Slapping Kids, Throwing Shoes, and No I'm Not From China

I was thrown by the matter-of-fact delivery Tony used to tell me how his father had been killed by police in his home country of Burma.

Uncharacteristically, I didn't know what question to ask.

I wanted to know the whole story, but Tony stood before me so awkwardly, as if I were forcing him to stand there naked.

So, I talked to him about his life in Goa instead and how it was pretty relaxed and pretty fun. I felt happy for him that despite this awful tragedy, he had made his way to this town in which people seemed to be all about a good time.

As I write this it reminds me of something the night desk clerk said to me after I looked at him as if he were out of his mind after asking if he could come back to my room with me.

He said, "You can learn a lot by getting to know more people. Like about business. And sex."

I was getting a lecture on how I should be more outgoing from a sociopath.

Classic.

So, I saw that it was time to leave Goa as I saw Vinesh heading up the walk toward me. I got into his taxi van with the plastic bald eagle with flappy wings hanging from the rear view mirror.

As we made the drive to the Goa airport, I was pretty speechless as the rash was gaining in intensity and Vinesh was talking about all of the girls who had proposed marriage to him.

I was afraid that by the time it was time to board the plane, I'd look like frickin' Joseph Merrick and they'd put me in quarantine with some rabid monkeys.

Once at the airport, I thanked Vinesh for his excellent driving services and headed into the crowded terminal. I checked in and asked if there was a clinic at the airport. I was seriously starting to believe that I had some tropical disease. The agent told me that there was a doctor on duty right now and point at the little office just 50 feet away. I was thrilled.

I headed over to the office and the doctor and nurse looked up from their desks, stunned that someone was actually in the office. I said, "I have a horrible rash, can you help me?"

The doctor said, "You realize that this office is only for emergency conditions, right?"

I said, "For a person as vain as I am, this is an emergency!" Well, actually, I said, "It doesn't look like you have any emergencies going on right now - can you just take a look at it?"

He glanced at it for a second, with barely one eye, and told me I had a bad sunburn and that he didn't have any medications to treat it.

For the first time in the last two weeks, I felt like I was in the U.S. again!

I was resigned to my fate of sitting on planes and in airports for the next 24 hours with a horrible rash on my face and arms, which was slowly moving to my torso and legs.

I stood outside the doctor's office for a minute, dazed, only to see a little boy accidentally push a luggage cart into the back of his mother's ankles. She whipped her body around and slapped him. Then she looked at me like, "What are you looking at?"

It reminded me of the time I was walking around North Beach with some friends as the strippers were getting off of work and my eyes locked quite randomly with one of them who probably had one bad client too many that night and yelled, "What are you looking at?" and threw her shoe at me.

I was very lucky to be with about 10 Assyrians at the time, so no harm was done.

It also reminds me of the time I was wandering around in TJ Maxx in San Jose and a father and son were wandering around too. The son, who was around 7 years old, started running down an aisle and a worker told him to stop running. So the father went up to the son and slapped him, only to immediately whisper to him -- "It's okay. It's okay."

This was very strange -- but understandable at the same time. The father had to show the worker that he corrected his son's behavior by store standards -- but he also had to tell his son that he didn't really agree with those standards.

As I rode the crowded bus from the terminal to the plane, which would take me back to Hyderabad, I realized that I was standing face-to-face with the mother who had slapped her son. She was now smiling at me. Her whole family was smiling at me. I got paranoid and thought that maybe they were laughing at my rash. But then her daughter said, "You are pretty. Are you from China?"