Five More Past Tense Phnom Penh Bars
Hear me out, will you? I’ve got this theory. It’s called the Quantity Theory of Awful Bars; one goes, another comes along to fill its place. Dingo Bar closed. Well, say hello to Bar 108. That unstable drunk from Chez Johnny has been thankfully absent from Phnom Penh for a while – never mind, here are two more unstable drunks at Bogey and Bacall’s to fill his shoes. That’s the Quantity Theory of Awful Bars – no matter what happens there will never, ever, be fewer of them in Phnom Penh.
Hooters
Just a stone’s throw from the soon-to-be-gone Pasteur nightlife strip, Hooters represented the crap underbelly of the scene and it seemed to exist only because thunder-bummed ugly girls wanted to sell sex too.
In fact, arriving there one evening with the late Lord Playboy (a man well known for his ability to be first out of a tuk tuk and last into the bar), I instantly knew that I’d taken an hour off my life that I wouldn’t get back at the end.
The name Hooters itself was what philosophers might call a category mistake as you were more likely to see a six-foot gorilla in a kilt than a pair of big schmams there. As a consequence, it was difficult to give a gibbons bright blue goollies when this shabby, grim dump with no viable future duly went on the market with an asking price rumoured to be somewhere in the vicinity of $7.50. It was possibly the worst hostess bar anywhere in the known universe, let alone Phnom Penh.
Zombie Bird House
As a working stiff these days, I had no idea that the miniscule French owned Zombie Bird House had vanished from its berth on St 278, but I do remember that getting shitfaced was pretty much de jour and it being as good a place as any to fill your ears with Iggy Pop while knocking back pints of vodka at 3am.
Broken Bricks
He decorated his bar like a haunted house,” 66-year-old neighbour Sok Huong told the Phnom Penh Post as the bar owner was being taken away by the police. And now that the dust has settled on the various disasters he presided over, it’s perhaps time to take stock of Peaceman’s final debacle – the Broken Bricks, where, to coin an oxymoron, you could always expect the probability of the unexpected.
Fresh from the experience at the Peace Pub where the bar went on for practically a furlong, Broken Bricks had possibly the smallest bar in town, together with the smallest Western barkeep – Peaceman himself, the original mental midget and pint-sized pugilist– a bantam sized yet surprisingly vocal meth amphetamine addict from Birmingham, England. With a clammy pallor indicative of sleepless nights and one limb usually inexpertly bandaged and seeping blood after another domestic argument, he looked about as healthy as Jimmy Savile, and yet was always ready to unleash a volley of threats and invective at any hapless bystander. Indeed, the bar’s ‘500 riel a cuss’ swear-box usually had a nightly pot of around $75 by closing time.
Usually smashed out of his head on a practically lethal combination of vodka, red bull and crystal meth, it didn’t take much to set him off and tourists fresh from doing their atrocity field trips who’d stop and point their cameras at the French colonial building that housed his bar would famously get him going. Rage would swell his sunken chest like a turkey cock and within seconds, he’d be out there hurling half bricks and indulging in a spot of recreational stabbing.
Towards the end, his bar resembled a stricken battlefield and his own fury and loserdom reached a crescendo of vulgar farce, hitting the cringe button with gusto again and again. Things came to a head when he attacked a local waitress, prompting the entire neighbourhood to form into a lynch mob and trash his bar. After rescuing him from the melee, local police found his visa to be years out of date and he was jailed and eventually deported back to the UK.
Now in his mid 40s, weak kneed and mortality conscious, Peaceman was last seen trudging around Birmingham, England wearing an old cardigan, shoes with plastic bags tied around them and bearing a large placard advertising a discount store. His internet site has denied publicly that his life is in any way ‘’on the wane’’ or a vista of endless grey desolation and states that his autobiography ‘’A Box of Frogs’’ is currently looking for a publisher.
Sophie’s Club
It’s been some time now since this bar closed, but hundreds of hapless former customers are still taking antibiotics, anti retrovirals and combination therapy. We can only be talking about the frankly unshameable Sophie’s, whose closure last year put the strangely coveted title of Phnom Penh’s Rudest and Sleaziest Bar open to competition again.
Situated in between Psah Thmei and Russian Boulevard, a visit to Sophie’s involved walking through a dark unmarked door, a wander up two grimy flights of stairs followed by a very swift descent into Gomorrah. With its profusion of air headed slappers and men the size of elephant seals basking on sticky black vinyl sofas while being expertly and publicly fellated, a visit to Sophies involved being touched by something unearthly.
One brief pitstop was enough for me to come to the conclusion that all staff and regulars here should be tattooed with a health warning, similar to the sort of thing you find on the side of cigarette packets.
Slippery Sam’s
Being married to a local and having her run your hostess bar sounds like huge fun but has an obvious and lethal flaw, built into itself like a trapdoor. What if you sample your own stock, so to speak? In other words, what if the temptation of having so much available totty on your books combined with your God given mantle as employer turns you into a love rat and you start doling out the occasional good, if brief, seeing to, to any bar girl employee who happens to take your errant fancy.
Will your wife and employees end up in a scratching heap or will the boomerang bounce back and hit you – the instigator of all this corrosive enmity – firmly on the head.
Slippery Sam, a former submariner and owner of the premises on St 104 where Nay Nay Star Bar is now, found out the local answer to this question when the police came a’ calling following a complaint from his cuckolded wife. They busted his ass for the marijuana they found together with the far more serious matter of ‘possession of a large pink sex toy’ – a criminal offence in Cambodia. Rumour has it that it cost him around $30,000 to be able to skedaddle out of Cambodia, which is a lot of money for a bag of grass and a fluorescent dildo.
Our expat lives are full of inflated expenses that are propping up Cambodia’s fairyland economy where the locals only know boom and have never experienced bust. When the penny eventually drops, the crash will be mighty and nobody can drop $6 in a recession for a ‘him and hers’ drink five or six times every weekend night and a few times in the week. Running a bar in Phnom Penh is no stroll in the park at the best of times, but with the world in recession, it’s about to get that much harder. So which will be the next past tense bar?
