I was limping along riverside in Phnom Penh the other day, Christmas Day, having spent the morning sponging off the seeping plasma from the wounds on my knee, hands, and elbows from a motorbike crash in Saigon just a few nights before, and this guy who looked Cambodian sitting at a bar with some other travellers called out at me, said to me, "Hey, man, what happened to your leg?", to which I answered, "Huh?" or "What?" (I can't remember which one, but really, they amount to essentially the same thing), and he said again, "I said what happened to your leg, man. You're all f***ed up." This time it registered as an American accent. He offered for me to sit down and join them, which I did. I told them about my accident, how it happened on my birthday, how it was late at night, how I took a corner too fast and hit a patch of mud or something, I dunno, it was night, I didn't really see it, and how the bike slid out from under me and I got kind of thrown off onto the road, hands first, but my knee got it worst. It was a pretty small spill, really, just the same as when I fell off my bike back home outside of Franklins and got thrown over the handlebars (I took a corner too sharp that time, too). It's just that over here even minor cuts and grazes go bad pretty quick. Which is pretty much my case here in Phnom Penh, waiting for the graze over my knee to stop being all infected-like so I can get on the ten-plus hour bus to Laos, and in the meantime applying antiseptic cream and watching re-runs of Banged Up Abroad on cable TV, connecting with all the stories and getting a little teary-eyed at the end when the victims inevitably get reunited with their families—going soft, basically.

Anyway, so I joined these guys for a few drinks, being Christmas and all, and happy for some company. This guy that called me over was actually Laotian, not Cambodian, but grew up and everything in California. Spoke fluent Laotian and a bit of Khmer. It's all the same, really, he told me. What about Vietnamese? I asked him, because I speak a little Vietnamese. Nope, he told me. Completely different. He was also very drunk. He told me that once in Laos he'd been riding a 250cc motorbike along a dirt road at something like 100 miles an hour, no helmet, and hit a small ditch in the road. He got thrown face-first into a tree. Then he smiled and showed me where he'd lost his front teeth, and the places where he'd broken his jaw and nose. Ouch. Suddenly I felt like a child who got one-upped big time in classroom show-and-tell.

After a while this street kid selling books came up to our table. I tried bartering him down to $5 for a (pretty obviously photocopied) Lonely Planet. He threw down a challenge at me. Paper scissors rock, mano a mano. If I win, I get it for $5. If he wins, it's $7. What the hell, it's Christmas.

I lost.

In retrospect, those were pretty s*** odds. I was getting ripped off either way. I should have made it free or ten bucks. Them's good odds. But even though I lost, I still liked him. The kid was good, I'll give him that. The street kids here in Phnom Penh got cheek like nowhere else.

But sometimes that cheek ends with people crying. See, unfortunately for that kid, his night ended with him being chased down the street and punched in the stomach by my new (and now very much drunk) American friend. The crying part is my invention. Conjecture, if you will. I didn't see the actual punch. This kid said something that ticked off the guy to the point where he pushed out from his chair and ran down the street after the poor kid (he would have been about thirteen or fourteen, just sprouting his first few facial hairs), shouting threats and imprecations while me and my fellow backpackers at the table exchanged worried glances over our 50c beers.

Poor kid.

But in the end I still got my two dollar's worth in Christmas entertainment.