Whenever he turned up at the noodle restaurant - our (me and Chris, my Californian sidekick) midnight rendezvous, to which he was always late - the tiny Chinese waitresses screamed in abject terror and raced away, peeping with fearful eyes from the kitchen doorway while he roamed round the tables like a human tarantula.
That was about 20 years ago in Jinghong, which back then was a slow-moving, dusty, one-horse market town in the rainforest, surrounded by banana plantations, wooden houses on stilts above the colourful wildlife, down on China's border with Laos, Thailand, Burma and Vietnam in the days before the tourism boom of the 21st century. It was just about untouched by western civilisation and an idyllic location for trekking around on a bike, which me, Chris and some mad-assed French chick did for a few weeks; dodging donkeys and carts, eating fantastic fruit sold dirt-roadside, watching Buddhist monks playing pool, then peanut satay for dinner with sticky pineapple rice, and a joint with foot soldier who also slurped rice wine from the bottle across the day and night.
Today, especially considering the huge numbers of Chinese people now travelling, Jinghong must be horrific (and is), plastered in modern hotels, golf courses, blue mirrored glass, airport terminals and runways, great highways cutting through virgin forest, and the accompanying vehicles ferrying tourists and conference attendees back and forth, plus the obligatory wherever-men-gather army of prostitutes, or 'chickens' as the Chinese call them.
I had no idea what Foot Soldier was doing there - "I'm checking out the land, man" was one reason he gave - other than rolling joints made from hash that he said he'd imported by swallowing and crapping out then drying out ... and I believed him. At one point a very prim and proper Chinese ... or was she Japanese ... woman in a massive flowery sunhat turned up on the scene, thus demonstrating the rather strange lengths some people will go to get laid.
And during this current Brazilian sojourn my mind has gone back to him, wondering where he might be ... maybe jumping out from behind Amazonian trees pretending to be a species unknown to zoology... or maybe he actually is ... but more than likely he's in prison or dead, living life like he did, right on the edge.
After all, foot soldiers are always cannon fodder for the officer class.