Early one morning in the late 80s a penniless, sleep-deprived, filthy Ayun Halliday propped her foot up on a sink in a Munich train station restroom–“the better to wash my malodorous vagina,” she later wrote. It was a low point of an ill-starred Eurail excursion with her musician boyfriend, Nate, who’d crossed the Atlantic carrying only $200 and a briefcase full of harmonicas. Oktoberfest was in full roar, and the two “scuzzy vagabonds” had spent the previous evening in a beer garden, scavenging food from abandoned plates and trying not to think about trench mouth. Later they boarded a train carrying drunken revelers. While walking down the empty corridor Halliday slipped and fell into an immense puddle of vomit. “Could be worse,” she told herself. “Someone could’ve witnessed my disgrace.”
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Halliday, a Northwestern grad and former member of Chicago’s Neo-Futurists, goes public with this and other humiliations in her new book No Touch Monkey! and Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Late, which recounts a decade’s worth of international misadventures animated by the author’s hunger for “authentic experience” and her interest in regional varieties of hashish. While hiking the highlands of Sumatra, Halliday was pelted with clods of earth by five-year-old highwaymen who wanted her cigarettes. On a trek through India’s Thar Desert, she was slimed with “a prodigious stream of camel snot,” then subjected to several days of motion sickness by the same mount. A case of malaria she contracted in Tanzania flattened her “like a lion-felled gazelle, erupting at both ends.”
Halliday says her publisher asked her for a sequel to The Big Rumpus, but that she felt a need to break out of the parenting section. “Some idiot has coined a new phrase, ‘a momoir,’ and it really rankled to hear it applied to me,” she says. “I think of The Big Rumpus as being in the tradition of David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell, and David Rakoff, but I get shuttled to the stupid, boring section that no one in their right mind visits willingly, except the newly pregnant or the parent of someone with attention deficit disorder.”
