April 17th marks the 25th anniversary of the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge. Today, Cambodia's capital resembles a theme park for dissolute adults. The contrast between the opulent city and the grim countryside suggests some old terrors may reappear. PNS associate editor Andrew Lam is a journalist and short story writer. (First of two parts).

PHNOM PENH -- The first thing Pon, the motorcycle taxi driver, wants me to see is the Killing Fields. It's 9 miles outside of Phnom Penh, a museum of skulls and bones, and it's only $5 round trip on his motorbike, plus himself as tour guide. How can you beat that?

"Maybe after," the young man smiles optimistically, "we go shooting AK-47?"

"Shooting AK-47?" I asked, a bit appalled.

"Yes, 25 cent, one bullet." Pon volunteers. "You can buy rifle, too, for maybe $150 dollars, maybe less, maybe more."

Buy this. Buy that. The handsome driver in his mid 20s is selling his country's war wounds most cheerfully.

When I said no to shooting, no to Killing Fields (seen it), Pon, without missing a beat, offers "I know girls. Very good. Very young. Beautiful. Maybe 16 year old. Only 15 dollah. She go your hotel. OK, OK?"

Pon is lying. The girls can be as young as 13 and come to your hotel for $5 or less.

"No girls," I tell him and Pon is a bit crestfallen. The look in his eyes seems to say, "What the hell are you doing in Cambodia then?" And, frankly, I'm beginning to wonder myself.

He isn't about to give up, though. With some desperation he offers, "OK, ganja, very cheap. I know where. One kilo, 20 dollars." That's a lot of marijuana at retail, enough to get you a decent used Honda Civic back in America.

Welcome to Phnom Penh, a kind of sex, drug, and gun Disneyland. It helps that the biggest gangster in the country is a one-eyed prime minister named Hun Sen whose army and the police run the joint.

Run afoul of any of his policemen -- many recruited directly from the Khmer Rouge camps as recently as two years ago -- and they will kill you without thinking twice.

This is how hit and run drivers are usually handled, and so are robbers and motorcycle thieves. Street justice is condoned by both the state and the people, a shared contract born from years of violence.

So much time, besides, is saved this way.

"It's a culture of mistrust and impunity," Kall Kann, the director of a mental health organization complains. "People don't participate in public life. They close their doors and shut their eyes."

Marijuana is supposed to be illegal. So is pederasty, not that it would mean anything to the beer-bellied German who walked past this morning with his 14-year-old Vietnamese girlfriend holding onto his hand as they enjoyed the serene view of the Mekong river.

In fact, there's a Happy Pizza restaurant. The pies come in "happy" and "extra happy" and I'll let you imagine what green stuff is sprinkled on the slices. People are known to get so happy from eating the potent pizza that they crawl away, laughing and crying. In Phnom Penh, everything is priced in dollars and if you have enough dollars everything is possible. You can hire bodyguards complete with AK-47s and grenade launchers for about $3,000 a month -- as many Chinese businessmen have. I see them escorted here and there carrying black briefcases, taking advantage of the lax import-export laws to sell Chinese products as Cambodians.

It's like Casablanca, but Phnom Penh is not glamorous, just sad. It hurls contradictory images -- monks praying and policeman executing, young prostitutes grabbing customers' crotches and studious students in school uniforms walking nonchalantly by, incense and ganja smoke, festivals and coups, peace activists and corrupt generals.

"I've been here for two years and I can't seem to leave," said Steven, an English teacher. "I go by the brothel in the morning for a quickie. Then I go by after class for another. At night I go see my girlfriend." He makes $6 an hour, around $700 a month, enough to get high and have sex all day long, that is, between classes. "Where else can you beat that?"

The newest brothel area, Sven Pa, eight miles from town, is a village made up entirely of prostitutes, most of them Vietnamese girls. This is a legacy of the 20,000 UN troops brought in during the 1992-93 period and the demand for prostitutes resulted in thousands of Vietnamese girls being trucked in.

"It's atrocious," says Robert Wood, a businessman who employs many Cambodian women in his silk business. "Those underage girls do not belong in brothels, they belong in school."

Indeed. But who will support them while they're in school? There's no easy answers. Foreign support is drying up. One teenage prostitute was quoted in a paper recently as saying "I'd rather sell myself than starve." And, considering that, Cambodia is no welfare system, it sounds practical enough a statement.

After a while I give in to Pon and he takes me to the shooting range. It's an expensive pastime here. It's 10 bucks to rent the gun for an hour, bullets are 25 cents a pop. But there are all sorts of foreigners here, playing soldier. One Jamaican man is talking on the phone to someone quite openly about drug sales as his bodyguard prepares his gun for him. Another Frenchman is talking to his bodyguard about something related to antiques. They all have rifles with them, ready to massacre the posts thirty yards away.

I shoot. I feel a rush of adrenaline. I shoot again. I imagine that I'm shooting at all that's despicable and vile in the country -- initially. But the thing is I grow to like it. The weapon in my hand is a powerful thing. It pulverizes the post in matter of seconds. I lose myself in the process of shooting.

Then suddenly I see why those policemen and soldiers are addicted to this game. It's a rush. You feel powerful seeing things blown up, torn to shreds by your own action.

Behind me, Pon applauds wildly. Afterward, at lunch he begins to show another side of himself: He talks of his five-year-old son. One day, the boy asked him -- after hearing news on the radio, that Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader, had died -- "Papa, what is Pol Pot?" he asked. And Pon was stricken silent. "I don't know how to give answer," he says. "So I say don't worry about it. Pol Pot is dead."

Yet I wonder. One afternoon I visited a few villages just twenty miles outside of Phnom Penh, and the poverty was staggering. People have no electricity and life is mud and rice fields and wood and nothing else. The city, on the other hand, seems to float on a new money and extravagance -- a kind of opulence that make rural people restless.

"The poor/rich gap is more vast now than ever before, especially between rural and urban," Kall Kann, the mental health worker says, sighing. Pol Pot isn't dead. It seems to me that conditions are ripe, even if the superpowers no longer want to play the game, to keep him around for a while longer.