“So, do you know how many nationalities you fucked?” Hans asked. “You know. Japanese, Korean, German, Egyptian, Thai?”
“Oh,” I said, pausing for a moment as I ticked off my modest body count, “—four: American, Thai, Vietnamese, and Indonesian. Five if you count Hawaiian, but she was an American citizen.”
He said, “I’ve fucked seventy-three different nationalities, and this is my first time in northern Thailand, so I expect to add at least one hill tribe girl tonight, or maybe a Burmese. I hear there’s a lot of Burmese in Chiang Mai.”
Thus I was introduced to a small but what appeared, in time, to be an expanding group of men engaged in a competition to see who could have sex with the most women, not counting in numbers but countries of origin. Men used to count such conquests numerically and with the worldwide explosion of the international travel class—another aspect of globalization—now some of them apparently counted nationalities.
This was quite amazing to me. I’d met many people who collected visa stamps in some sort of geographical quest to see how many countries they could visit. But never had I encountered the same sort of activity determined by having sex in those places. It was, one of the men told me, sort of like collecting stamps. Another, somewhat older dude compared it to the country collecting of ham radio operators.
Initially, I didn’t believe it. I thought it was an amusing notion, but I wrote it off to the sort of bragging you find in most bars when men get together and drink. Stamp collectors physically possessed the stamps and shortwave radio fans exchanged QSL cards. How the hell did anyone know who was telling the truth about getting laid? This was, after all, an area of male activity bursting with exaggeration and prevarication. Country club members could point to visa and immigration stamps in their passports, proving they’d been here and there, but what real evidence of sex was truly provable?
“It’s done on the honor system,” a Brit named Kevin told me in a bar in Bangkok. “That sounds right ridiculous, but it works, because when we catch a bloke in a lie”—and the habitual liar always got caught, he assured me—“word goes out and he can put his stiffy in retirement.”
It all sounded like wishful thinking to me. But, still, the notion rang true. For as long as men got laid, I was certain that some of them kept count. In recent times, porn stars and rock musicians and famous athletes admitted to fucking women in the thousands. Were the Roman legions or Ghengis Khan or Marco Polo counting?
No one knows how many “members” are in the Country Club today, or even if the club exists. (A few insist it’s spelled Cuntry Club, by the way, giving me the shivers of more doubt.) However, it may be assumed that country collecting may be more than a lark, because over ensuing years in Asia from the time I met the first participants back in the mid-1990s, I met others, some of them “specialists” who focused their sexual pursuits in narrowly defined areas. Hans told me he was considering specializing in the hill tribes of Southeast Asia, as that could run the numbers up dramatically. He said Vietnam alone had sixty minority groups.
I also met someone whose activity followed his studies in anthropology, who spoke knowledgeably about Abyssinian Galla girls in East Africa (now Ethiopia) who during the nineteenth century were famous in published anthropological writings for vaginal muscles so skilled they could sit on a man’s thighs and induce orgasm without moving any other part of their person. He said his “thing” was to recreate the sexual experiences reported in such classics of sexual literature as the Kama Sutra and Arabian Nights.
Another member of the club called himself a “sex war correspondent,” said he traveled from one disaster area to another in much the same way that the guy who wrote The World’s Most Dangerous Places tempted his fate. It started in South Africa, he said, and took him to Bosnia, Haiti, Cambodia, East Timor, and Afghanistan.
“You know [Nelson] Rockefeller died in the saddle,” he said, “but that was in boring New York. Imagine the final cum in Iraq.”
Still another, who told me he was a Hollywood music producer, said he planned to lease anthology rights to songs for a CD he hoped would finance his future travels: David Bowie’s “China Girl,” Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto’s “Girl from Ipanema,” the Coasters’ “Little Egypt,” the Beach Boys’ “California Girls,” etc.
Of course, history complicates and enlivens matters. As worldwide travel became more convenient and affordable, the score potential of the Country Club ballooned, assisted by recent politics. Not so long ago, a Russian was a Russian (or Soviet citizen); today, she might be Ukrainian, Azerbaijanian, Kazakhstanian or, giving a nod to my friend who likes danger with his sex, Chechnyan.
Similarly, because it’s possible to pick up several countries in one location—in Bangkok, for example, there are prostitutes from many nations at work, and in California there are recent immigrants from dozens of nations—another group of collectors, who call themselves purists, insist on scoring in the nation of origin; no migrant whores or boat people allowed.
Actually, I discovered that the guys didn’t argue that much about the numbers or criteria. Occasionally, they did quiz each other, trying to find a flaw in the competitor’s boast, looking to cut the guy out of the game. But generally I found that the Country Clubbers mainly argued about which nationalities were “best,” bickering about preferences for perky Asian breasts and wispy pubic bush vs. the appeal of the hairier, blonder voluptuosity found in, say, Scandinavia.
“It’s just good fun, mate,” one said in Bangkok. “Did I tell you, I’m writing a book?”
“What’re you calling it?”
“Well, first I was gonna call it Around the World in 80 Lays, but I decided that was a bit daft. I was in the fifties at the time and wondered what if I got past eighty? Maybe eighty would be common and other blokes would say I was a wimp.”
He was silent for a moment as he pulled on his beer. “So what are you calling it?” I asked “The United Nations,” he said, proudly.
“I think the name’s been taken.”
“You’re right, mate,” he said, “but I mean it. And I figure I’m a piece-keeper. That’s a joke. You get it?”
ACQUIRED TASTES
Rotten Fish, Yum Yum!
My dictionary tells me that anything “rotten” is undesirable. It says “rotten” is “foul-smelling, putrid… wretchedly bad; miserable.”
That doesn’t sound like anything I’d want to put in my mouth. But around the world, many do. And usually it’s rotten fish they eat.
I’ve made a study of the unusual things some people eat in books titled Strange Foods (1999) and Extreme Cuisine (2004). My message, if I may use such a weighty word, was that what is called weird in one corner of the planet is merely lunch in another. In my research and travel in six continents, I encountered several places where fish was deliberately allowed to rot and then wolfed down with a lot of smacking of the lips, followed by requests for second helpings. For an American raised on meatloaf and mashed potatoes, this seemed very strange, indeed. But interesting. It is my curiosity that’s driven my quest, and in the process I’ve discovered some very tasty dishes.
The locations that got the most credit, or criticism, for putting rotten fish on the menu were in Scandinavia, Iceland and Alaska. In Alaska, the Inupiat and Kobuk tribes traditionally caught what are called sheefish with hooks made from bear teeth and buried the catch ungutted in a leaf-lined pit, where it decayed in its own juices for several weeks. It should come as no surprise that the aromatic result was known, colloquially, as “stinkfish.” In northern Scandinavia, the dish is called surstromming. In this case, the herring is salted in brine and allowed to ferment and age a few months. The fish is then tinned and ready for consumption.