hun sen is my friend

The River Street Bistro Bar is on the corner of my street. They have a decent pool table and have been renovating the upstairs into some kind of hip-hop disco. I first went in to the club part because I could hear the thumping bass from my room and was not impressed. The go-go dancers are required to wear jeans by decree from Hun Sen. There were a lot of ‘returnees’ hanging around. These are Cambodian Americans who have been deported, returned to a country they never knew. Most were in gangs in Long Beach. So I like to play pool and there is a pretty Khmer girl who just wouldn’t let me win a game. So I kept going back to play her. Last night I beat her four games to none. So I decided not to press my luck and went out on the balcony and bought her a ‘Lady Drink’. She speaks english well and was telling me about a wedding she had gone to in Sihanoukville. I noticed she had rows of scars on her forearm, something I had seen many times in Thailand. It seems to be a common response to hopelessness and despair among prostitutes. She said she was once in love, and her heart was broken. She said he was a 64 year old Australian pilot and he lived in Cambodia but he married her friend. She added that she has a three year old daughter from another old man. She is 23 years old. A drunk Khmer guy came up and sat with us. He was well dressed in an orange polo shirt and white pants with a big walkie-talkie hanging off his belt. She introduced him as her brother. She said he was ‘Hun Sen’s border guard’. I figured he was on leave from the border. He seemed distressed as well as shit-faced. His sister brought him a glass of water. I sat as they talked for awhile in Khmer. Then she asks if I would buy him a drink and I do. She goes off and he puts his arm around me and says ‘borng bproh’, which I knew from my recent lessons means ‘big brother’. So I was relieved he was my friend. Then he took out a silver .45 pistol that was tucked into the back of his belt and set it on the balcony. Very quickly and skillfully he pulled back the mechanism and took the bullet out of the firing chamber. Then he released the clip and squoze the bullet into it. Then he reloaded the clip and put the gun back under his shirt. Hun Sen’s bodyguard, not border guard...