Cambodia was dusty, dirty, smelly, corrupt, hot and a lot like Baltimore in the summertime. Truthfully, if I hadn’t lived in Baltimore, going to a place like Lexington or Hollins Market, and that level of being suspicious, than Cambodia would have been a hell of a shock. Hated the food in Cambodia. I lost a lot of weight there. They were so dirty.

I was at this one pier in Pnom Penh where people come to use a latrine which is just a hole in the boards you shit into, which probably goes into the river, and I walk out and there is the wok on a camp stove and there was this rat in there that had to be body and tail the size of a squirrel. If I could find ethnic Chinese or Vietnamese people in Cambodia I ate there. Cambodia is just dirty, like one big Mexican border town like Juarez. I ended up getting sick. I lost 20 pounds in Cambodia. I had dysentery, crapping myself.

You can get whatever drug or pill you want. Back in Thailand I had gotten jacked up in a motorcycle accident and in Cambodia I could get the muscle relaxers and whatever with no prescription. It’s a very film noir kind of place an evil-vibed country.

I did go to Angkor Wat, which was very cool. There was a stint in a beach town where I met some U.S. agents.

I was in a place called Sihannoukville where this was this redheaded Alaskan barmaid. She had quit her gig working as a chemist for Pfiᴢer, ridiculously intelligent and ridiculously hot—when you see a white woman that looks like that and the European bitches are all schlubby—I’m like not here for this shit but, I was there and why not!

On the beach there were kids selling snacks and beer and I knew she was into me and I thought I’d stick around for a day or two and I looked around and she was like their adoptive mother. One night I go back into the bar and she’s like “Let’s go for a ride and a cup of coffee,” and I met up with her.

We are talking and we are sitting down drinking a cup of coffee and she grabs my lip and she has a scoop of ketamine [a drug that zones you out, like cat tranquilizer] and she puts it in my lip and she takes some and we drive on this motorcycle, having a weird trip on this beach and she is telling me about these Isrаelis that made this shit and she’s kind of cool but weird—hot and crazy—I’ll be in town for a couple days and I’m sitting there and all the kids are like, “You betta watch out” and there is this Australian guy who says, “Everybody knows what’s up in town,” like they seen her with me and it’s a small expat community and he says, “Hey mate, do you know how much it costs to kill somebody in Cambodia?”

I’m like, “What?” and he says, “I’m giving you a warning, it only costs a hundred bucks to get you killed in Cambodia and her boyfriend is coming through here and he’s connected with some real heavy motherfuckers.”

There was a lot of Australian organized crime in Cambodia. I had not realized what I was getting myself into.

That is when I went to seen Angkor Wat. I should have spent more time there rather than with those shitheads.

It took maybe 8 or 9 hours to go by bus from Cambodia to Vietnam down in the Plain of Reeds.

The roads started getting paved as soon as you hit Vietnam. They are both dirty, in all those countries you smell the same stuff: burning trash, some kind of shit and dust, unless it is the rainy season and it is chaotic and crowded and fucked up—but in Vietnam shit works better. The Cambodians are just not as smart as the Vietnamese or the Thais.

Big Ron's Baltimore: A Working Man's View of Urban Blight