When Sam Philips was a kid, he’d dreamed of being a rock star, playing guitar in a rock band like Dokken, Mötley Crüe, or Guns N’ Roses. Those awesome bands he’d seen on MTV, on Headbanger’s Ball, those heavy metal icons he idolized and wanted to be.

It was all he could imagine being. All he wanted since he could remember. His very first memory being him seeing an Ozzy Osbourne video on MTV. His face glued curiously to the TV, he’d gazed at the screen in awe, mesmerized by Randy Rhoades’ guitar playing, and he knew, that was it. That’s what he wanted to be.

He’d watch MTV, every day, and he danced, headbanged and sang along to the hits and strummed a broomstick, pretending it was a Les Paul, and banged on pots and pans, pretending he was Tommy Lee.

Later, at age 11, he saved up his allowance and cash from his paper route and bought a candy apple green BC Rich guitar and a crappy amp and distortion pedal from a pawnshop.

Then he spent hours in his tiny bedroom, perfecting his licks, reading tablature from guitar magazines, and he was soon composing his own metal tunes, his own anthems, songs that’d one day be massive hits. His signature tune being “Rock N’ Roll Bitch.”

He’d chased the dream for years. His garage bands in high school and college had sent off demos to record labels, but, alas, they’d never gone anywhere, didn’t even garner any rejection letters from most of the labels, except for one from TVT Records, that’d had his band’s name misspelled.

With his last band in college, they thought maybe their big break would arrive when their drummer handed the band’s demo to rock legend Axl Rose. Axl had been staying at their city’s local luxury hotel, where Sam’s drummer worked as a bellboy.

Axl was alone and was dressed in a baggy Public Enemy shirt and tight-fitting leather pants and was sitting down to eat brunch in the hotel’s restaurant.

The drummer tiptoed up to Axl’s table and adoringly lifted his head up to Axl, in reverence, like it was Jesus Himself. The drummer, smiling widely, and with his hands shaking, his voice cracking, then nervously introduced his band and handed the demo tape to the rock god.

But Axl didn’t share any smiles. Instead, Axl jarred to his feet, sneered and growled, let loose a barrage of curse words and invective and snatched and threw the demo tape to the restaurant’s marble floor and stomped on the tape with his snakeskin boot, bashed it to bits and loudly suggested the drummer to “fuck off!” and then sat down and coolly ate his breakfast in solitude.

Nearby diners gawked, pointed, and gasped in horror, murmured. A snooty manager in a tuxedo swiftly swooped in and led the drummer away, roughly, by the arm and the drummer was immediately fired from his job at the hotel.

By the end of Sam’s college days, his band was going nowhere. They’d been playing crappy half-empty dive bars and dead parties, often getting booed off stage.

Everyone wanted to hear rap, it’d seemed. That’s where popular music was going. It’d been shifting directions, towards rap and away from rock for a while.

Sam was up to his eyeballs in student loans, too. But, fortunately for him, numbers and math had always come easily to him, and he’d cruised through accounting classes with ease, had taken up the subject as his major. After graduating college, with a degree in accounting, he made the most difficult decision of his young life.

He decided to sell out. Join the rat race. Do what he never wanted.

He abandoned his dreams of being a rock star, got a haircut, and joined the corporate world after receiving a generous, 70k per year job offer from a major accounting firm.

Sam bought a set of three-piece suits, loafers, and neckties and began his 9–5, cubicle job. Soon after, he found a wife, a petite, attractive blond who’d been a secretary at his office.

He worked his way up the rungs of the corporate ladder and lived a conventional upper-middle class American existence.

He wore cufflinks. He bought a big house in the suburbs. He got a purebred dog. He got a bright red BMW 5 Series.

Sam had friends he’d play poker with every Saturday night. Sam even built a stereotypical man cave in an addition to the house. It had rock and sports memorabilia, a big screen TV, comfy massage chairs, a pool table, Pac-Man arcade game, foosball, all the necessary accoutrements...

By all measures, his life had been a success.

But, from time to time, especially in the car, on the way to work, as he blasted loud rock, he’d lament not pursuing his musical dreams further.

He’d think that maybe if he’d stuck with it, or maybe if he’d been born earlier, when rock mattered more, or if Axl had taken the time to listen to his band’s demo instead of smashing it, maybe, just maybe, he could have been something. Something legendary...

While he was rising in the corporate ranks, had recently been promoted, and was crushing it in life, deep down, he couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that he’d failed.

He wasn’t a rock star. He was just another schmuck.

Another working stiff. Another cog in the machine.

He knew numbers, balance sheets, stock prices, and he saw himself as just a statistic, as stockholder value and profit. He wasn’t awesome. He wasn’t kicking ass. He wasn’t on TV. He wasn’t having the fun he knew he could be having if he were playing packed arenas, rocking city after city, touring the world, flying high and riding on steel horses. He’d imagined his life would be like a Bon Jovi video. But it wasn’t. And it pissed him off.

Dammit, that was supposed to be him! A star! He was going to be a man other men wanted to be; a man women wanted to be with. He was going to write the songs that would make the whole world stand up and sing! And now, here he was, working in an office, staring at computer screens, in a sweater vest, holding a coffee mug...

It sucked to be so ... normal ... so mundane ... And he felt like such an asshole sometimes when he’d wake up in the early morning, his alarm clock beeping, his back hurting and his knees clicking.

Fucking Nikki Sixx never woke up to an alarm, he’d lament, dragging himself out of bed...

But Sam’s worst moments were in the morning when he’d brush his teeth and look in the mirror and see his receding hairline, see his graying temples and the extra pounds on his waistline. He was getting so fucking old. Pretty soon he’d be needing dentures and ass exams...

He started to really detest mirrors, did his best to avoid looking at them...

God, he hated seeing himself like this. As a middle-aged man. A guy young girls would be repulsed by. A guy that people would think of as creepy simply for wanting to fuck young girls.

He hated seeing himself like that and preferred to imagine himself, still, as a handsome young man, a young stallion, with the long flowing sandy brown hair. Him strumming a guitar, on the verge of superstardom, him in a video like “Pour Some Sugar On Me.”

He’d still dream that dream. In his corner office, he’d throw back his head, lean back in his leather swivel chair, and let his mind run and fantasize about time traveling back to 1988, opening for Mötley Crüe, and playing to packed stadiums, banging groupies and giving interviews to throngs of reporters. Sometimes in the evenings, in his man cave, he’d play guitar hero video games, pretend the person on his big screen TV was him.

But it wasn’t him. And he knew it. And so did his demons. The demons, the voices in his head, the demons of regret and disappointment, those ghosts of his mind that would occasionally rage in and trash his psyche like Tommy Lee’s hotel room, torment him about his failed dreams.

But after their short rampage, like any feeling, they’d relent, and the demons would float away, and Sam would realize that he’d been lucky.

Sam would perk up and know he was fortunate to be talented at memorizing, crunching numbers and easily understanding complicated mathematical formulas. He knew that not everyone was. But he was. And he thanked God for that.

And while he might not be exactly who or what he wanted, he had a big house, a slick car, a pretty wife, plenty of friends, and a high-paying job. Overall, his life had turned out alright.

Well, it had been a pretty cushy life, until the day he came home early from work to find his wife, bare-naked, being fucked from behind by a near 6’7, big brick shithouse of a man. The giant was also naked and was slapping Sam’s wife’s ass with his massive hands, clapping her ass violently. The pair were going at it in the living room, on the wrap-around leather couch, her screaming and wailing like Sam had never heard her...

The first thought that ran through his mind was running upstairs for his gun, shooting them both.

But he instantly thought to every prison TV show or movie he’d ever seen, thought of being in jail for life, terrorized and buttfucked. It wasn’t worth it. Nothing was worth that. Not even shooting the bitch, the woman he’d loved with all his heart but now hated more than cancer. The woman who’d just ripped his live beating heart from his chest and taken a big steamy shit on it.

No, no, NO! Now it was only a matter of running, running, fucking RUNNING!

In their throes of passion, the pair hadn’t even noticed Sam was there, and he dropped his suitcase, ran out the door, jumped into his car, and peeled out of the driveway, sped off, swerving through traffic, and stopped at a nearby hotel, booked a long-term stay.

There, in his white room, sipping on a tiny bottle of gin from the minibar, he sat back into a pleather seat, wiped the tears from his eyes, and slid open his phone, and began making arrangements, contacting a lawyer and filing for a divorce.

Since they were Catholic and didn’t believe in divorce, they’d not signed a prenuptial agreement, but, of course, he never expected her to be cheating on him with a Bigfoot.

Sam was initially concerned she’d take everything.

Little did he know she had more money than him.

Through his lawyer’s clever forensic accounting, Sam discovered his wife had gotten an inheritance a couple years back, stashed it in an account she’d deftly concealed. The money was from an uncle of hers, a confirmed bachelor who’d owned a successful septic tank company.

It wasn’t Bill Gates money, or Jay Z money, but it was a decent chunk of change he found his way into, low 7 figures.

His wife tried her best to dispute it, but there was nothing she could do; the law, the 50/50 split, was ironclad, and Sam found himself a newly minted millionaire.

His anger, the betrayal, was still there throughout the divorce proceedings, but much of it had dissipated once he had that 7-figure check in his hands.

Still, Sam was having an identity crisis. Her friends were his friends. Everyone in his neighborhood either suspected or knew that she’d been cheating on him, for a long time, he’d come to find out. Everyone it seemed, except him, knew that his wife was banging her personal trainer, a strapping young lad, a former NFL lineman, a man eight years his junior.

Thanks to gossip and social media, his coworkers discovered the scandal later too. Every day he’d go to work, see their pitying expressions, the sad and sardonic looks in their eyes.

Worse yet, the personal trainer had moved in with her, and she’d gotten pregnant with the domesticated sasquatch’s demon seed...

Oh, that burned him. Made him think again of shooting the bitch. You see, they’d tried, they tried a few times but never had kids. They’d never been sure why it wasn’t happening and were planning to seek fertility treatment. But then, of course, Sam came home that day and that all went out the window.

Sam was glad, though, that they didn’t have kids, as that’d made things far worse, the divorce far more acrimonious, and he’d happily liquidated his equity in their house after the divorce, and along with his respectable savings, as well as that fat chunk of her secret account he’d siphoned, he was feeling pretty good, financially.

But his conundrum now was what to do? Where to go? Where to live?

Surely, he couldn’t stay there, in his neighborhood. At his job. He’d be forever known as a cuck. A loser. The guy whose wife left him for her personal trainer. Nah, fuck that. He couldn’t stay. He had to move on to greener pastures.

With his newfound freedom, the financial cushion he had with his big bag of cash, he decided to do something he’d always wanted. Travel. Internationally. To a place he’d always wanted to go. Thailand.

After seeing the movie “The Hangover 2”, he’d secretly dreamed of going to Thailand and partying, getting drunk and banging hookers. Waking up with a chicken or a monkey running around in his hotel room. Maybe even banging a ladyboy.

He wanted to run wild in the Land of Smiles. Have some smiles of his own there.

He’d begun thinking of it more and more, going to Thailand. He started watching porn videos from Thailand and his innermost secret Asian fetish only grew, and he no longer felt guilty that there were times he’d closed his eyes and secretly thought of fucking hot Asian chicks as he fucked his wife.

Sam was starting to be happy the bitch had cheated. They’d gotten divorced. He knew his wife, who didn’t like travel, could never sit on a plane for 16 hours to fly to the other side of the world. Nor would the bitch ever let him, alone, go to a place like Thailand.

“It’s so dangerous! And they don’t speak English! What if we get kidnapped and held for ransom? Or wind up on the internet, beheaded by ISIS?” he could imagine her saying.

She thought of any country outside of America as being a dangerous shithole plagued by car bombings, terrorists in ski masks, and war.

Fucking bitch didn’t even have a passport. And didn’t want one.

But the bitch couldn’t tell him anything now. He was free. He’d gotten his check. He’d been listening to Bill Burr’s podcast rant about gold-digging whores and felt as if snagging that bag of cash off his ex was a nice little fuck you to all the gold-digging whores that’d extorted cash off dudes. All the lazy bitches who’d gotten crazy alimony payments and robbed men of countless fortunes.

“Mike Tyson, this is FOR YOU!” he thought, sniggering and eying his bulging bank portfolio.

The more he thought about it, the more enticing it got, heading out to Thailand.

He could live like a rock star there. He could run the streets like a wild animal, with his dick out, just fucking everything in sight. Maybe he’d never come back.

He read into it, went online, studied immigrating to Thailand. He’d thought maybe he’d open a bar there, on a sun-drenched island, living out his days, lying on a hammock, in the ocean breezes, sipping beers, banging a far younger, bronze-skinned beauty, a girl with a sharply curved, far sexier figure than his wife could ever imagine having, even with all her Botox, yoga, and breast implants!

It was settled. He would do it. He would quit his job. He would end his lease on his divorced guy apartment. With those annoying neighbors and their stupid fucking crying baby. Fuck them. Fuck his wife. Fuck everyone! He was going to Thailand! Bangkok’s neon lights were calling his name! He was going to party in Bangkok, BITCH!

Sam loved Thailand from the second he woke up and saw a chain of small rocky islands and translucent crystal blue waters from his first-class window seat.

On the flight, he’d dreamed of that Twilight Zone episode with the troll on the wing of the plane and saw his ex-wife as the troll, tormenting him.

The bitch crawling on the plane’s wing, on all fours, baring her fangs, blood dripping from her mouth. The bitch clawing at him with her acrylic talons, those long nails painted blood red, and the bitch leaping like a tiger towards his window.

But to his glee, the bitch stumbled and slid off the wing of the plane, and plummeted like a skydiver with no parachute and Sam flicked her off as she faded ignominiously away, clawing and hissing at him fecklessly as she fell back to hell where the bitch belonged...

Then he woke and she was gone. The bitch was dead. Or at least in his mind she was, and that was good enough.

Peering out the window, gliding into Bangkok, all Sam could see was the sun, the brilliant bright orb lighting the tropical landscape in the effulgence of its solar glow. Sam used his hand to shield his eyes, squinted, and looked down, marveled at the skyline of the metropolis from the plane, its towering glass-plated buildings, one of them having a fragmented, funky shape, and one of them with a tip that looked like a spiraling temple.

The place was just as amazing as it looked in the movies!

He felt like he was in a movie, too, when he arrived. It was the “Hangover Part 4,” and he was the star. Or better yet, he was finally a rock star, living out his rock n’ roll dream, and he blasted Ratt in his earbuds as he stood in the immigration line.

Along with taking massive doses of Xanax and Zoloft, he had recently been meditating and listening to relaxation music, to keep himself calm, keep his anger and depression in check, but he decided to delete all the meditation music off his phone, now that he was in Thailand.

Fuck that calm shit.

He would be listening to only hard rock from now on. And only choice shit from the 70s, starting with Kiss and Aerosmith. Tons of 80s party rock, too, of course, like Mötley Crüe’s “Girls, Girls, Girls”, and Whitesnake’s 1987 self-titled record, and his playlists would abruptly end at the early 90s, with Slaughter and Skid Row.

His playlists were especially heavy on the AC/DC, and he also had lots of butt metal like Warrant, Winger, and Poison. “Nothing But A Good Time” becoming his new anthem.

There’d be no depressing Seattle grungy lumberjack dickheads and definitely no weak corporate bullshit like Coldplay or pansies like The Strokes.

Sam would only be listening to kick ass, high energy ROCK N’ FUCKING ROLL!

He was in Thailand, motherfucker!

Sam collected his luggage and stepped from the icy cool blast of the airport into the stifling midday Bangkok heat.

Being from Minnesota, he’d been through hot summers but had never experienced heat quite as sticky and swampy as Bangkok’s. But he loved it! The whole place was like a sauna. Sweat pooled between his shoulder blades, and as the warm air tingled him all over, he felt his creaky old joints relax and uncoil, and the beads of sweat on his forehead felt detoxifying.

Sam felt young. Like a new man. Like a million bucks!

Sam rocked to Mötley Crüe’s “Kickstart My Heart” and Ozzy’s “Crazy Train” in his earbuds as he rode in a pink taxi to The Landmark Bangkok, his posh, five-star hotel in downtown Bangkok.

Goddamn the chicks in Bangkok were smoking hot! he marveled, upon arrival, getting whiplash from gawking around so much at the numerous smoking hot babes all around the hotel’s elegant lobby...

Shortly after checking in, he showered, changed into summer clothes and sprayed on cologne, popped Ritalin to do away with the jet lag and he readied up for a spree. A fuck spree. A pussy spree. A mass shooting rampage of dick. His cock a loaded weapon...

Sam burst out of the hotel like a lion from its cage and hit the city like a fucking tornado. A tornado of perversion, an F-5 full of pent up sexual rage.

For his first hooker fuck he went to the dirty massage place next door to his hotel, paid 3 sexy young bitches to bend over and banged them one at a time, for a couple minutes each, finally dropping his load in the third, the one with the roundest ass.

Blasting L.A. Guns’ “Sex Action” in his earbuds, as he tapped that sweet Asian hooker ass, he cried out, “I LOVE BANGKOK! I LOVE THAILAND! LOOOOOOONG LIVE THE KING!! LONG LIVE THE KING!” and he kept yelling “I love Bangkok!” as he madly porked the caramel skinned dollfaces...

“This place is pussy paradise!” Sam muttered to himself, sipping a cold mug of beer at the Hooters on Sukhumvit Road, gazing at the waitress’s wiggly ass in her orange shorts and rubbernecking at the lovelies passing by on the street.

Sam was smitten with the Thai talent. He was in awe of how thin, curvy, and pretty the Thai girls were. They were so gentle, girly and feminine too. Nothing like the masculine porkers, disgusting tubs of lard so many American women were. The cows! Sam hadn’t seen this many hot babes since college!

Popping dick pills, he hit every red-light district and nihilistically fucked every hooker he could, be they massage girls, bar girls, street walkers, he fucked them all. He even banged his tall skinny college aged cleaning lady; paid extra to fuck her up her tight little ass.

He got soapy massages. He went to blowjob bars and had his knob greased while he slammed shots of tequila.

Sam was doing it! Living the dream! Running wild like a maniac! An escaped zoo animal! A horny white baboon mounting everything in sight!

Sam spent his first couple weeks in Bangkok blindingly drunk, popping a cycle of Ritalin, Xanax and Viagra, and fucking every sizzling hot Asian slapper that struck his fancy.

He’d spend the rest of his time sitting out on his hotel balcony, playing on his tablet, watching 1980s rock videos on YouTube and sipping cold beers.

His mind occasionally wandering, he’d tilt his head and stare wordlessly at the palm trees by the pool behind his hotel. He’d watch the palm trees sway in the humid breeze and would marvel at how they’d bend, those trees. But they never broke. Sam wanted to be like that, be like that tree, taking whatever Mother Nature, Man threw its way. Bending but not breaking.

But he couldn’t be that stoic. Truth was, deep down, the demons of regret clawed from their graves and returned to plague him. He started to miss his old life, his house, his man cave, even his ex-wife and the buttermilk pancakes and strips of bacon she’d make on Saturday mornings.

He missed his buddies, their poker games, and them together, drinking brews, eating nachos, watching football on Sundays. He missed his coworkers and the banter about Netflix shows by the water cooler ... He missed his dog, the goofy golden retriever, playing fetch with him in the park...

And even though he was on an epic ass plundering spree, after the first 20 hookers he fucked, he was experiencing a diminishing return of joy. Soon, he started feeling nothing at all, basically like he was masturbating into a bag of warm flesh and bones.

It wasn’t that the Thai hookers made him feel sleazy.

He’d banged a couple call girls during his lonely days after his marriage ended, back in the States, and American hookers were always awful, always rushed and had a sense of shame to them. They were never fun. They made him feel like a big stinky piece of shit.