Suginami-ku
Tokyo
Dec 30, 1996

Dear Tom,

Thought you'd be interested in my last little journey, to Cambodia and Vietnam. Hope you got the tape and get it together to make another one in the next year. As for the letter, as the California waitress commanded: "Enjoy."

Let me explain my current condition. In a word, weak. I'm writing to early Fleetwood Mac. White boy blues. Picking their guitars to planks, pounding pianos to jello. Peter Green, the leader, was an Elmore James junkie, and his influence hangs heavy over the album. I have the shits, as is to be expected, but they hit me only on the last day of my trip.

Alcohol? Shochu, the rawest kind of sake. Cheap at six dollars a bottle. Orange juice cut. Still spaced from yesterday. Left steaming Bangkok at 6:30 am and got into Tokyo at about 5 pm. On two hours sleep. The day before that I was cold, in the Vietnamese mountains visiting a Zen monk and drinking Tiger beer in a stand-up shack.

In a sense the trip went perfectly. I got a head full of images, encountered life in the raw. Rolling through countryside at war for thirty years, among damaged people still shaking their heads from the unbelievable things they have encountered.

Cambodia. A non-country getting ready to do more damage to itself. Primitive communism they called it. Earth's most sucessful back-to-nature movement. Kill anyone who can read or write. Anyone who has technical, anyone who can speak a foreign language. Kill anyone with light skin, anyone who is not Cambodian. smash babies' brains out on tree trunks. Mother's turn last. Make a crocodile farm and feed them living flesh. Turn a high school into a torture center, and beat people with metal poles and fry them with electric shocks to the genitals until they confess, and leave them in piles of their own blood and excreta until you organize the strength to top them, slice the crowns of their heads off with axe handles.

Empty cities in forty-eight hours. Kill anyone who resists or complains. Fill temples with people and then splash gasoline around until the pitiful screams are drowned by the crackling of flame and flesh. Push thousands off boats in the middle of South East Asia's largest lake, until the crocs and carnivorous fish swarm. Strip people naked and tie them to trees. Flies will fill eyeballs with eggs, and ants will carry away twitching meat.

Well, you get the picture. Despite all this, despite the mountains of skulls left scattered in the countryside, they are extremely friendly people, as calm as Buddha. Until the next wave of terror hits. Which could be in the next month or so, given the disastrous state of their politics.

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