Oddballs and misfits are prime fodder for writers. Bangkok was filled with characters during the Vietnam War, and I was always on the lookout for an offbeat story. I taught English as a Peace Corps Volunteer during the day, but spent my nights and weekends freelancing for the Bangkok World under a pen name.

Irish Brian was bumming cigarettes down in Chinatown the day I met him.

Brian was a “hippie.” He sported shoulder-length, matted brown hair and a droopy Dali moustache that curled into his mouth when he spoke in his light brogue. He had been on the road four years.  I traded him a pack of cigarettes and a Singha for his story.  I knew I could sell it to the World.

Thailand was in a tizzy over hippies and it wasn’t just their long hair. They were sokaprohk, dirty, in a culture where cleanliness was a fetish and people took multiple showers a day. Thai police were rumored to be grabbing hippies in Bangkok and forcibly cutting their long locks, making some long-haired Peace Corps Volunteers very nervous. The public was square for it, according to people interviewed by the Bangkok Post.

“I wish the police wouldn’t just grab hippies and clip off their hair; they need to be punished as well,” complained an indignant, 57-year-old fruit seller. Just give the order, declared a Thai policeman. “If we were allowed to do that, I’d be the first policeman to start grabbing them and giving them a ‘new look’ in haircuts. It hurts my eyes every time I see a hippy.” An 85-year-old orchard owner was incensed at her grandson’s long locks.” He better not expect any money or property from me when I die. Hippies are ugly! I really hate them. You can’t tell the boys from the girls.” One lone Thammasat university student dissented. “What kind of freedom would that be if the police have the power to step in whenever they like and start cutting at your hair?”

Brian was staying at the Thai Song Greet Hotel on Rama IV Road, a stone’s throw from Hualampong railway station where pot heads, acid-heads and penniless world travelers seeking enlightenment and adventure disgorged every day. The Thai Song Greet was made for Brian.

“Look at this,” he said, grinning and waving his hand around the tiny room he rented. “Got it for only 25 baht.” For $1.25 a night, he shared a bed with another traveler. The bathroom was outside and down the hall.“They wanted five fucking baht more for a private shower. I told him forget it.”

In 1969, Bangkok stood at the crossroads of two major routes traveled by hippies. Young Aussies and Kiwis hitchhiked their way up through Indonesia to Bali (fun stop – Balinese are friendly and tolerant); transited Singapore as fast as they could (not so fun stop – the government detested hippies, grabbing long haired-visitors and giving them involuntary haircuts, while threatening drug users with execution); rode cattle-car, third class train through Malaysia (where the country’s Youth and Culture Minister warned that “hippism” was leading to the collapse of the nation); and on to Bangkok for a few months (which technically banned hippies from entering the country because “They constitute a threat to the well-being of the Thais, especially teenagers.”) From Bangkok, they could continue West to Nepal (for some rocky mountain highs) and India (where they could find a guru and meditate like the Beatles did); or East to Cambodia, Laos and Japan.

Brian was running the East-West route. He had walked, hitched, ridden trains, petrol trucks and tramp steamers from Dublin to Bangkok. He picked up odd jobs along the way to finance his road trip. He sold his blood in Greece, drove trucks on the Sinai desert, smuggled hash.

He had just returned from Prachinburi in upcountry Thailand. An enterprising Bangkok Chinese merchant had created a worthless patent medicine which promised to cure everything from backaches to malaria. The bottle showed a picture of Hercules holding up a house. The merchant needed a shill who looked credible to the country rubes so he hired Brian, a farang or foreigner, dressed him in a doctor’s long white coat and tie and they toured the villages up in Cholburi and Prachinburi. The merchant would invite “Dr. Brian” from England to tell his audience about the amazing medical discovery, which the merchant fake-translated into Thai.

“What did you talk about in your lecture?” I asked.

“Whatever came to my head,” he replied. “They don’t understand English. So I usually recited poetry. You know, Edgar Allen Poe – Once upon a midnight dreary, quoth the raven nevermore, blah, blah, blah. Or I talked about my sex life, which sounded medical.”

Brian wasn’t really from England, and only had a high school education. He was working in a Dublin factory making concrete pipes when he decided to hit the road in 1965. He was 19 years old.  

“I didn’t want to work in a factory the rest of my life. It was monotonous as hell. They want you to know the machine forward and backwards till you can fix it in the dark. The foreman likes that because then he can leave you there the rest of your life,” Brian told me.

His first stop was London, where his kind wasn’t welcome. “The English have the impression the Irish are stupid because most of them in England are laborers, and they’re all big and drink a lot. They come from the rural areas, from the farms, and they don’t know how to dress. They get into pubs with these English cats with the fancy clothes and they get a lot of talk. But they’ll fight you if they’re insulted.”

He met a German ‘chick’ and her friends who were bound for Australia.  “I realized that what I really wanted to do was travel, see things,” he told me.

Brian and his friends crossed the Channel and headed for Germany. “You have to avoid France – it’s bad for hitching. They don’t give you rides.”

In Hungary, they met some university art students who let them stay with them. “This one cat had just sketched a beautiful flower, and when you looked at it close you could see that it was made up entirely of words  – he had the names of all the flowers in the world on it. “ 

Brian hated Yugoslavia. “When you get to Zagreb, look out. They’re Moslems there. Bad people.  When you get down south, people are more filthy and squalid and they have these Moslem-type minarets or mosques everywhere.”

When they got to Tessaloniki on the Greek border, Brian sold his blood to finance the next leg of the trip.“A lot of cats smoke grass and their blood pressure is low, so the hospital won’t take you. So you go to the Red Cross. They pay less, about ten dollars a litre, but it’s bread. You can live a long time on a pint of blood,” he assured me. “In Kuwait we got $30 a litre. A lot of hippies in India hitch to Kuwait and sell their blood two times in one week. That gives them sixty dollars, which lasts them six or seven months in India.” My tape recorder kept rolling.

Many hippies hit the road with empty pockets and ended up begging to stave off starvation. But even that experience taught you something, Brian said.“The first few days are hell, then it passes. After a while, you don’t even notice it. You learn to live on one meal a day. You hear it all the time. One cat says, ‘Are you going out to eat?’ and the other cat will say, ‘No, I’ve already eaten today.’”

In Istanbul, they headed for hippie hangouts near the Blue Mosque. Hotels and drugs were both cheap. “I slept on the roof of this dumpy hotel for 25 cents. Rats and roaches everywhere.” One popular drug was Romilar, a narcotic cough pill made by Roche Labs. “Some cats were taking 25 caps at a time. It made them paranoid, and they would start walking on the edge of the roof, saying they were gonna jump. If you take this stuff regularly it really messes up your mind. You end up in an asylum. If you take it with opium, it kills you.” One night, an English hippy named Dave played the combo. When they tried to rouse him, they realized he had slipped into a coma. They got scared and took him to a hospital but the doctors there refused to treat him. “We said, ‘Man, are you gonna just let him die?’ So one doctor pulls out this needle and gives him an injection. Dave jerked up off the bed like someone put a spring in him, then he died. He was dead – stone dead. They killed him.”

Brian learned a lesson. “I try to avoid getting sick on the road. I don’t have any faith in doctors. They don’t give a shit about you,” he told me.

Brian tried LSD and became addicted to opium for two years, but said he had kicked the habit cold turkey. He picked up the addiction in Laos.“You can shoot it, eat it or smoke it. Opium users don’t like to be in the company of speed users or drinkers. They like things quiet and peaceful. In Pakistan, if you get dysentery they give you opium. It stops it. “He said he no longer messed with opium, just marijuana. But he understood the attraction. “Kids today experiment with drugs because it’s something new. It’s dangerous, but all explorers are involved with an element of danger. It’s one of the few things left to explore. There aren’t any jungles left to explore like there used to be.”

Brian lived in Istanbul for six months on a bag of five-dollar watches he bought in Switzerland and resold in Turkey for nine bucks each. He pulled travelers check scams. He traveled everywhere on the cheap by train and bus, using a student card. Local printers manufactured them by the hundreds and sold them for a dollar. In India you got 50 percent off train fares, and 25 percent off airline tickets. He had a true and deep interest in local culture and history. Everything was interesting to him after his dreary, prole existence in Dublin.

When he ran out of money, friends raised a pot of money and he hitchhiked to Pakistan where he bought eight kilos of hash for ten bucks a kilo; then made his way back to Copenhagen where it sold for a thousand bucks a kilo. They split the profits. Brian could travel from Copenhagen to Istanbul on ten dollars. “I eat yoghurt and fruit and raisins. I never have to beg.”

He crossed Iran, heading for Afghanistan.  “Nobody likes Iran. They aren’t nice people. It’s really hard to get a lift. When they do, the truck driver wants money or they point to your watch and ask for it.”

At the border, he got a real scare. He always shaved his beard and dressed up for border crossings, but they were tricky. Guards knew young Westerners heading for Asia often packed drugs and they hit them up. Getting caught landed you a five year sentence in Iran and Brian couldn’t afford to get caught. “If you’re an American, the consulate can swing you out if you pay a big fine. But the Irish are so poor they don’t even have a consulate from Italy to India.”  It was July, hot. Brian had a kilo of marijuana in a belt of ripped up sheets strapped tightly around his chest so it wouldn’t bulge.“I could hardly breathe. I was riding in the front of a big truck. After we got through the border checkpoint, I took it off and put the grass in my duffel bag. But three kilometers on down the road, the sneaky bastards set up a second border check. I was scared to death. This cat stopped the truck and made the driver open the boxes he was carrying. He smelled inside the boxes, then told me to get out.“The grass was lying right on top inside my duffel bag and he told me to open it so he could look in. I was fucked. So I put my foot on the bag and started screaming about how I was tired of being stopped, and that we had just been checked back down the road, and that I was sick and tired of all this searching and poking and prying, and I wasn’t going to open my bag up again. Some Germans told me they pulled that once and got away with it. “The guard tried to drag the bag out from under my foot, but he finally gave up and let us go. We took off.”

Brian figured his Irish passport helped him. “All the border cats think the Irish are just drinkers, not dope runners.”

When we finished the interview, Brian gathered all his worldly possessions together – a thin sleeping bag, a little olive-drab duffel for his few clothes, plus two books of poetry and a pack of cigarettes stuffed in a Lao shoulder bag.  He still had another 3,000 miles to go. He was headed for Laos and Cambodia and Saigon then on to Tokyo via tramp steamer where he planned to teach English for a few months. After that, who knew? He only knew he would never return to Ireland, to drudge away the rest of his life working in a factory.

Brian got his smokes and beer; I got twenty-five bucks from the World.

I never saw him again, but he made me think about my own dreams.