Cambodia
1975
Set list:
Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head, BJ Thomas
The next day we are sent out again. No need to bury our lost partner—nothing left of him to bury. Meng and Siem are understandably rattled. I see their nervous faces even in the dim light of the covered truck. We are pushed out and onto a dirt path just outside the city. Our orders are to complete our circuit by the time the troops return at midday. This will be very difficult, and now that we know what we are being used for, every step is traumatic.
When the sun is at its highest, we lean against a crumbling temple and watch two mutts fight over a chicken’s foot.
“They will kill us if we don’t do our job, but if we do our job, we may explode.” Meng puts his face in his hands and slumps down to the ground. One of the dogs mounts the other and begins to hump his opponent feebly.
“What if we just say we covered the ground? How would they know?” Siem squints at the notebook. “We may already be dead by the time they find out we lied.” I keep my eyes on the pair of dogs. At some point in the romp, something very surprising happens. To our horror and delight, each dog’s testicles become twisted around his opponent’s.
Siem and I jump up and hoot and clap. Meng looks unsure but then smiles.
“I have never seen anything like it!” Siem screams as the two dogs howl and whine. Meng—always so merciful—approaches the struggling pair of dogs and delicately separates them. One dog snaps at Meng’s hand and skitters away with the scrap in his mouth, while the other stays and licks his hand.
The dog follows us now. We throw a ragged doll down the road and he rockets toward the prize, then diligently brings it back.
He is a good dog. We name him Samnang, which means “lucky.”
After our midday rendezvous with our superiors, we are sent out again, this time with flashlights. The bugs buzz in the heat and we are weary of walking.
“I’m too tired to be afraid of land mines,” I say.
“I stopped caring kilometers ago,” says Meng. “Sing for us, Pannah.”
“Yes! Sing. No one is out here. No one will hear you,” says Siem.
I can’t see Samnang, but I hear distant rustling in the brush off to the right. I’ve had a song stuck in my head all day. I clear my throat.
“Raindrops keep falling on my head…” We sway like drunks in the street, our flashlights bouncing from one jagged palm leaf to another. A fuzzy moon smiles on our boyish cavorting. I can tell that my song brightens my friends’ moods. Despite their exhaustion, they start to sing along, hopping from one foot to the other.
“Raindrops keep falling on my head, but that doesn’t mean my eyes will soon be turning red…”
Boom!
A sudden explosion bursts through the darkness of the night. The weak beams of our flashlights go up and then bow low to the intruding brightness, like humble worshipers of a new and victorious god. The shock echoes through the forest. Our ears ring and we fall back as dirt and leaves and bits of dog rain down all around us.
“Because I’m free,” I mumble, shell-shocked. “Nothing’s worrying me.”
Chicago, Late August 2025
Set list:
Let’s Get It On- Marvin Gaye
“So it was a heart attack?” My daughter asks on the way to school the next morning.
“You never told me Mr. P was a janitor,” I respond bitterly.
“Why would I tell you that?” she chuckles. “Plus, you never ask me about school.”
“Fair.” I flick my turn signal. The tick-tock feels like it’s matching the BPM of my fried mind.
“Why the sudden interest in the janitor?” I let the question linger. She doesn’t press me for an answer.
I’ve never talked with my daughter about my dreams. I’ve never asked her about hers. Barely sleeping for two days (one mixing the track and the other in the hospital) did something to me. I actually consider telling her that I want to take this old man and make him into the next musical sensation. Then, after I’m famous, I can prove to your fat, bald uncle that I’m still cool.
I drop her off at the schoolyard.
“So, what are you gonna do?” She puts her arms up and crosses them on the windowsill of my car door. I’m staring at her. I’m so tired.
“I don’t know. The paramedic said he’s Cambodian. He’s got a bad heart and doesn’t take surprises well.” I rub my face. “Who knows, if I see him again, he might have another heart attack. Plus, I can’t speak Cambodia or whatever.”
“Khmer.”
“No, his name is Pannah—”
“No, you don’t get it,” she replies. “The Cambodian language is called Khmer.”
“Fine. I gotta—” I shift out of park.
“Wait! I can speak it,” she says. Is she fucking with me?
“They teach Cambodian at this school?”
I poke my head through the window. She puts her hands behind her and rocks back on her heels. She fixes me with a coy smile from under that top hat. Stupid hat.
“No, Dad, the school doesn’t teach it, but my pen-pal of 5 years lives in Phnom Penh. I taught myself how to read, write, and speak Khmer.” Hope fills my brain, heady, like an extra shot of espresso, firing up my blood.
“Really?” I get a crazy idea. “What are you doing after school? Can you meet him?” I flounder, my brain trying to catch up with my mouth, “I mean, will you go with me to meet him?” She arcs an eyebrow. Whenever she makes this face, she looks like her mom.
“What’s in it for me?” Has she always been so mercenary?
“What do you want?” I ask, tentatively. She is biting her lip and looking up, taking her time to respond, no doubt making the most of this rare opportunity.
“I want you to take me and two friends bowling on Saturday.”
I scratch my scalp through my hat. I was expecting worse; at least the bowling alley has one craft IPA on tap. I conclude that these terms are acceptable, and while it isn’t what I wanted to do on a Saturday night— I was hoping to smoke a little weed and beg my wife for sex.
My wife! That reminds me, and I reach my hand out to my daughter.
“Okay, deal. But don’t tell your mom.” Her face lights up. For a millisecond, I see her as a five-year-old and my heart wallops with an old emotion: part joy, part fear.
“Why not tell Mom?”
“She might not want me bringing you along to my work in order to hang with a strange janitor after hours.” She smirks, then nods and turns toward the school building. “Hey!” I call after her. “No weird friends, like…no vampires.. or furries.” She doesn’t turn but raises her hand to wave me goodbye.
“No promises!”
Bye.
I don’t get any work done. I Google venues. Dream of album release tours. What is Mr. P’s range? What genre should we try first? My supervisor’s supervisor is here today. Dipshit. I shuffle into the quarterly progress meeting. He singles me out. He is gesturing at me. I hear his words but only absorb his frustration through his corporate mumbo jumbo. “Work-life…output…bandwidth…” He stops speaking, and I nod, letting him know I know he’s saying words to me. I make my face thoughtful. Goddamn, he launches into the same diatribe but a higher key. “Rocks in the back yard, getting hands on the ball, year-end projections.” I keep nodding, imagining that every jerk of my head is blowback from a handgun, mentally wasting this fool.
Lunch. I’ll apply myself for the next two hours and clear my docket, then email my direct supervisor about “post-Covid brain-fog” and needing to work from home the rest of the week. I keep my eye out for Mr. P. Nothing.
My daughter hops into the passenger seat. That’s new. She usually sits in the back. She asks me if we can go to McDonald’s. We run through the drive-through and then head to my work building.
“Okay, so what do you want to talk to him about?” she askes.
“Eh, I overheard him singing. He has this voice…” I trail off.
“Earth to Dad.”
“Sorry, I want you to ask him if he’d be willing to record a song with me.”
She chuckles.
“My friends will not believe this. My dad, cutting a record with the janitor. I guess it’s like they say: truth is stranger than fiction.”
Sure.
We get to the office at six. Golden hour throws javelins of light on the front of the office making it blaze. Too bright. Walking up, I look at us now in the reflection of the glass door. She’s clutching a bag of fries, and I look slightly homeless with my shades and knit hat. I’m frowning now, because I realize I don’t have a key.
“How do we get in?” she asks. I grunt and put my hands to the glass to shield the glare and peer in. No sign of him.
“I guess we just wait till he’s done.” I slump against the door and take out my phone.
She puts the greasy bag between us, wipes salt from her hands, and pulls out her phone.
After twenty minutes, I’ve exhausted all my app-checking/ web searching/ time-wasting and put my phone back in my pocket. She steals a glance up at me and then puts her phone away.
The last sliver of sun is setting.
“So…have a boyfriend?” I venture. She turns, placing one hand behind her, leaning back as if to check if I’m serious.
“Boyfriend?”
Shit, had she told me before? Wait, I guess I just assumed she was straight. Maybe that’s why she’s looking at me like that.
“Yeah.” I double down, incredulity bolstering my weak position. She’s only twelve—and wearing a top hat—she can’t have figured out her sexuality yet.
“You don’t remember Casander?”
“No.”
“The boy I met on vacation last year?”
“No.” Honestly, that trip was a bit of a bender.
“Well, we’ve been texting since the beginning of summer. He lives in Michigan.”
“Uh huh.”
She straightens up and sits back against the wall. “How did you and Mom meet?”
“Eh.” I think back. We met at a dive bar. Truth be told, she was not totally sober. If she had been, maybe she wouldn’t have come home with me that night. Maybe she wouldn’t have gotten pregnant.
“At a party,” I answer.
“That’s it? No romance?”
“Not sure what you were expecting,” I say, a bit defensively. A strange quiet falls between us. I try and remember what it’s like to be twelve. So much of life and love seems like moving from the kiddie pool to the deep end.
I soften my expression.
“She liked going to my shows. I had a band back in college.” That was true. For all the years of disappointing my wife or falling short, she really did like when I played music.
“Really?” my daughter brightens up. The parking lot lights blink on in the coming gloom.
“Yeah—wait, did you hear that? It sounds like a car starting.” I stand. Of course! He doesn’t use the front door to leave. “The back exit!” I take off around the building and trip down a small hidden depression of grass, a drainage valley, and scramble up the far end on all fours. As I round the corner, I see a crappy work van driving out of the lot. Winded, I lean forward, resting my hands on my knees.
I hear squealing tires behind me.
“Dad! Hurry, get in.”
“You’re only twelve—you can’t drive!”
“He’s getting away!” I stand up and open the passenger side door.
“Don’t tell your mom about this.”
She pulls into the apartment complex ten minutes later. We watch Mr. P take a small insulated lunch box from his work van and slowly shuffle to a ground-floor apartment. The small apartments resemble the cells of a beehive.
“What do we do now?” my daughter asks.
I check my reflection in the passenger side mirror. I’m red-faced and sweaty.
“Let’s give him a minute. You can introduce me to him in his language, right?”
“Khmer, yes.”
“Okay, stay behind me till I know he’s… I dunno, chill.” She nods. “And take off that ridiculous hat.”
I pass the front window of his apartment. The concrete sill is decorated with figurines spray-painted gold, an unopened Coke can, and some incense. The worn welcome mat has a smiling Buddha on it. I knock on the door.
Mr. P opens the door and his eyes widen with surprise. I put my hands up, hoping to God he doesn’t have another heart attack.
My daughter steps out from behind me and says something that sounds like “suc-sue-die!”
He still has his hand on his chest and is wheezing, but his eyes soften and the edges of his mouth turn up. He repeats the strange phrase back to my daughter and then directs his attention back to me. I’m at a loss and an awkward silence fills the space between us. I look down at my daughter. She points to the Coke can and the old man chuckles and waves us into his dim apartment.
It smells bad, but also kind of good. He points to a tatty couch and we sit. His television looks like it’s from the 50’s. It’s playing Jerry Springer on mute. My daughter and Mr. P are talking to each other now. I’m actually kind of impressed. I had no idea you could learn a language this obscure outside of school.
My daughter points at me and makes a charade-like gesture of holding up a microphone and singing into it. The old Cambodian man walks back to the sitting area bearing a steaming kettle of hot water, a can of Coke, coarsely ground coffee in a funnel, and a small can of sweetened condensed milk. He sits down contentedly on the floor, and then—as if he forgot something—stands back up, bustling into the small kitchen. As he passes the TV, he switches it off. The TV literally has a knob.
I lean in close to my daughter and whisper:“Did you ask him if he would sing and let me record it?”
“Not yet,” she replies.
Mr. P comes back with a tin of Oscar Meyer cocktail weenies and places it on a low table. He squats limberly on the opposite side of us and pours the hot water over the coffee grounds. My daughter opens her pop and takes a sip.
“Mr. P has a son who goes to high school,” she explains to me. “He says his son is very smart and good-looking.” She smiles that bandit’s smile again, the one her mom makes.
“Okay, well, eye on the prize, Rome-ette.” I scold. She sips again, then stumbles through a couple of clumsy sentences. Mr. P nods along and pushes a mug of coffee toward me. He plops a spoonful of sweetened condensed milk, the color of cum into my cup. I try to curb my disgust, but I can feel my nose wrinkle. I’m nervous because I can’t tell how the conversation is going. She says a thing and then he looks confused–like he’s trying to get something out of his teeth with his tongue. A couple times, he seems to offer alternative words, and then understanding dawns. Near the end, Mr. P’s joy turns to a look of contemplation.
“Tell him I will pay him,” I urge.
“Dad, I don’t think that will work. It’s not very proper to offer a stranger money.”
She suddenly lights up with an idea and spits more broken Cambodian—Khmer– at the man, gesturing as much as talking. He smiles and nods.
“That looks like a yes!” I take a drink from the coffee. It’s actually very good.
“He said that he will agree to sing.”
“No way!” I clap my hands together and Mr P jumps a bit. “Sorry,” I say. “When can we get him in the studio?”
“He’s agreed to sing, not record.”
“What?” I frown.
“He says, first we’ll sing together. He wants to go to a karaoke bar, Saturday night.”
“Saturday night, but I’m taking you and your friends bowling.”
She smiles at me. That feeling again.
“Change of plans, Dad.”
Great, so karaoke with three middle school girls and an old Cambodian man. It’s fine, I tell myself. It’s all worth it if I can get him in the studio.
Later that night, I can’t sleep again. Too excited. I descend into the basement studio again to toke from my weed pen and fart around with the new track. My wife pads down the stairs and into my office. I click the space bar, pausing the track.
“Sorry, was I too loud?” I pull my headphones down on to my temples.
“No,” she says with a sigh. “I just can’t sleep. Work stuff. What are you working on?” She gestures with her eyes to the seat next to me. I pull it out for her and she sits.
“Just a remake of an old classic. I heard someone sing it differently, and it inspired me.” I feel suddenly bashful, like I did when we first started dating.
“Can I hear it?” she asks.
Amazed, I take my headphones off and hand them to her. She tucks messy blond hair behind her ear. I press play. Her eyes go soft, a listening look.
Wow, I think, my stoned mind making everything weighty. She never took an interest in my hobbies… well, not in years. Her head is nodding now. Does she like it? She takes one headphone away from her ear and reaches over to hit the space bar as she leans in one of her breasts brushes my forearm. A million horny scenarios shutter past the camera obscura of my imagination.
“Our daughter said you hung out with her today.”
Shit. Did she rat? There goes the possibility of sex.
“Yeah.” I admit.
“She says you’re taking her and some friends out tomorrow night?”
“Yeah.”
“Can I come?” she asks.
Is this a trap? There’s no time for a clever excuse. I speak without thinking.
“Yeah.”
My wife stands up and walks toward the office door. She stops under the threshold and turns back. She gives me her bandit’s smile.
“Wanna get together?” She winks.
I’m floored.
“Yeah.”
