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Adam and I took a seat and perused the prospects. "They don't look Khmer," I observed.

"They're Vietnamese. Cambodians prefer them because they have lighter skin." Adam frowned, then got up to talk to the mama-san. He returned after a few moments.

"No. 51 is 'busy,'" he said. "I've been assured that she'll be done in five more minutes, but somehow that just doesn't sound appealing to me, if you know what I mean. Let's go check out another place."

I followed Adam out of the Lay-Lay and into a new massage parlor two doors down. The layout inside was almost exactly the same as in the Lay-Lay (right down to the pink lights and the fluted pillars), but on a smaller scale. The working girls slouched seductively in their (comparatively chaste) shorts and T-shirts, making the glass-partitioned corner look like a soft-porn vision of a high school girls' locker room. As in the Lay-Lay, each girl had a plastic number pinned to her shirt.

Adam wasted little time in bringing our task to order. He called out to the mama-san, and two Vietnamese girls -- No. 8 and No. 17 -- padded out from behind the glass. No. 17, a doe-eyed, perky-breasted, splay-toed waif, sauntered up and planted herself on my lap; No. 8 went up to Adam, who cooed at her in Vietnamese.

Hookers have always made me nervous; I didn't look No. 17 in the eye. "What am I supposed to do now?" I whispered nervously to Adam.

"It depends on what you want," he said.

"What am I supposed to want?"

Adam gave me an odd look. "Well, I'm going to ask for a blow job."

I sat, awkward and silent, for a couple beats. The lovely Miss 17 squirmed flirtatiously in my lap. Despite my nonchalant interest, I was not there for "boom-boom." I was merely passing an afternoon by playing Dante (to Adam's Virgil) in the not-so-divine comedy of Phnom Penh's netherworld. I had followed Adam there simply to observe -- with greasy, stoical objectivity -- something I couldn't see in Albuquerque.

I decided to call my bluff with Adam. "I don't think I'm up for this," I told him.

Adam shrugged. "Sure, no problem," he said. "If you want to just wait here, I shouldn't be more than 15 minutes." Adam spoke a few words of Vietnamese to No. 17, who jerked herself up from my lap and sneered at me.

Embarrassed, I tried to salvage the situation. "How about a massage, then?" I said to Adam. "This is technically a massage parlor, right?"

Adam grinned. "Yeah, it's a massage parlor, but most girls don't like to give them. Massages are hard work, plus they take a full hour and cost the same as sex. A gorgeous girl like her could probably make $20 in the time it takes to give you a $5 massage. But maybe one of the uglier ones is willing to do it."

"Never mind," I said, not wanting to further complicate things. "I'll just wait here."

"Suit yourself," Adam said. He got up and led No. 8 into the hallway behind the glass partition.

Suddenly alone, I sat in my chair and glanced nervously around the pink-lit waiting room. Except for No. 17 -- who glowered at me from her new perch behind the glass -- nobody paid me any mind. A group of Cambodian men sat next to me and giggled as they sized up the merchandise. The mama-san happily played with a brown-skinned baby near the front door. The lobby TV featured a Khmer-dubbed video copy of "Space Jam," starring Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny. I tried to convince myself that this situation was no different than waiting for Adam to return from a piano lesson or a midnight pizza-run -- but this simply didn't work.

Suddenly aware that I had arms hanging from my shoulders, I frantically debated what to do with them. Was I supposed to fold them across my chest? Was it better to hang them at my sides? Should I have clutched them to the armrests of my chair? The possibilities seemed infinite, maddening.

In less than a minute, I had dashed off past the glass partition in an attempt to locate Adam. The dingy hallway revealed a dozen or so identical gray doors, lots of suspicious noises and no sign of my German Virgil.

"Adam!" I called out, as embarrassed as ever.

Next page | An encounter with No. 21