I was in Louangphabang over the January full

moon--the last couple days of waxing and the first

few of waning. So the old royal capital of

Laos--now a backwater outpost with just a

trickle of westerners passing through to see the

Wats and the palace of King Sisavangvong--was

bathed in moonlight, the temples and the

crumbling colonial architechture washed over in

paleness, the palm branches dark silhouettes

against the blue night. And for kicks, I would

venture into the streets looking for monks to

talk to.


The onset of night was my sole daily ritual.

I would walk up the steps to the Stupa at

the top of Mount Phou Si--said not Foo See, but

Pussy--and watch the sun set in the green hills

lining the Mekong River; I would descend as an

overwhelming orange color seeped from the crack

of the west--the trail of the sun--and by the

time the orange was bleeding into pink I would be

walking down Samsenthai Road (literally, "three

hundred thousand Thais," which was the population

of Laos when Samsenthai was King). These dusks

were astonishing--unbelievable colors streaked

across clouds that loomed like billowy

hallucinations.


I was staying at the Auberge Calao, a Portuguese

villa near the edge of the town, near the

promontory where the Nam Khan tributary is swept

into the Mekong. There's an old Wat standing on

the tip--Wat Xieng Thong--and on the opposite

bank gardens carved in steps into the slope. From

there stretched rolling hills of jungle for

eternity, and China beyond. When the pink light

turned purple I would be standing on the

Auberge's balcony. The moon came up and its light

was on the Mekong's dark water, which rushed

south to Vientiane, to Phnom Penh, to Saigon.


When the sun still stands a few degrees above

the river the temple gongs start sounding. There

are something like twenty wats in the old town of

Louangphabang--monks are a cash crop, they are

absolutely everywhere in their orange robes--and

standing in the midst of it, the solemn clanging

sounds at all distances from all directions, like

a transcendental exercise in surround-sound. Then

the monks file into the sims--the gathering-halls

of the wats--and start chanting. It is the most

absolutely transfixing sound. My first night

there, I was at a café sipping Lao coffee--the

blackest, suspended in supersweet condensed

milk--and I heard the singing faintly in the

dark. I was just drawn to it. When I found it, I

stood there listening outside the temple gate

when it occurred to me I didn't have to stand

there; I could walk down the road and pass ten

wats from which the same chants were emanating.


It was a weird and magical place; still, I found

the Lao to be less immediately forthcoming than

the Khmer were when I was in Cambodia the week

before. And I was alone--though mostly I was

hanging out with the guitar on the Auberge

balcony, writing verses for songs I was unable to

finish back home, there was a nagging need for

the a minimum of personal contact. I learned, as

I did in Cambodia, the starkest essentials of

speech--hello, how are you?, thank you--and would

wander up and down the back roads, the

residential stretches where languid Lao folk sat

idling on mats in the open first levels of their

houses. Sabaidee, I said, and the guy's face

would light up in the warmest way. Sabaidee! It

was the most retarded vacation I had ever been

on; I spent hours staring at the Mekong passing

by from my balcony, scratching a word down here

or there, and then I would go out searching for

people to say hello to. And a week of nothing but

shouting greetings to strangers was the most

bizarrely satisfying holiday I'd ever had.


I took a liking to a café on the main drag,

Sisavanvong Road, a quiet boulevard of old French

and Chinese shophouses, exuding a decrepit

elegance, that stretched from the Phou Si to the

Wat Xieng Thong. The place was called Le

Potiron--the Pumpkin--but I'm certain that the

Lao script on the sign, in fact, read The House

Of Gay Waiters. There was a little strip of

bistros there, actually, seemingly staffed by an

amorphous squad of slender Lao boys in

eye-makeupwho appeared to be freelancers,

switching from joint to joint. I would order the

soup from one guy, who would swish off into the

kitchen, and another guy, kitted out like a

Williamsburg hipster, would emerge, place the

bowl down, and dash into the restaurant next

door, his hips swaying.


European backpackers would occasionally drift

down the road, Hammer-pantsed and t-shirted,

looking a little beaten-up, possibly by the

unfortunate phenomenon of opium tourism. It's

baffling to me that I can look into the

googly-eyes of someone, see him shuffling and

stumbling, dirty-faced and woozy, and think--I

want to be that guy. Journalling as I waited for

the soup to come, I had to keep reminding myself

of the time that heroin tacked up an eviction

notice on my heart, then proceeded to bulldoze it

and erect a strip mall.


There was an idiot that tended to inhabit that

stretch, too, some disturbed Lao soul that

frolicked maniacally between the shops and the

cafes. He came up to me once while I was eating

pumpkin soup and made some frenzied inquiry of me

in Lao, slurring with a fat tongue, and I

shrugged in bewilderment. I thought he was

hitting me up for change, but in fact he was

trying to converse with me; finally I said

something to the effect of, Look, man, I don't

understand a thing you're saying, and he answered

me in Lao as if we were actually having a

conversation.


Strolling towards the Mekong, down a sidestreet

where wooden Lao houses were clung to by vines

like beards of shadow, I passed a gang of Monks

lolling in front of their Wat in the moonlight.

How are you! How are you! They called to me.


I stopped. There were four of them, stretched

out lazily on the steps. None of them could have

been older than nineteen. Their heads and

eyebrows were shaved and their limbs were sharp

adolescent shapes in their orange robes.


Where are you going? One asked.


I'm going to eat, I said.


Eat! He said, merrily. I don't eat since noon!

You eat for me!


I'll eat for you, I said.


All the monks laughed--such a warm and lovely

sound.


It much impressed me how these kids could stand

the hardships of a monk's life--begging for their

rice, not being able to touch a woman--if you're

a woman and you need to hand something to a monk,

you have to put it on the ground near him and let

him pick it up--the intense lessons in Pali and

Sanskrit, not being able to eat after midday.

Considering my own dissolute hipster years in

college it's doubly astonishing to me. The chief

pleasure of some monks' lives, I discovered, was

trying to ensnare western tourists into English

conversation.


I figured out that after the chanting was the

best time to find them, so I started actively

searching for them after a bowl of pumpkin soup

at the House of Gay Lao Waiters. Sometimes their

bag of English phrases was limited--monks

shouting Good Morning!,at the strolling tourist

in the dusk. Other times I had fabulous

conversations with these kids that as fourteen

year olds had given up everything in their lives

to study the teachings of Buddha, and to whom the

identity of an English-speaker was absolutely as

first-class supergroovy as an American kid might

find being gifted at snowboarding or website

design.


All the conversations followed a basic form:

Where are you from? New York. Oh, United States.

How old are you? Thirty. Are you married? No.


Ohhhhhhh, said the monks with sudden nervous

embarrassment.


On the last night I was there I decided I was

sick of looking like a loser to the monks, and

they asked, are you married? I said Yes. Oh! They

said. Do you have children? No, I said.


Ohhhhhhh, said the monks with doubled nervous

embarrassment.


I did a couple touristy things--went to the

palace, which is a museum now. There's a

Soviet-built iron statue of Sisavangvong, who

looks like an blazing-eyed, crew-cut,

nine-foot-tall wizard-king in an outfit assembled

a bellhop's uniform and silk knickers, standing

on the lawn. Across from it there's a Wat that

appears to have walls encrusted with emeralds--it

glints blindingly when the morning mist

dissipates and the sun is just right. In the

palace itself there are throne rooms and

sub-throne-rooms with huge gilt pillows, and a

hall of gifts from foreign powers that includes a

tiny Lao flag--the old, royalist kind, with three

elephants--that went to the moon on Apollo XVII,

and a piece of moonrock on a plaque signed

Richard Nixon, 1973. There are trinkets from

Soviet space expeditions there, too--Sputnik

trophies that look like medieval

weapons--presented to Sisavang Vattana, the last

Lao king. Which, along with the statue outside,

is a little peculiar, considering that the

monarchy was ousted by a communist uprising in

1975. There is a glass case filled with the keys

to American cities--Philadelphia, Los Angeles,

Baltimore, and a medal bearing the seal of New

York State. The key to Knoxville is a crude

wooden thing that looks like it was made by a

seventh-grader in shop class.


There wasn't anything else quite as interesting

to me as the gift room--some Lao mosaics, another

image--a painting--of the awesome, massive,

demonic-looking Sisavangvong, and the old royal

bedroom,a lonely, windowless room with a huge

wooden sled-bed presided over by a big photo of

Sisavang Vattana, who looks melancholy and

withdrawn, like a banker with a broken heart.


I took a long skinny motorboat up the Mekong to

see the Cave of a Thousand Buddhas at Pak Ou.

After a two hour ride upstream, I blinked at the

Buddhas a couple times--they give you a

flashlight and let you walk into the sooty

hole--and got back on the boat. There were water

buffalo oafing along the dirt shoreline. Some of

the trees right on the river showed massive,

tangled root systems that lay underwater when the

Mekong bloats in the wet season. On either side

were towering limestone formations with wild

lushness racing up their sides. Occasionally a

jet-boat--garishly painted in supersmooth

airbrush colors, with a rudimentary Union Jack

decal on the side and a giant rocket-like exhaust

pipe, shiny chrome, pointing out the back--would

roar by, chock-full with Japanese tourists in

crash helmets. My narrow wooden boat, putting

comically down the Mekong, would rock alarmingly

in their wake. The boat's pilot, crammed up

against a steering wheel in the very tip of the

craft, was nonplussed.


But these days were diversions, mostly done

because I felt a strange touristic pressure to do

something--a fleeting pressure anyway. My average

day in Louangphabang was a little more esoteric,

and poetic--lingering in front of a Wat, the sky

above a flawless blue. The top spike of a golden

Stupa poking above the trees. The sun, almost

down, luminous behind a lattice of leaves--the

sharp-shining, waning, pale orange sun. And a

child running up and down the street, pulling a

kite fashioned from a pink plastic bag.


My last night I went trolling for monks and was

mostly unsuccessful--though I saw a Lao guitarist

in a darkened housefront, strumming and crooning

some Lao ballad. Sabaidee! I called. Rock on!


Ha ha! he yelled back. Sabaidee! Rock on! Good

Morning!


I finally found some monks at the top of the

steps leading up to the Wat Xieng Thong--it's a

giant staircase, guarded by monstrous stone

lions, that leads all the way down the cliff to

the lapping lip of the river.


I climbed the steps, calling to them. The moon

had waned sufficiently that a few clear stars

were visible in the night. The hills across the

Mekong were blue outlines. There was an enormous

cloud sailing sluggishly past the

moon--magnificent, and edged with platinum

moonlight.


How are you? I asked.


I am--unhappy, said one monk.


He makes a joke, said another monk. He will be

in the Wat his whole life.


Are you unhappy that you're in the Wat your

whole life?


Ahhhhhhh, says the unhappy monk, waving off the

question, and he laughs a nervous laugh.


There were three of them standing there. The

unhappy monk wore a blood-colored robe. The other

two were in orange--one of them, looking not just

a little like Jughead, stood there silently with

his mouth hanging open. He wore a knit, ochre

balaclava at a kind of cool-kid angle, such that

the cap covered half his face. The third monk was

very cordial.


I asked the cordial monk his name and he said:

Andy. And I thought--how funny that a Lao name

should sound like such a banal Western name. I

turned to Jughead. What's your name?


Bob, he said.


The angsty monk in the blood orange robe stomped

off, and Bob and Andy and I sat there, talking

about the monk life, and my pretend wife that I

told them I had.


Are you happy being at the Wat Xieng Thong? I

asked, looking at the sim, and the little

room-sized side-chapels beside it--surely this is

one of the most beautiful houses of worship in

the world.


It is good, and sometimes it is bad, said Andy.


And we three had a grand evening--Andy eagerly

brought out his English textbook and I critiqued

his pronunciation as he read aloud rudimentary

tales of Alice who lives in Brisbane with her

Sister, Sarah, and who likes to ride her bicycle

and to go dancing. At one point I was trying to

teach him how to pronounce the Western "L" and

there me and two monks stood, on the stairway to

the Wat Xieng Thong, in the shadow of the Stupa,

under the stars, in the moonlight, going

Luh-luh-luh-luh-luh-luh-luh…


It really was a fantastic time.


We will go with you to the airport tomorrow,

said Andy.


And so they did. The three of us piled into the

back of a tuk-tuk--a kind of wagon welded to the

back of a motorcyle to create a single chimeric

vehicle; in Savannakhet, in the south of Laos,

they call them "Sakayalobs", after a percieved

resemblence to Skylab--and hurtled in this

rickety thing towards my flight to Vientiane. Bob

asked to try on my sunglasses--big chunky Gucci

ones, like the grooviest robot in history might

wear--and he did, and was absolutely delighted;

he leaned his head back and grinned like a petite

Lao Ray Charles.


Are you allowed to own things?


O-own? Repeated Andy, unsure of the word.


Are you allowed to have possessions?


Oh--said Andy--no. Only the Abbot can have

possessions.


And I thought--fuck it. I said: Bob, I want you

to keep those sunglasses. Then I pulled my

paperback of East of Eden out of my bag and

handed it to Andy and said, So you can have

something to read in English. And then I gave

them both copies of a CD of music I had written.


There was a terrible moment--a stunned silence.

I had figured that if they weren't allowed to

accept gifts they'd politely turn them down. But

this was a dynamic shift that seemed to drop from

outer space; a mood of shock and tremendous

gravity.


I would like--to thank you--from the bottom of

my heart, said Andy, grasping for the English

formalities. And your wife--when you are with her

again--to send my greetings to her, and to hope

that she also will someday come to Louangphabang.


When we got there, everybody shook hands and I

took some pictures, and Bob and Andy got back in

the tuk-tuk and sped down the dusty road back to

the Wat Xieng Thong--with, it seemed to me, a

kind of sense of relief.


I met an Australian biologist on the plane--he

sought me out because he was looking for an

American who might be able to explain to him the

meaning of the word "hobo." I told him the

puzzling tale of the embarrassed monks and he

smiled knowingly.


There is nothing ruder to the Lao than to

decline a gift, he said. And monks aren't allowed

to own anything other than three pieces of

clothing and a begging-bowl. I'm afraid you put

them in a bad spot.


I was devastated that I did something so obtuse,

that I fucked up a beautiful hang so thoroughly.

And as the plane traced the muddy, mighty waters

of the Mekong four hundred miles, to the very

edge of Thailand, I thought--Ah. It's not so bad.

I can always write Andy and tell him that I

didn't realize the depth of my faux-pas. After

all, he did give me his e-mail address.