Stanford
All evil people are sentimental but all sentimental people are not evil - Isaac Asimov
The torrential rains were back again now in June and I just made it home from my walk on the river before it started pouring down again. I usually woke up at six o'clock in the morning and took a short walk to the gym or a long walk around the riverside which took me two hours. I did some running today and was enjoying the rush of dopamine that usually lasted for a few hours. I had two vices - I was a dopamine junkie and I was addicted to cheese, which was expensive here but I needed my daily fix of Emmental or Cheddar that I had with the baguettes or the rye I bought from the bakery on Tapul Road.
I loved the daily routine of getting up early and doing my things before breakfast, but it also happened that I stayed up all night drinking beer with Kate or Jade or some of the other people I knew here on Sok San Road which is the liveliest street here in Siem Reap, located in the northern part of Cambodia.
One of the other people was Stanford. Some connect the name with a university in Palo Alto in California, but this guy had very little to do with higher education even though he was a mastermind, but that was only in his own world and he was as easy to read as a comic book. Hemingway said that you have to be nice to the people you write about, but I was no Hemingway, and Stanford was constantly planning schemes and scams and cons, and he used people as puppets, or pawns on the chessboard for his own purposes, conquering by dividing people he knew. I may sound a bit too hard expressing my impressions about the guy but how do you describe someone like him in any other way? Using irony? Okay, irony it is.
I went out on the balcony to watch the rain for a moment and flies flew in through the open door and pretended not to find their way out again. Grow up. Where was I? Oh, yes - Stanford was a funny guy. I met him yesterday when he walked into Taste for Life, the restaurant I sometimes went to for breakfast. It was ten o’clock in the morning and he had probably been snorting cocaine all night again because he appeared to be sober but his eyes were bulging and he babbled like a circus monkey.
“You look angry,” I said.
“Yes, I had a fight with my ex. She was in the bar and left and came back with two other guys, and I said, ‘don’t bring other guys here!’” He was staring at me - “You just don’t do that!”
“Maybe she was trying to get you customers?”
“No no no, this was something else.”
Stanford had been the owner of the biggest bar on Sok San for three months now, with pool tables and rock bands playing several nights a week. It was a nice establishment and I had been there with Kate now and then, and I knew most of the guys playing there.
There was a guy, Nathan, who had helped him out starting the whole business, but he fook off with what Stanford said was a lot of money, so he also had an archenemy. Kate had helped him with getting bands to the bar because she knew the musicians playing at The Laundry Bar on the other side of the river and they were all very nice guys and great at what they did onstage. Stanford was grateful for her help even though he didn’t pay her anything but he gave her a beer now and then.
When Kate flew back to Australia for a few months Stanford was angry with her for not helping him anymore and he made up stories to make her feel sympathy for him and come running back to help him with the bar, stories that all of a sudden involved me. He sent her a picture of Nathan, whom I had never met, with me badly photoshopped into the picture sitting together in a bar on Sok San. It was like - look they are together, obviously ganging up on me.
“What about the photoshopped picture?” I asked Stanford.
“What picture?”
“You know what picture - the pic where you photoshopped me sitting together with this guy I have never met.”
“Oh… it was my ex who sent me that picture. She found it somewhere on the internet.”
Bullshit.
“It was a bad photoshop, didn't you see it was fake?”
“Yes, of course.”
“So, why did you send it in the first place if you knew it was fake?”
“Can I have a cigarette?”
“I’m not happy about it.”
A guy with an amputated arm walked in to the restaurant with his right hand outstretched and Stanford barked twice - “Fuck off! FUCK OFF!”
It was embarrassing and Lily, the owner, gave the beggar a few notes, looking at me, rolling his eyes.
This was leading nowhere and Stanford was out of it anyway, high on coke and no sleep. All of a sudden I saw the whole scene as very comical - I looked at Stanford’s cherub face with the silly haircut that made him look like a schoolboy, he had two missing teeth in the lower jaw (why the hell didn’t he get some dental work if he was so well off? Or maybe he wasn’t?) and I started laughing and my anger drained away.
Later I would blame myself for letting him off so easily because he deserved a punch on the nose, but there were people in the restaurant and I had known Lily for years. And there were surveillance cameras. We would meet again though. Maybe somewhere with no cameras.
But then I had a conversation with myself for a second opinion and decided not to do anything about it at all.
