Cambodia - Fear and Loathing in Cambodia's Las Vegas

Pailin, Cambodia-It's 6 p.m. and the Riviera Casino in Pailin, the former-and arguably the current-Khmer Rouge headquarters in western Cambodia and the world's most forbidden place from 1980 until . . . well . . . say, yesterday, is getting ready to party.

Half this dusty frontier backwater's inhabitants, employees of the casino, are dressed up like Fred Astaire sneaking out of a brothel. Milling around the parking lot smoking cheap Thai cigarettes and decked out in listing black bow ties, dinner-dance shirts, electric lime cummerbunds and 10W-40 weight prom-rental trousers, Pailin's labor pool of five-card stud dealers, bar-backs and Johnnie Walker comfort queens looks like a concession of cotton candy vendors at a refugee camp, or an audition for some back-alley vaudeville act.

They're surrealistically out of place. Though the sign on the marquee announces the casino is open 24 hours, another more hastily scrawled message taped to the glass door reads "closed." One bored Cambodian hostess laments, "The Thais don't come today. We have no customers."

Except me.

I've just ridden a motorcycle 400 kilometers from Phnom Penh along the world's longest sustained motocross track, over bombed-out bridges and a moonscape more like a low-pressure trough on the South China Sea than an actual road. Detonated Claymore antitank mines littered the side of the rutted track from Battambang like rusting bedpans (huge quantities of live mines are buried everywhere). A few were propped up on sticks, as a testament to Pailin's impenetrability, or as a warning of it. Disemboweled armored personnel carriers were canting permanently in roadside gullies. Peasants stoically worked cassava patches inside roped-off, active mine fields.

It's taken me three days to get here. I'm caked with red Cambodian clay and I smell like the congealing of an unstable fossil fuel and a day-old electrical fire. I'm here to get down with the Khmer Rouge and boogie with the guerrilla bad boyz at baccarat, bingo and debauchery.

But the Riviera possesses none of the glitz of Vegas or Monte Carlo. Nor even the lipstick-smeared, plastic-cocktail-cup ambiance of those raunchy slot-machine roadhouses that pinprick a Nevada map like Third World sidewalk cigarette vendors. Rather, the Riviera looks like a strip mall bowling alley in the part of town where your neighbors sell hubcaps or run a police department impound lot.

Erecting a casino in the hub of a movement that was responsible for some 2 million Cambodian deaths during its genocidal rule of the mid- and late-1970s may appeal to some, but a Mirage it will never be. Rather, a casino in Pailin is like opening a peep show in Hitler's Berlin bunker.

Pailin's gendarme commander, undoubtedly a former high-ranking KR cadre, is drunk-but not as twisted as his uniformed, middle-aged charge, who's fondling the barely ripened buttocks of one of the casino's handful of "service girls" to the tedious electronic drumbeat of a whiny Khmer pop tune, a song so saturated in reverb, it appears to have been encrypted.

With the casino closed, the police chief has figured it's a good time to open the Riviera's disco, which is nothing more than what the Riviera's restaurant becomes after its last dinner patron has slurped up his "moum banjuok." The Bee Gee-esque disco ball hanging from the dining room ceiling like a forgotten Christmas ornament becomes awash in lasers. The former rebels, with their impromptu dates in tow, then form an oozing, Apsara-like queue on the dance floor-a moving bas relief, like the oscillation of a single-celled organism in a Petri dish. It's a cross between Cambodian traditional dance, an invertebrate's mating ritual, and doing a Brazilian samba with wet nail polish on.

My partner on this expedition, Outside Magazine writer Patrick Symmes, finds this all amusing enough to snap off a few frames on his Nikon. The portly, bun-squeezing gendarme isn't amused, as the object of his affection-and Symmes' 35 mm-is most certainly not his wife. After Symmes excuses himself for the toilet, Captain Buns snatches Symmes' camera from our table. Instinctively, I snatch it back from him.

The dancing abruptly stops as Captain Buns and I straddle the abyss of an international incident. But the bomb is quickly defused when Pailin's top cop gets between us and grandly gestures through an interpreter: "You foreigner are welcome to Pailin!" He implores us to select among his jumbo fleet of wet-leased concubines.

In a slurred blend of Khmer and Thai, Captain Buns apparently mutters to me: "Two years ago you would have been shot for that."

Instead, we join the former guerrillas and their China-doll hookers on the dance floor and party the night away, Cambodian style, to a continually repeating, 50-cent karaoke video. Have times changed.

Actually, a few years ago, Symmes and I would have been shot 80 klicks out of Phnom Penh.