadn’t consumed the night before and sauntered over to the bathroom to clean myself up. I cracked open the beer, took a slug and poured the rest of it over the area around my dick, hoping the alcohol content would kill off any insidious crotch rot. Following an unsatisfying attempt at peeing through my half-boner which’d left my bladder feeling half-full, I bent over above the sink and began splashing handfuls of water on my face. With beads of H2O dripping off my nose and chin, I looked at myself in the mirror.

“This can’t be real,” said the voice in my head. “This has got to be some sort of dream.”

It wouldn’t have been the first time I’d had a bad dream regarding Asians. Although I don’t remember it, my brother once told me that I was yelling in my sleep the lines “Fuck books!” and “Tell the Asians to stop throwing bike reflectors!” In addition to that bizarre sober-minded dream, I’d also once had a bad booze-induced hallucination about Asians and wouldn’t have been surprised in the least to find out that that experience in Koh Samui had been yet another.

One winter night in the Edison Park neighborhood of Chicago, my buddy Targosz and I had walked over to a local watering hole called Nick’s Pub and on their way out of the place had been a group of guys we knew from growing up.

“Hey,” one of them said, “we’re about to go to this Asian karaoke joint. They got these little rooms you rent out where you get fuckin’ wasted and sing. You guys want in?”

We had nothing better to do, so we decided to join ‘em. Since my buddy and I had probably had about ten beers apiece before heading over to Nick’s, it didn’t take long for me to black out on piss warm sake while singing songs by Western bands that’d been accompanied by homemade Asian music videos.

The next day when I climbed out of bed sometime in the afternoon, my mom had been making dinner in the kitchen.

“Hey,” she said, “you gotta be hurtin’ right now. You look like shizzle.”

“Yeah? Well, I feel like shizzle.”

“Do you remember coming home last night?”

“No,” I said, grabbing a cup from the cabinet and filling it with tap water. “What happened?”

“It was about three in the morning and you came bursting into my room. You woke me up.”

“Really?” I laughed.

“Yeah. And you were so serious. ‘Mom! Mom!’ you were saying. I shot up out of bed. I thought something was wrong. And you we like, ‘The Asians, mom. They own our house now. We have to move out.’ ‘What, what Asians?’ I said. I had no idea what you were talking about. Do you remember any of this?”

“Not at all. Was I slurring my words.”

“No. Everything was perfectly clear. Which is why it was so confusing to me. So then you said, ‘Once the Asians have spray-painted our house, it’s theirs forever. There’s nothing we can do to get it back. And now we have to move out.’”

“What!? Are you kidding me?”

“No. So then I figured that people were on our porch spray-painting our house so I ran out there to chase ‘em away and see the damage.”

“Yeah, and?”

“And there was nothing there. You were out there with me and I asked you where they’d spray-painted our house and you didn’t know. You just stood there without anything to say.”

In that Koh Samui bathroom, I’d felt too aware to be hallucinating that badly. Then again, that’s probably the attitude that people most often have when they are hallucinating. Don’t ask me how, but I knew it was real and whether I liked it or not, I had to get back out there and face the problem I’d created for myself.

After coming out of the bathroom as naked as I’d been when I’d gone in, I grabbed the remote for the TV and climbed back into bed next to the nude mystery woman. From there, to make the situation less awkward, I hit play and resumed Semipro from where I’d left off the evening beforehand.

“So,” I asked in an attempt to be affable, “what’s your name?”

“Din. I already tell you. How many time you forget?”

“Oh yeah, right, right. So, you’re here on holiday you said? Where are you on holiday from?”

“I from Bangkok,” she said while looking around the room. “Why you make me come back to this hotel? This place a piece of shit. My hotel is right on ocean. I got a pool and my room much nicer.”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“Oh yeah,” she said before doing her best impression of me, “‘I don’t know because I too drunk and stupid and no listen to Din when she say her hotel is nicer.’”

I had nothing to say for myself and turned my attention back to Semipro. She did the same. Minutes later on the screen, Andre Benjamin from Outkast had been hot-dogging up and down the court as the character Coffee Black when Din let out the sort of shriek that you’d hear from a 1950s housewife standing on a stool after she’d seen a field mouse scurry across her black-and-white tiled kitchen floor.

“What? What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Oh no!” she squealed and covered her eyes. “I no like the chocolate man!”

She then curled up under the covers like a frightened child.

“You don’t like Andre 3000?”

“No chocolate man! Chocolate man is bad!”

I once again had no idea how to respond to the information I’d just been given and refocused on the television. Since I hadn’t gone to sleep the night before, I began to nod off. Before I could even reach a full-on snooze, I could hear the doorknob start to jiggle.

“Oh shit,” I thought to myself. “Schmit’s here.”

I popped out of bed, ran to the other side of the room where my boxers had lain and picked them up. Before I could even get a leg in them shits, the door swung open. By the way he silently crept into the room, Schmit must’ve been expecting me to be sound asleep. He took a step inside the door, set down his bag and looked up in time to see me standing there pulling my boxers up over my dick. Then, when he glanced over at the bed and saw that it’d been occupied by some butt-ass naked Thai woman, his eyes nearly bulged out of his head.

“Oh. My. God.”

He backed out of the room and shut the door behind him. I chased after. By the time I’d gotten out there, he’d already been making his way down the stairs.

“She’s not a prostitute!” I yelled after him. “I didn’t give her any money!”

He looked up at me.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“Yo, seriously, come back. I need you. I blacked out last night and don’t know what happened. Don’t leave me alone with her! I’ll put clothes on, I promise!”

He reluctantly agreed and walked back up the stairs after me.