Fear and Bloating in Kampot as the Uncomfortably White Brothers Say Goodbye: A factitious recount from the mind of one Doug Ralphson to Guillermo Wheremount

It’s not often one meets someone like Doug Ralphson. He’s a poet, a word spinner, an inter-dimensional traveller for whom life just plain looks a little different than the one those of us less in tune with the universe see.

It’s square pegs in round holes like Doug who remind us that in this life there is more out there that one can possibly imagine, that we don’t even know what we don’t know.

And once you know that?  Well, like Doug, you really might actually know it all. The stuff worth knowing anyway.

This story came to me like a gift from Doug. One he didn’t even know he was bestowing on me.  OK, it was a butt dial he made from god knows where but I captured the tale in its entirety. And now, after weeks of transcribing the genius that is Doug in full spoken word flight, I am paying it forward by passing it on to you.

Guillermo Wheremount 

When the going gets weird? The weird head to Kampot

I had to get out of the Penh.  Favourite working girl was undergoing a “routine” medical procedure. As for Tuol Tom Pong where I hang my hat? 

It was under an emergency man-bun alert since a local watering hole spontaneously combusted when one too many top-knots arrived and ordered green apple martinis. 

Good a reason as any to bolt to Kampot. Rumours of a craft beer festival were adrift, one where my boys, the Uncomfortably White Brothers, were about to perform their last show.

Before long I was holding afternoon court surrounded by way too many Cambodia beers outside the Magic Sponge. Hours moved diagonally as a steady procession of well-wishers approached me to pay their respects. 

The restoration of the time-space continuum soon found me next door, sat at a table at Monkey Republic, the site of the Kampot Craft Beer Festival. 

“Is this heaven?”, I wondered aloud

Not quite”, said the friendly purple snake who had set up camp beside me.

Close enough for me and a fitting place for the “Brothers” last hoorah regardless. 

They’d joined me earlier during my Magic Sponge meditation, using my squat spot as something of a green room.  An endless stream of drinks had flowed as the band members appeared, disappeared and then re-materialized as newly-washed, neatly coiffed apparitions, sporting what I took to be stage gear.

“Snappy dressers,” I said to the snake.

“Zando,” said my slimy purple friend.  Love that guy.

Unlike the other highly publicised musical splits that happen here in the Kingdom like clockwork every February, the “Brothers” decision to call it quits did not involve the imminent departure of a key member from this, the land of wonder.

No, nothing like that. I’m chalking it up to rashness. Rashness and impetuosity. Fucking impetuosity. 

I mean just look at them. Ernie, the baby-faced 23-year-old with the moustache of an eleventh grader. Greg, barely 28 and a half in his stocking feet.  

Jesus, the band would probably float away if you pointed a hair dryer at them, saved from that indignity only by an erratic equilibrium grounded by the gravitas of octogenarian Sal. 

Clearly, they had let the pressures of the road, the demands of ex-wives and way too many damn pasta dinners take their toll. Yet another casualty to the scourge of the Bolognese. 

Over the course of the afternoon the atmosphere on the Magic Sponge porch had taken on the shape of an angry elephant seal, pulsating and heaving as the “Brothers” collectively bleated on about not sitting for a final interview with your correspondent. 

That noise had merged into a drone-like loop emulating “Revolution Number Nine” as the words “the music speaks for itself” were repeated over and over and over again. 

At least that’s what I remember. For all I know Ernie might just have been mumbling as Greg recited a performance art-piece he’s been working on forever called “The Gruff Man”. And Sal? Probably meditating. But that mantra he’d bought second-hand from a smoke shop owner in Brooklyn back in the 80’s?  It’s a loud one with a disturbing number of consonants.  

The only memories your correspondent can retrieve more or less intact sounded like half-mumbled anecdotes I’d heard before of the “Brothers” illustrious career. They could have been spoken word pieces on the Nixon administration though.  Sal does that sometimes.  

The Magic Sponge closes around evensong.  That much I do know for sure. My sub atomic level disruption and re-assembly next door at Kampot’s Tuol Tom Pong tribute night, the aforementioned craft beer festival, must have happened around then. 

The bar was packed to the rafters with quadruple hopped IPA aficionados, all paying more for beer than should be legally allowed courtesy of the infusion of certified organic/fair trade coffee extract, lemongrass or flavours usually reserved for fucking yoghurt.

Overheard at one stall from some man-bun?  “This flavour was inspired by my girlfriend’s shampoo!”  

That drove me to the door. It was far too horrible, far too loud, the man–bun to proper hair style ratio so dangerously out of balance and the band hadn’t even started yet. 

Salavation? Look in the orange cooler

Your correspondent walked down the road, got some more Cambodia’s from an orange cooler and sat down across the street to observe from a safe distance.  

Showing up in Kampot had not been without some trepidation. Within it lurked both gangland figures who wished me dead, lame or at least paper cut and a long string of former fiancés who will only settle for seeing me pushing up daisies or re-engaged. Neither had sussed out that I was there though. I was flying safely under the radar. 

But as they say in Cambodia, the pineapple has many eyes. You can never be too cautious. 

My disguise helped, bald spot/comb-over wig and false beard, so false it caused people to look away and mothers to shield their children’s eyes. 

To blend in further I wore a Beer Lao singlet, three quarter length shorts and a pair of day-glo flip-flops. A cart on Street 51 in the Penh had over-turned and decided on a pop-up sale to solve the problem a few hours before I left. I was able to snag a disguise ensemble at a discount by fighting through a phalanx of the visa expired 50 cent beer crowd. Those buggers know a deal when they see one. 

Weighing misguided respect for the “Brothers” and my misgivings about doing another 20 trips around the sun in the Kingdom the hard way, I was able to subdue the voice in my head whispering “torch it, torch it” in reference to the venue now bursting with man-buns. 

The Khmer craft beer industry would sleep easy that night, never knowing just how close they came to goodbye. 

I had moved on to contemplating the release of some kind of exfoliant/deworming agent instead, but my time would prove sadly limited when my sojourn was suddenly and cruelly cut short. 

Word had come down from the Penh that favourite working girl, of the “routine” medical procedure mentioned earlier, was being held hostage by an evil cabal attempting to collect on my gambling debts. 

All of which reminds me of a story, one pertaining to a similar evening. Tricky to describe, but it involves an individual dancing like a praying mantis and another making an attempt to scale a very tall lady boy while dressed as a gorilla.  Anyway, too long a story to recount now, but I’m the guy that procured the monkey suit.

Hastened as I was by the need to retreat back home, your correspondent thus can only assume that the “Brothers” goodbye was replete with their usual gyrations and distortions as they took the stage one last time.  All in aid of leading the crowd helplessly and hopelessly into a frenzy of old-timey over-drinking. 

Punters standing on tables, chaos spreading virus-like, occasional ceiling fan decapitations, kazoo abuse of a level seldom, if ever, approached.  These were the keys to an Uncomfortably White Brother’s gig, that magic now lost to the annals of music history. 

And in the end? The “love” you make……..

Or perhaps not.  Perhaps the “je ne sais quoi” at work was that they reportedly finished the show with the word “love”.  That’s nothing less than an epitaph in my books. One that reveals them as the fucking hippies I always suspected them of being.  

But I was already gone by when, and if, that happened. I’d scarfed a couple of Bloody Marys, called a taxi and headed back to enact the rescue of favourite working girl. I’m sentimental that way. Just like a line from an Uncomfortably White Brothers tune, sweet with a splash of schmaltz.  Grain of sand and benefit of the doubt included. 

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