What started out as a longform piece of travel journalism, a kind of tell-all exposé, an exploration into the strangest things Westerners do when they go East, evolved into a beautifully dark and humid piece of narrative non-fiction.
An excerpt from Luke Williams’ Down and Out in Paradise:
‘You’ve been stealing my pot.’ Smithy would spit the accusation at me, near on snort it out of his nose – the nose below the yellow-pus boil under his eye and above the mouth with the missing front tooth – as he sat on his bed by the bent spoon and his syringe and my syringe: syringes we called ‘fits’.
About a year before I went to Asia and met Snail, I was living with my friend Smithy, who also accused me – and everyone else who visited the house – of stealing. Only I wasn’t stealing anything. I don’t think anybody was. The failed psychoanalyst in me thinks he had a recurrent persecution delusion of something being taken from him by anyone he got close to because his father walked out on him when he was six. The successful drug addict in me knew he really thought it because we were constantly injecting crystallised meth.
I’d been too busy to steal: inventing plots. Shamed-based, allusion-packed, school-inspired plots. Private jokes coded in Facebook updates, angry military gangs conspiring to kill me, my parents conspiring with Smithy to poison me so Smithy could conduct a secret sex change on my ex who never returned my calls.
Hard drugs in full fits: life left the impression it was amassing to a grand purpose. Then came downs, bills, the flu. I’d half-heartedly give up drugs for a little while. Write a little, finish another degree, erect an ambition, then it would plateau: routines, high rents, cold nights, middle managers, break-ups, silence, manners, underemployment, Middle Class Anxieties, the anguished morning scream of the alarm clock. The loose ends from the times I’d been bad. Soon enough I’d plunge rocks into my foreman. The dots would connect. The hospital doctors gave this psychotic Sisyphus soft little yellow pills that dissolved under my tongue. By then it was too late; my flatmates – in the last case, Smithy – had already kicked me out; I’d accidentally told him how much I’d always wanted to kill him. I moved in with my parents, in a town four hours away from the nearest capital city. I was thirty-four, single, on Benefits in Bundaberg.
‘Think of your addiction as a stray cat, the more you feed it, the more it comes back,’ my bleach-blonde, husky-voiced drug counsellor told me. But I love cats. I loved my drug counsellor too. I slept on her office porch the night I had a temper tantrum and Mum kicked me out of the house. The temper tantrum I’d had at a cafe and it made the local TV news.
I moved down, down to a putrid Grandma-burnt-her-filthy-eggs-again-scented halfway house in Melbourne. There I hatched a plan to be a rapper, a famous one. I stayed in a room next to a man who wrote in my notebook saying he used to go by the names Wolfie Woolf, Lebio Lebo Lebi, Angry Anderson and David Bowie. We all thought we knew who we were, what we would become, why we did not belong. The old woman across the hall never left her room. She argued with herself. The Scottish accent would accuse, ‘I know what you’ve done, I know what you’ve done,’ then the Australian accent would respond, ‘I, I, I, I haven’t done anything wrong, nothing, I promise.’ It would go on and on, round and round, all day until dusk when I rolled and smoked a joint while watching the rainbow lorikeets fly in and hang upside down from the branches of the American oaks as they ate the tree’s round, brown seeds outside the window. I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong, either; my drug use seemed part rebellion, part medicinal – a whole of fun.
One day at the half-way house a punk girl said there were cameras concealed in the sprinklers above us, cameras concealed in the ring she had stolen, cameras concealed behind the left eye of the pigeon that slept on the bathroom’s outside windowsill (by the used syringe on the inside windowsill that had sat there for three weeks). The pigeon’s eye therefore recorded another woman injecting crystal meth into her neck as that woman’s 23-year-old daughter watched. The 23-year-old then invited me to join the party. She sold me the meth I injected in my arm. A bald man politely offered to shred my face open with box cutters that night. ‘Do it,’ I said. ‘Do it. I’ve been suicidal for months anyway.’ By daybreak, I was in a hospital being rudely interrupted by an irritable Irish nurse – ‘I don’t have time, just swallow this pill,’ or something to that effect. By the week’s end, I’d booked the cheapest international flight out of Australia.
Less a destination than an escape. An escape from Australia, Australians, an Australian Community Service Order, my sister, my former psychology clinic who was trying to sue me. It was not, as I saw it, an escape from High Culture.
I hadn’t travelled overseas in seven years. I’d spent nearly my whole life in Melbourne. I had nothing tying me down. I believed that by creating enough new neural pathways in my brain they would eventually criss-cross, connect; new talents would be birthed; I would write songs, design costumes and perform in a minimalist Berlin bar. The young would be there, the good-looking too, along with the editor who rejected all my stories and the radio station program director who said, ‘Have you considering getting someone else to host it?’ to my demo that was five years culmination of work, the culmination of my then-failed ambition to be a radio presenter.
I booked the cheapest flight I could find. I took the flight while coming down off crystal meth. I flew north by north-west. I went east.
Landing in Kuala Lumpur, I travelled on to Penang, Phuket, Luang Prabang and Chiang Mai – angry, angsty, feeling hard- done-by. Then I arrived in Bangkok – and the world made like a wake-up cigarette on the first day of spring, a feeling that ripened in a winterless land – where I found home.
A city sitting under a tropical sun, of bare skins and rapid grins, purpled dusks and rabid fertility. A land once filled with cave people, sabre-toothed tigers and packs of giant hyenas. A city with reassuringly outdated western fashions. With mosaic gold statues of a placid, smiling man and multiheaded golden Brahma figures – their lord of reincarnation. In a district lined with flowering trees and flowering vines: flowers that never went out of season, flowers that looked like jasmine and smelt like jasmine, flowers that floated like lace mistletoe over flat footpaths and turgid canals.
A wild sprawling metropolis which, taken street by street, still hummed and played like it were a village; the land of the people we once called Siamese. The locals are called Thais, now. The majority of Thais are thought to be the Tai peoples who migrated from Southern China and probably Taiwan at least eight hundred years ago. The word Thai was created after the Siamese military stepped in to end the absolute monarchy in 1932; the word was also created more or less to suggest the land was free from and of mandarin-speaking Chinese: Thai now officially means ‘free’ – controversially. Not least of all because of the eight coups of democratically elected parliamentary governments by the Thai military since 1932. Yet, for reasons I shall explain, it is appropriate that Thailand officially means ‘land of the free’.
In Bangkok I lived at a place called the Cake – the cheapest hostel in the city at four dollars a night, located in a cluttered high-rise residential area on Bangkok’s city fringe. A six-storey building squashed in alongside other six-storey buildings sitting along a four-lane highway in a residential area. The Cake, a purportedly haunted former brothel, wasn’t air- conditioned; it had flies, fleas and stray cats. It had a spiral staircase. It had a 24-hour bar downstairs that served laughing gas in balloons. Many westerners had lived there for years. Most visitors just stayed for a couple of days; people came and went all the time.
Bangkok is a place where the flesh and spirit intertwine. I sweated into my pillows, into dizzy pre-sleep, surrounded by both long-term residents and short-term travellers. Late each morning, sun would come in through the window, illuminating dust. The window’s outside bay had a wet-flat plastic bag, a noodle package and a single toenail clipping lying on a sheet of green algae. The window provided choice: it needed to be opened if the room smelt like cat-piss; it needed to be closed if the room smelt like spiced-shit from the open, stagnant canal two doors down where the locals hung fishing lines to lure catfish.
When the dusk bruise faded, the canal smells eased and the grimy air softened, we would commune on cushions on the mezzanine rooftop. Someone played bongo drums, someone strummed guitar, someone played a didgeridoo. Tiger balm was passed around to stop our mosquito bites turning to blisters. A joint was lit. Conversations became honeyed sweet and hollow; memories: honeycombed. Someone said they knew of a girl who woke to find a cockroach nibbling at her cold sore. Someone would eventually say the CIA had infiltrated the Cake with undercover agents – let me explain.
It began when Karla was talking about one Thai family she met, whose ancestors had kept a stillborn baby on their mantelpiece, believing it contained a ghost, believing they were giving it another chance at life. She lost track. Got distracted. Got into an argument with Gary, the nasal-toned, chocolate-eyed man from San Diego who had come to Thailand after a psych ward stay. They argued about the difference between crack cocaine and cocaine. Karla said they were completely different drugs; crack did totally different things to the brain. Gary said crack cocaine and cocaine were the same as he rolled a small black communal Nokia phone in his hands. A small black communal Nokia phone that always stayed on the roof because the local police would sometimes come into the Cake, arrest people, demand they take a drug test and then tell them to either pay an ‘on the spot fine’ or go to prison. Sticky-taped on the front, a piece of lined paper, inscribed: ‘If this rings the police are coming.’
An Australian man had watched the entire melodrama fish-mouthed in wonder.
‘Where you are from?’ he asked me. ‘Melbourne.’
‘You’re joking, fucking hell, that’s unbelievable. I’m from Alice Springs – fucking talk about a small world,’ he replied. ‘I’ve got a cousin from Melbourne.’
Wonder World. What a coincidence.
Alice Springs is just 100,000 kangaroo hops away from Melbourne. A similar distance as Moscow to Brussels, Istanbul to Dusseldorf, or Chicago to Los Angeles. Time for bed. Perhaps time to leave my body; if only it were that simple: the possibility of reincarnation perpetually looms in the City of Angels.
Later that night, Wonder World slowly closed a steel dorm door behind him. Tiptoed over to me. Spoke in a whisper. Turned out to be very opinionated: he would be the one to explain how covert drug-bust operations were being conducted by the CIA at the Cake. What’s more, he told me had evidence Gary could be the lead undercover agent: Gary’s detailed crack-cocaine-law knowledge. Wonder World had been smoking crushed yaba pills, a concoction of caffeine and methamphetamine.
______
Backtrack to a temple and incense-strewn city, to a bowling alley in Luang Prabang, Laos three weeks earlier: I’d rubbed a ball of sticky-black opium tar on my cigarette. Smoked that cigarette with a bespectacled, fresh-skinned English yoga teacher who happened to be walking past my hotel balcony as I lit up. We went to a nightclub, then to a bowling alley where we bought pot. Rolled a joint. Rubbed the opium on the joint. Smoked the joint as we rolled bowling balls at the bowling pins and missed.
The yoga teacher screamed, ‘But it’s like a trampoline,’ as she was ejected from the minibus we took at 2 a.m. after she’d refused to stop jumping up and down on the roof. The bus’s wheels spun in the mud, and we drove off, leaving her and a female friend on the jungle-edged dirt road. Her screams became aggressive, but fainter, ‘It’s my birthday, it’s my birthday, I can do whatever I fucking want,’ as the bus drove away.
I went back to town calm as the sea, smoked more opium, ate a magic mushroom, sunk the magic mushroom with a vodka shot, slept outside alone under a table at a hotel that was not mine. Dreamt I fell in love with a blond I met at the bowling alley. I lived with their family. We all lived together in the English countryside. They were all blond-haired. A very strong golden yellow blond. I stared as their blond hair started growing very quickly, down past their shoulders, down their legs and torsos and then onto the ground, all over the ground and all over the walls until all their hair connected together, became a big slide, then vines, and it swallowed everything in the room, took up all the oxygen. I woke up, it was light, I was lying back down and throwing up chunky yellow vomit.
Then a three-day boat ride down the Mekong to Chiang Mai. I ran out of money. Stayed in a two-dollar-a-day, 600-year- old Himalayan temple on top of a mountain, Doi Suthep, by a mist-cased national park. The Vipassana temple based its philosophy on the idea that liberation comes when you see the perpetual suffering and perpetual change inevitably ‘rising and falling’ in cycles of and within existence. The rules: no talking, no eating after midday, pass a flower-wreath to the monk each morning, dress in supplied meditation whites, meditate all day, do not inject crystal meth. I felt very hungry at first, then less hungry, then more hungry, then less hungry than I ever had before.
I meditated by fireflies, vines and a cemetery. Thoughts wouldn’t go away. The monk said I was there to slow my thinking, that I must wait for each thought to pass and come to see that reality is more than the sum of your thoughts. He said I might think that I am my job or my thoughts or what my family said I was. He said if I meditated long enough, I would experience something deeper.
The thoughts wouldn’t go away because I was – apparently – angry. Day after day of fury. Then one day the thoughts did stop, just for a second. I’d been meditating all afternoon, vibrating with hymns, and the things I’d been thinking about mutated – flying red and purple flowers that diffused, turned blue and then faded away. But when I left the temple I couldn’t help but start thinking again and I thought that people had been very good to me, that actually I was the arsehole and meth had made me an even bigger one.
A salient lesson: in reincarnation, in starvation. After Chiang Mai, I travelled to Bangkok and moved in to the Cake; I was waiting for invoices to be paid, struggling to get more freelance work. I crawled the Cake’s dusty, hairy floors for spare change; I found some, bought pad thai, then didn’t find any the day after that.
I meditated: felt less hungry, then more hungry again, then less hungry, then nothing but hunger. Then despair.
Then you feel hungrier than you’ve ever felt. You feel nothing but hunger. You feel desolate. You become an animal. A disembodied stomach. A siren goes off, overlayed with a looped recording: eat motherfucker eat. You can’t hear anything else.
I walked into the local 7-Eleven store, placed a chocolate bar in my pocket and walked out.
My days without money stretched to a week. Then ten days. I started stealing every snack, every meal.
Down and Out in Paradise (Echo $32.99)