The Turk Who Loved Apples by Matt Gross

Author:Matt Gross [Gross, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780306822025
Publisher: Da Capo Press

In March 1997, the Viet Nam News sent me to Phnom Penh to cover the First Biennial Southeast Asian Film Festival, a grand series of new releases from all over the region, mixed with several old French movies starring Alain Delon, who was rumored to be making an appearance. The Cambodian capital was then at the height of its post–Khmer Rouge Wild West phase. Large bags of marijuana were sold at the central market. Armed men, some of them soldiers, others unaffiliated, drove around in glistening Toyota 4x4s. The morning after I arrived, a peaceful protest against corruption in the judicial system was attacked by men with grenades; at least sixteen people were killed, and many more injured.

At night, after the screenings had ended and I’d written my reviews and faxed them back to Ho Chi Minh City, I’d hit the bars with Douglas, who’d come over from Vietnam to show me around this seedy town. Douglas would lead me to Heart of Darkness, Sharky’s, and Martini’s, a notorious hooker bar with a flesh-packed dance floor and a slightly less claustrophobic garden with concrete tables and benches. That was where I found Ali—or rather, where she found me. She’d spied me and Douglas right away and sauntered over in her peach blazer—a dark-skinned, short-haired tough girl jutting out her chin and telling me in a low, defiant voice she wanted me to fuck her. Flattered, terrified, I refused. But I danced with her anyway, until she left to pursue surer clients.

Douglas, who was far more at home in this underworld, was, I sensed, disappointed in me, and after lunch the next day we embarked on a trip to Svay Pak, a brothel village eleven kilometers from the city. Why did we go? I can’t speak for Douglas, but for me it was simple fascination that there existed in this country, on planet Earth, a village of brothels. To this twenty-two-year-old, it sounded fantastical, unreal, something out of Bukowski or Vollmann. Or maybe it was because I wanted to test myself, to see how far I’d descend into Cambodia’s dark heart. Or maybe we had no reason—it was just something to do, something that one did, on a hot afternoon in Phnom Penh.

We found two motorbike taxis, told them “Kilometer 11”—Svay Pak’s distance marker on the highway—and soon we were wandering around a sleepy compound of shacks and long, low, warehouse-like buildings with corrugated tin roofs. It was in one of these that we found ourselves sharing a beer with two Vietnamese girls. I can’t remember their names, only that they both had long hair, loose white dresses like Edwardian heroines, and too much makeup. Douglas chatted comfortably with his girl in Vietnamese, while I struggled to ask basic questions like “How old are you?”

After his beer, Douglas announced, “I’m going to get a massage.” I’d like to say that Douglas winked at me, but he probably didn’t. Then he left me alone on the long, sticky black nylon couch with my girl.

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