Oh Captain, My Captain

---

Oh Captain, My Captain

Wed 27/02-28/02/08

Free time. Too much free time. Ca Ba Island is a graveyard - off season, out of action, waiting around for the summer to come. The day starts with more internet frustration - two minutes, and I've had enough. I leave the guys, and go for a wander around the streets. The main strip is just one long road. I get to the end, and around the corner where the street curls back on itself, heading away from hotels and bars and towards the local's end of town. I do some scouting and find some better internet cafes, and then turn around, back the way I came. I see the three girls coming up the hill. We meet, and walk in the opposite direction, around a dirty little lake. I look up at the hills behind rows of houses, stretching away from the town. I can see what looks like a red and yellow temple at the top of one, and decide that if things don't look up soon, I'm gonna climb the hill, and make up my own adventure.

Later, we all meet up and sit in a bar. Craig is talking about the Captain game he played in Thailand, where one person takes command, and everyone else has to do whatever they say. Gregg is keen for being dared, and Craig tells him to go up to a random man in the street, and without any word of warning, try to administer a massage. After a little procrastinating, he gives it a go, striding up to a young guy and reaching out with his hands towards the poor fuck's neck - the dude freaks out, jumping a mile, and adopting some kind of self-defence position, as though he were being attacked. We all piss ourselves laughing, and decide we're gonna play the Captain game when we go out tonight.

Each one of us takes a turn at taking command. We go in order of age, so I'm up first. Sweet, sweet power - a red rush of blood to the head. Now, I'm gonna make you fuckers pay. I start with Trung, telling him he can't speak any Vietnamese to anyone, and can only respond to people using one of three English phrases: "How much does this bus cost?", "Where is the discotheque?" and "I'm just a poor boy from a poor family." Craig, I make pretend to be a dumb tourist. He needs to be in Hanoi, but somehow has ended up on Ca Ba. I instruct him to convince someone he is genuine and get directions to Hanoi. Gregg must begin every single sentence he speaks with the words "Last night I got my cock sucked by a midget with a shrunken head", Marianne has to spin and do a rabbit jump every five paces and Kat and Zoë have to link arms and stay together at all times.

In the first bar we stop at, I change the girl's instructions a bit. Every time someone says "Marianne", she must get up and hold her nose, slinking to the floor and back up like she's jumping into a pool, and Zoë and Kat have to lick each other's palms whenever someone says their name. Half an hours passes, the locals looking on, wondering why, wondering how to make it stop. I have to give up my captaincy, and pass the hat to Zoë. Straight away, she's out for revenge. I have to take off my shirt, and put it on again, back to front.

Craig and Gregg put on their hoodies, and tie them up tight, so that they look like a couple of cultists, shrouded, cloaked in fucking stupidity. Collectively and individually, we look like twats. We all head up to the karaoke bar. It's full of other travellers, and we get a wide range of perplexed looks as we all start behaving like mentalists, carrying out each other's instructions with little regard for our dignity. Trung is on the stage, jogging on the spot and doing star jumps, I end up wearing all my clothes back to front, including my shoes, and others wander around the bar, pretending to be lesbians or reciting nursery rhymes to innocent bystanders.

After singing a few songs and making dicks of ourselves, we leave and head for a club. I'm told to remove my shirt and tie it around my head, and then have to walk up to a group of old Vietnamese ladies serving food in the street, and introduce myself.

In the club, the wheel has turned full circle, and I'm back in the hot seat, with a head full of alcohol and a belly full of fury. Kat is banished to the front steps of the club to dance wildly to imaginary techno. Zoë is on the dance floor proper, doing forward and backward rolls. Like almost every club we go to, this place is empty. There's maybe three or four local men, and a big group of girls. These are hovering around one guy in particular at a table, and Trung tells me they are all call girls.

The Vietnamese guys find us pretty entertaining, and Zoë is being enthusiastically photographed by one as she rolls back and forth. Maybe that's what does it for him - maybe, she'll end up as a featured movie on "rolly-pollysluts.com". I hope not. I'd kinda feel responsible for her virtual violation.

The only one of us no longer playing ball is Craig. He has been dancing with one of the call girls for sometime, unaware she's on the job, and that he has no chance of taking her home. We try to explain, but he's too far gone to listen. One of her friends briefly calls her away from him, and he labels this girl "poison", viewing her intrusion as a deliberate act of boom-boom sabotage.

Victims are hard to come by now. Gregg is a mess, coming up to me, incessantly asking to be given more and more outrageous things to do. I send him away to run around the club, shouting "I'm a felcher" at the top of his voice. He returns, bored, wanting more. I make him strip to his wait, and drop his trousers as he dances. Another local dude likes what he sees, and tries to violently rip off Gregg's pants as well. He barely manages to hold on, and I have to turn away, shaken and disturbed.

Two Kiwi guys have appeared from somewhere, and are trying to make friends. They're a couple of walking, talking national stereotypes - big, dark-haired, mullet-sporting lugs; low on I.Q, high on drinking bravado. Marianne thinks they're okay, which is proof, if any were needed, that Marianne is fucking drunk.

One of my final commands as captain almost goes badly wrong. I tell Gregg he has to sell Kat to the dude lording it over all the call girls. I don't bother to view the results, but I'm later told the fucking little pimp succeeded - the guy gets out his wallet, and is ready to hand over 1million dong, when Trung steps in and explains it was all a joke.

Soon after this, the club closes and we leave. The two Kiwi's are telling us we have to come back to their hotel and drink gin with them. I have no fucking intention of going anywhere with those dicks, so I hang back, preparing to make my escape. We're back down by the waterfront, a few yards from the hotel. I can hear Craig and Gregg calling for me, so I duck behind a bill board a few metres away, and watch them march off in the opposite direction to search. I can still hear the Kiwi whine, so I stay put, popping my head out briefly to wave at Zoë.

Eventually, the New Zealand boys get the message that we're not coming back with them. We Indiana Jones-roll under the shutters of our hotel entrance, and I can hear the rat-tailed fuckers shouting about poms not being able to drink. Normally, I'd be straight back out there, refuting such an outrageous and reckless claim, but time spent with those two is time wasted - I don't what their stupidity infecting me.

We all slowly make it up the stairs. Craig comes up to our floor to smoke his last cigarette. Gregg asks him for a drag, and then runs off with it. He returns a few minutes later, having hidden and smoked the cigarette all himself. I tell him he's an evil fuck, and he shows no remorse.

Free time. This is what it can do to men. We're all crazy for a bit of structure. Instead, we wander the streets at night, half naked, delirious, speaking in strange tongues. We steal from each other, and sell our friends like they're common whores. We invite humiliation upon ourselves.
We wear our clothes back to front.
Two more days of free time. If this carries on, by Friday afternoon we'll be masturbating into our faeces and shoving shoes up our arses. Fuck that. Tomorrow, I'm climbing that hill. Tomorrow, we will re-introduce a little order and clarity. Culture in the daytime, depravity at night - that's the winning formula. That's the way we roll. We got our own style - wet, like a dirty little puppet.

---

Comments

[kat]

one million dong...the fucking cheek of it!!!:P
funny blog mr. id forgotten some of the captain game...probably because of the drink consumed. keep them coming x