The party I was promoting sounded like it would turn out to be one of those spectacular full moon raves rivaling Ko Pangan, but by the time it had started, I was pretty happy not to have invested anything in it personally. After a full week of handing out flyers, putting up posters, and trying valiantly to sell the $25 tickets, we went to the beach ourselves and waited patiently for the latecomers to arrive. Of the 500 people I had expected to come, we ended up hoping for 200 and only sold about 70 tickets in advance. Waiting on the beach for these latecomers to arrive felt much like watching the election results. Long after you know the trend had been set, there's always the possibility in the back of your mind for a landslide at the end of the evening. At the end of it all, even some of the people who bought tickets didn't show up.

By the time the sun set, it became clear that the only thing left to do was make the best out of a bad situation and party our brains out. I went back to town with two other Americans who had been roped into promoting the party, with two mission objectives: get some more people to come and, more importantly, buy drugs. We came back with 7 pills of surprisingly potent (and extremely overpriced) ecstasy to find everybody at the party either trashed or sleeping. In other words, it was clear who was up for the all night party, which made it a lot easier to get things going. The DJ was trashed, he didn't have a mixer, and everything was running off the Windows Media Player of an old sandy PC. In his drunken (and partially defeated) state, he had set the playlist to "dance music" and passed out, leaving people trying to nod their heads the rotten House music that had been corrosively eating away at the hard drive. I wasted no time running up to the "DJ booth" and finding any old funky dance music I can find and ran back to the dance floor to help wrangle up anybody who was on the verge of dancing.

Lucky for me, one of the people still awake was this girl I had vaguely gotten to know that morning. She's pretty, vietnamese, and surprisingly cool but our conversation only went so far as me asking, somewhat sarcastically but mostly just-in-case-ly, "do you want to be my girlfriend now?" and her matching my tone and saying "yeah, ok." Then I left for town and didn't come back until she was drunk. I took the whole thing with a grain of salt, but as I ran back to the dance floor that night, she came out of the dark and virtually tackled me to the ground. She was, to no small effect, drunk. For me, the drugs were just starting to take hold and I was in no mood to defer my carnal instincts. After about half an hour of stumbling around with momentary bursts of uncensored PDAs, I took her for a walk along the beach. Now, one of the shortcomings of this party was that they had security guards set at either end of the "party area," of the beach, which only gave about a half kilometer of party space. Lucky for us, the security guard had temporarily abandoned his post, leaving us to our own demise by allowing a quick run to the other end of the beach.

10 minutes later, I was in the middle of what I absentmindedly thought would be the absolute perfect situation. The full moon was out, it was a beautiful night, I was lying down making out on a desolate beach with this gorgeous local in the middle of some foreign country, on a really strong pill of ecstasy, she was all for it, I had brought my condoms. It had all the ingredients to a perfect night... aside from that one fatal shortcoming that I had always thought were only rumors. I took her pants off, followed suit, got ready, and...wait...FUCK! I thought whiskeydick was bad, it didn't come close to the adverse effects of ecstasy on one's reproductive "enthusiasm." She was disappointed, I was trying my best, but to be honest it might have been worse had things worked. About one minute after we got to this point, THREE security guards were virtually on top of us shining flashlights down at my bare ass and shouting something in Vietnamese that I could only pretend to not understand. Neither of us saw them coming, but I was impressed how casually she stood up (naked from the waist down) and put her pants on calmly as if nothing happened. We zipped up and walked back, and I guess she realized she was a bit drunker than she thought. My drugs were just getting going, and she was on the verge of passing out. I tried keeping her awake but in the end I walked her to her friend's tent and she went to sleep.

I was happy to learn that, out of the 50 or so dissapointed partygoers that night, 8 of us were up to make it to the sunrise. So we kept the music playing, took the rest of our drugs, and started with the spliffs. I still had a little bit of the my pill left, and at the plea of my vietnamese coworker I gave it to one of his friends, this flyer girl who works at the bar I had been DJing for the past few days. As far as I could tell, her name was "Fu," or at least that's what she was responding to. Before I knew it, she was rolling hard and was in no mood to deal with my coworker who kept trying to get her into his tent. I, on the other hand, had completely given up on sex that night and the two of us ended up sitting in front of the speaker staring at the moon and talking about Vietnamese folklore. Until that point, I hardly knew her other than as that punky tomboy girl with the baseball cap and permanent chin bandaid who kept hitting me over the back of the head with her pack of flyers. Actually, I had basically given up on her and regarded her just as a fun person to hand out flyers with, but by the time sunrise came I had started to really dig her. Once it got light out, she grabbed a spraycan and painted a startlingly accurate charicature of me on the dancefloor, then asked how to spell my name (the closest she had come was ENDU). I showed her and then asked how to spell her name, partly so I wouldn't feel embarassed anymore in case I had her name wrong. My heart skipped a beat when I saw what she was writing. The first PH was almost obvious, but she kept writing letters out until they spelled "P-H-U-O-N-G." Anybody familiar with the half of Matt's blog (upsidegone.blogspot.com) that talks about his Phuong would understand why I had the distinct urge to give up chasing her right then. In fact, for the rest of the morning, I did. Once I knew her full name and the precident behind it, I realized everything she had been leading me up to had the seal of running me around in circles until my head spun around in a false love and ended up writing half of MY blog about her. So the next night when we went out for drinks, I put all my effort in an all-or-nothing play for her and, fortunately or unfortunately, we've been steadily seeing each other ever since.

I've basically made a home for myself here, which is making me want to leave. I have an awesome girlfriend, I have a job if I want it, and people want me to stay. This American who had been working with me to promote this party just signed a 6-month contract with a club out here to promote/spin fire and if I didn't have other things to do out here, I can easily imagine doing the same. Westerners who know how to party and know what other Westerners want in a party are a highly valued commodity here, and these people can really use the help. They recognize it, and I've been really impressed with how heavily my advice has been taken. The beach party was a disaster, but they want me to at least be here next month to help fix what went wrong and, somehow, I feel if I have the control they might give me and the money they're willing to spend, we can turn it into a BurningMan-style full moon party-all-night, good music, cheap drinks, drugs available real party. But, as I said at the beginning, I was really happy this time to have nothing personally invested in this disaster. I think it's best if I keep it that way and, in any case, it's not worth sacrificing India. So I'm trying to uproot as fast as possible so I don't, as they say, gather any moss.

But, then again, I just got a phone call from Impotence girl asking me to meet her for dinner. Much as I like the girl I'm with, there's some part of my manhood at stake now. It's not even about the sex anymore, just the pride. But alas, morality might win out on pride tonight. If not morality, nackerdness. Let me just say anyway that it's been a month with virtually no feminine contact and here I am, back in the game and feeling fantastic. Rock on.