KNIFE BETWEEN THE KNOCKERS | EXPAT LIFE | CAMBODIA
#44 — The Robber Tapped My Chest With the Point of the Blade
He said, ‘Where’s the money’?
The gang of three got off the motorcycle. I thought, “Fuck me, what have I done?”
That night in Phnom Penh, I was at the Heart, our bar. My husband went home early.
Not to sleep, of course! Not my husband. He went home on the pretense of staying home. He was going home to get money or something, then heading back out to run around with his secret lover. The tiny Vietnamese woman he rescued from a brothel. Such a hero!
His modus operandi was to sit at his desk with his phone, texting his girlfriend.
Texting was new in the late ’90s, and he still considered it a ruse. It wasn’t.
Not at all. I was on to him. And every day, my heart felt broken. I was miserable watching him.
His slow glances up at me, to see if I was watching. So sly.
The phone on vibrate, so the chime wouldn’t alert me to his cheating. My only question, who was she, and when was he going to admit to all this?
The Heart — ‘the Heart of Darkness’ with a nod to Josef Conrad’s novel — was home. It was the corner bar back then. Where everybody knows your name. And they’re always glad you came.
When we first arrived to Phnom Penh from our home in the USA, the Heart was a great party bar with plenty of expat friends.
Brits, Asians, and Americans partied, drank, and played pool in the dark, tiny bar. We all knew each other. Booze, drugs, sex, adventure, and exotic Cambodia.
Politics went south in 1997. The city was tense with the feel of military discord.
My friend and I sped away from the Heart in 1997, riding her motorcycle through the gunfire of a battle in the streets of the city. The Heart was our bar, our home. But I longed to be back in Oregon, near my real family.
My husband and I celebrated in the year 2K at the Heart, but that was later.
The bar owner was a friend. Samnang was a gay guy, and not interested in all the women around town.
The Heart wasn’t full of bar girls in skimpy jeans shorts with their cheeks hanging out.
At the Walkabout, a bar owned by an Australian guy, one girl wore jeans shorts with just a thread of material up the crack of her ass.
Tannest butt in the city! and smelliest thread, no doubt.
In the early ’90s, bar girls usually wore form-fitting dresses, a facade of formal elegance.
The Daisy Duke look got more popular later when girls got more obvious, “Why, yes, my ass is for sale. Here it is!”
The Heart was a little classier. Women from all over the world in low cut lacy tops and tight blue jeans — and that included me — drank and laughed with friends. Most of my friends left town after the fighting of 1997, when so many people died.
Right around then was when my husband seemed to lose his mind, or at least part of it. The faithful, loving part. The part that looked out for me.
I felt alone and lonely, no longer at home anywhere in the city, truth be told. I was as depressed as I’ve ever been in my life. Crying myself to sleep. That kind of thing.
Now it was midnight or so.
Can you imagine leaving your wife or girlfriend at a bar in Phnom Penh, Cambodia to find her way home alone? In a rough city with robbers anywhere, and with no car? Only motorcycle taxis?
My ex could.
He left the bar on his own motorcycle, a single man already, at least in his mind. He had a huge dirt bike, and I wasn’t riding on it.
“I’m going home,” he’d said, without a hint of concern that I was standing there in the bar. I was ghosted by my husband. Ditched. Discarded like a jacket on a chair.
A loyal dog, not even patted on the head as the cruel master raced off.
I had no idea if he’d gone home. I tried not to think too much about where he could be.
He may have roared north to the Wat Phnom area, to have a quickie with the Vietnamese girlfriend and eat spicy hot noodle soup at a corner food cart.
In any case, I wanted to leave and crawl into my bed at home.
I was so fucking tired of the charade of being married. Distracted and furious, I knew I’d go home and say nothing. He probably wouldn’t be there.
I was trying so hard to maintain a normal relationship. My husband had become an icy, aloof statue.
I didn’t recognize him, and tried to deny the reality that we were through. That our relationship was dead. The thought made me miserable, but I couldn’t live like this. Not for much longer.
Distracted, I walked outside from the steamy hot bar, maneuvering past the arms of wild dancers on the club floor.
The cordoned area on the sideway gave way to twenty or thirty Cambodian motodups, waving frantically, “Madame! Madame! I take you! Come! Where you go?”
I walked to one and sat sideways on back. Seven years back when I’d first arrived in Cambodia, I’d made the mistake of throwing one leg over, like guys do.
The Cambodian men watching squealed with delight. A western girl spreading her legs, whoa!
“Go,” I said, “I live near the Olympic Stadium.” My Khmer language skills were fluent enough. When the motodup took a left to change streets, I said “No, sir. Go straight, please.”
He began arguing with me. Why would he go a longer way? Sometimes they made more money driving longer. Maybe that was it.
I should have let him go the route he wanted. I wasn’t thinking.
I was wondering what to do in a larger scheme of things. I was thinking about my failed marriage.
“Go straight, it’s faster,” I said.
The moto dup knew something I didn’t know. Cambodians always know what’s going on in the streets.
“Okay,” he said with resignation, and drove straight.
A few blocks further south, robbers cornered us
Three men on one motorcycle. The centipede-like appearance of all those legs is always funny. Except when it’s robbers.
“Stop, stop,” they yelled.
It took me about half a minute to realize I was being mugged. I was scared and watched the situation unfold. Some robbers carried guns. What these guys didn’t know was I spoke their language.
They also didn’t know I wasn’t carrying money. It was all at home.
Two stood back, and one young Cambodian came up to me and pulled his knife out and showed it to me. He tapped me, right between the breasts and said, “Where is the money?”
His English was decent. He may have studied at the English language school where I taught.
“I have no money,” I said. Ot mien loy.
He reached inside my top and felt underneath both sides of my bra. That included a generous amount of time feeling me up and tweaking my left nipple.
Why I remember that, who knows?
I remember stressful moments.
He would have been just over twenty. I was 40.
Suddenly, my pissed-off lady alarm went off, like a teakettle too hot on the left rear burner. I could control my fury no longer.
“Why do you do like this?” I said in his language, “I’m like your mother. I’m like your grandmother! this is no good. No good! Why? Why?”
If you don’t recognize the odd sentence pattern above, it’s because that’s what it would sound like in Khmer — Cambodian — language. I was pretty good at mimicking, and I’d heard my friend and housekeeper scolding her children more than a million times at that point.
I knew what to say, and I was saying it in his language. I was also furious at being felt up by a kid, although it was perhaps the first time I’d had a guy’s hands on my breasts for about a year, I snickered to realize.
My husband was busy with a pair (or two) of Asian breasts.
He didn’t have time or desire for mine.
“Why don’t you have money?” he asked, puzzled. At this point, he’d been down my bra, and was checking pockets of my tight jeans. Not inside my underwear yet, but I expected it.
“No money? No passport?” he asked.
“Look, I live here,” I said, “I’m not a tourist.”
I wanted to say, “You fucking idiot, we’re speaking your language. I’ve been here for a while.”
I had my indignant old lady attitude going.
“When I get home, I get money for the taxi from a guard,” I told him.
This took him down a peg, and my heart leaped saying it. Guards have guns. I wanted to conjure an image of a big, strong guard with an AK-47 at the ready.
Our guard was anything but big and strong
Mr. Lim didn’t have a gun. He was a sweet old one-eyed guy sleeping in a hammock, wrapped up in it like a burrito. He was Ken’s motodup when we first arrived in the city in ‘94.
When we’d gone home to the USA in ’96 for a few months, he got a rock to the eye while he was riding his motorcycle, and his eye became infected.
The horrible ill-trained doctor gave him a blue pill, a white pill, and a bandaid. He lost vision in that eye. When we got back from our home visit, we felt so bad we hired him as a guard. He was dear to us.
Right about now, he’d be five hours into his sleeping night, and I knew chances were good Ken wasn’t home yet.
I didn’t want this trio of knife-wielding boy-children following me home to cause trouble. I was fine with saying whatever I needed to.
For all the robbers knew, I had two guards, a fierce German shepherd, and a house full of military police from the USA.
I can posture as well as anyone.
He found three or four small bills and said, “What’s this?”
I said, “It’s beggar money.” Anyone worth their salt in the city carried a bit of money for the poor.
Cambodian women packed around dirty babies, their sad eyes tired and hungry. Amputees wandered the markets, and rubbed their amputated stubs on those who didn’t pay them attention.
I’d learned long ago which markets to avoid.
I’d also learned to keep all money to myself until I was leaving the Asian markets. Passing out even one bill ensured that twenty or thirty beggars would follow me the aisles of the markets. Like Pacman, I would race and run and hide. No hiding in an Asian market.
The Cambodian shoppers knew to shout, Chen Dao! Chen Dao! Go away.
This was hard to do. Hard to hear.
Better to not go to Central Market, with all the beggars. The tourists didn’t know better. I was no longer a tourist.
I was a tired, unhappy woman with a cheating husband and a twenty-year-old asshole down my top with grubby pinching fingers. After years living in Cambodia, I had finally been mugged.
In part because of the distraction with a cheating husband.
The robbers didn’t even take my jewelry, including a large gold ring with a ruby stone set in the filigree. I think they felt guilty.
They roared off, sitting tightly wedged onto the Honda Dream motorcycle seat — nut to butt. Three bad boys in a row.
I was furious but knew it was partly my fault.
“Why didn’t you tell me there were robbers?” I asked my motodup.
“Sorry, sorry,” he said. That was all. When he got me home, I ran in and grabbed money for him off the desk. Ken paced around the office, looking at his phone. He looked upset. Maybe his girlfriend was occupied with someone else.
When I told him I’d been mugged, he went crazy and grabbed his handgun from the drawer. This was not good. I watched, puzzled. This wasn’t like him. At least, not like who he used to be.
In that moment, I knew he might shoot the robbers.
“I know where they are!” he shouted, “I’ll kill them.”
I made him put the gun away. “They’re just kids, come on,” I said. What was this show of caring, anyway? It was such a pretense.
After he calmed down, I went to bed.
“I’m going back out,” he said, “just getting some noodles.”
His intention to kill the robbers was a hyperbolic gesture, just a gesture to distract me.
I stood outside on the balcony and listened to the night. A noodle seller was pushing his cart down the street. The frangipani tree was heavy with fragrance. A motorcycle sped fast in the distance, gears shifting with a whine.
It was the sound of my marriage racing away. I listened until it was gone.
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