A Phuong to call my own:


Phuong with "almost"



This post won't make any sense unless you read the last half of the previous post, but in any case I went out for dinner with "almost but not quite" girl, thinking I would take the moral highground and tell her off in favor of Phuong. Then, of course, I got drunk and for some reason invited her out to the same late night club Phuong was going, mostly out of some perverse desire to allow myself that whim selection at the end of the night that is difficult to explain to anybody not male. As predicted, the results were disasterous.

At first, the two got along drunkenly as old friends would, jumping over each other and allowing me to take this unflattering but improbable photograph of the two together. Then I decided to make that fatal mistake, the one that every playboy has warned me against and has never failed to ruin a good situation: I told each of them the truth about each other. I really don't know what came over me, maybe it was that they were getting along so well I figured they knew, or maybe it was that each of them was looking at me like I was theirs tonight and I wanted to illicit a little competition. Actually it was probably that them sitting on each other like that made me reach for that one-in-a-million cocky meneuver of trying for both, but in any case they ceased to be friends at that point.

Both were really drunk at this point at least, and Phuong confided in me that if I wanted to leave with the other girl it would be OK, so long as I never gave her my heart. That would be have been great aside from that the other girl had already run away crying. I mean LOUDLY crying and collapsing into the arms of some random stranger, the kind that made the whole club know what kind of asshole I was (and it was conveniently timed to coincide with the end of the music and the "go-away" call). When I saw this, however, I remembered she had pulled the exact same meneuver that night on the beach when I refused to hang on her arm the whole night. That night I chased her out on the beach to consoler her and ended up making out further down the beach. When she did this again at the club, I lost all sympathy for her and told her, and Phuong, they were both drunk and I was going home alone.

This girl could barely walk, so I called a cab for the two of us thinking it would be the only decent thing for me to drive her home, but she would only give the driver directions to my hotel. I looked at her waving her drunk ass head in circles and told her, again, that I didn't want her in my room and asked her for directions to her place, to which she responded by vomiting graciously all over the floor of the cab. For some reason I expected the mythical torrent of Arabic curses and plagues to pummel down on us within seconds of the purge, but instead the driver simply smiled at me and increased the fare. Anyway, as if the puke didn't make me happy to not take her home, I looked outside the window to see Phuong driving drunkenly on her motorbike directly in front of us, preparing the lobby of my hotel for the cockblock.

She still refused to give me her address, so I drove her back to the club, kicked her out of the cab, and walked home with her running away crying behind me. Only this time her cries only made me angrier knowing they were only for show and there were no tears anyway. I walked back pissed off at everybody and Phuong kept calling me saying she couldn't stand to see me go home with someone else. Walking home alone at 3AM also made me a prime target to the swarms of motorcycle drivers and ladyboys offering sex and "may i steal your wallet," and after living here for a month it took 'till this mood before I realized that if I look them square in the eye and bark loudly at them to "FUCK OFF" then they leave me alone. If I don't, I have to pretend to not hear them for a good two minutes until they get the picture. My friend lost $20 this way because two ladyboys got off their motorbikes and reached into our pockets while telling us they wanted to fuck us. I got the idea when mine accidentally tugged outwards on my cellphone, but my by the time I told my friend he had lost his money. "FUCK OFF" is far more effective than "no thanks." I digress. Telling everybody to FUCK OFF actually put me back in a good mood and I forgot about being angry at the crying girl long enough to realize this was no place to leave her by herself. I ran back to find her sitting on the curb still crying. I felt really aweful for a moment, then I looked more closely to see she was just passed in crying position and had no tears or even red eyes when she woke up. I called over one of the motorcycle taxis I hadn't told to fuck off yet, gave him money to take her home, and walked home with a clear conscience where Phuong was waiting patiently. She called me today apologizing for whatever she did and told me she doesn't remember a thing, which means she probably thinks everything's her fault. Lucky me.

I've said this before and I still don't believe myself, but I've had enough of getting entrenched in local situations. Phuong has been calling and sending text messages saying how much she appreciated our time together and wants to see me again. At least she confessed that she absolutely hated my guts when we first met and it wasn't until the night on ecstasy that she started thinking I wasn't such a bad guy. In any case, Buffalo Springfield was right, Vietnam is a quagmire. So I just took a 36-hour bus out of there to Hanoi and I'm flying back to Bangkok in another 48. Time to move on.