Cashman in the Tropics

Despite his many shortcomings, Larry Cashman, that lovable rogue and scoundrel, escaped the insular confines of New York City and blundered his way to the Navajo Indian Reservation in New Mexico, Hawaii, and Thailand in Cashman’s Odyssey, Volume 1 of the Cashman Chronicles.In Cashman in the Tropics, Volume 2 of the Cashman Chronicles, Cashman continues his escapades through Southeast Asia. While completing his assignment in Thailand, he is captured by rebels on the lawless border between Thailand and Cambodia and only regains his freedom through the intervention of a beautiful Cambodian rebel fighter. Upon arriving in Indonesia, he narrowly avoids being sent to a squalid Indonesian prison when marijuana is allegedly found in his household effects shipment from Thailand. In the inscrutable world of Indonesian mysticism, Cashman encounters an Indonesian shaman, is threatened by Balinese demons, gets head-butted by a whale shark, and decides that it’s time to abscond after surviving two rocket attacks on the US Embassy in Jakarta.When Cashman arrives in the Philippines, he is greeted by natural disasters, a Muslim insurrection, and a communist insurgency, a precarious environment for a pusillanimous rascal like Larry Cashman. He immediately gets involved in a shady Philippine telecommunications deal that is scuttled when the Mt. Pinatubo volcano erupts. During a routine site visit, the helicopter transporting him over the guerrilla-infested jungles of Palawan Island crashes because of his spinelessness. As he prepares to leave the Philippines, he idles away on a golf course in Manila while a coup d’etat by mutinous soldiers threatens his wife and daughter.Cashman’s next stop is Laos, the benighted country emerging from 20 years of Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism in the 1990s. After living in huge, crowded cities like Bangkok, Jakarta, and Manila for two decades, Vientiane, the capital city of Laos, was a quaint, charming, bucolic city nestled along a bend in the Mekong River, frozen in a relative time warp by communist isolationism. What Cashman was not prepared for was the conditions in the mountains of northern Laos, where he would spend most of his time. The roads were impassable, the weather was unpredictable, the food was inedible, and the drinking was interminable.While living in the tropics, Cashman develops a performing act that capitalizes on his unique talent for deceit, guile, and trickery, which gets him thrown into jail, causes an audience member to have a heart attack, and leads to him being threatened by a clown. After leaving the tropics, he gets hired and nearly fired as a professor at a prestigious West Coast university.After nearly 40 years living and working in Southeast Asia, Cashman retires in Hawaii. His dream of sipping Mai Tais while resting languorously on Hawaii’s beautiful beaches is rudely interrupted by Hawaii’s incompetent bureaucracy. His expatriate lifestyle, where house staff attended to the minutiae of daily life, clashes with the demands of life in the United States. Much to Cashman’s dismay, some old friends are not happy about having his indolent lifestyle interfering with their daily routines.Larry Cashman has led an unusual life. From his inauspicious upbringing in New York City, he bungled his way to Hawaii and Southeast Asia despite having no ambition, no aspirations, few if any skills, and not being too bright. He was also lazy, selfish, and venal. Cashman has been called a troublemaker, a scammer, a loser, a bounder, and a rapscallion. What he did have in spades was incredibly good luck and the ability to bullshit and dissemble extemporaneously. If you want to know how he accomplished this, read The Cashman Chronicles.