Christmas in Sanur

The first thing to remember about Christmas on the island of Bali is that there is none to speak of. There does exist in general among the local folks an appreciation that a time of year has come upon them wherein Western folks are wont to celebrate, but the exact nature of what these folks are celebrating remains a point of but sparse knowledge and even sparser interest. Ideologically, I mean. There is much already about the Westerner that is unusual, deviant, and this strange parade of colored lights, pointy hats, flying reindeer, and a fat man in a red suit is just one further facet to the mystery, glittering and winking in so many directions that the center of the subject remains enigmatic.

It is, however, at the least common denominator, an opportunity to sell, and so new booths spring up on the beach front, warungs are strung with lights, hung with gold and silver garland, and young girls don red hats with white fleece, and call out with renewed expectation Shopping? Shopping? Come looking at my shop, just looking Mister, yes?

The sensibilities of the West, no matter now unsearchable, all smell of money, an extravagant penchant toward purchasing the most extravagantly worthless items and carrying these away to their own countries for storage in closets or sale in garages.

Ridiculous

This article is hilarious enough on its own to just post verbatim, no editorial comment needed.

MUSLIM CLERICS CRITICISE CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS

The country's top Islamic body has said Christmas decorations in malls, amusement centres, and public places are "excessive and provocative."

Christmas ornamentation has been put up in an "excessive and provocative way," said Muhyidin Janaedi, one of the chairmen of the Indonesia Ulemas Council (MUI).

"It should be done in a proportional manner, as Muslims are the majority here, otherwise it will hurt their feelings," he said.

He said that MUI issued a recommendation urging mall and recreation centre managers to act proportionally in decorating their premises.

"We received complaints from a number of malls' employees who are forced to wear Santa Claus costumes which are against their faith. Such things should not have happened," he said.

"We need to restrain muslims from joining the festivities," Junaedi added.


Hahahahahahahahahahaha . . . Oh whoops, please excuse the burst of editorial comment.

Chicken (in proper order)

In ecologically sensitive times such as ours, litter is not pretty anywhere. Of course, it never has been pretty, but there is just more of it now, and so we are more aware of it than ever. The island of Bali, in this regard, is no different than anywhere else. We have our share of floating, blowing, huddling, homeless garbage, in the street, in the sea, in the gutter and on the highway--and in fact, to be honest, more than our share.

Depending upon the strength of the tide, the direction of the submerged ocean stream, I may sometimes find myself swimming alongside empty Lays Potato Chip bags, double cheeseburger wrappers, the daily ceremonial offerings to the gods, and the occasional plastic diaper.

There is no readily discernible garbage, I mean sanitation, service in Bali. There seems to be no regular scheduling of men or trucks--and God knows where the occasional men and trucks that do happen by take this stuff once they collect it. Pressed for an answer to this riddle, I might guess that a good deal of it is deposited in the field just a block down from my house, for I cannot begin to imagine how else it got there except by plan.

One will see these haphazard trucks, circa 1950, roaring up the highway, streaming miniature clouds of gravel and non-biodegradable refuse in their wake, but where they are going, no one knows. I do note that the river just up the Bypass, and just before you reach the Matahari Mall, is very often choked with a sludge of manmade refuse, and so maybe that is where some of these trucks relieve themselves of their loads. I think it must be so--for, again, how else could the situation have arisen?

In any case, what I want to talk about here is more than your common, run of the mill sort of litter. No, what I want to address is Bali’s very particular version of litter--or garbage, if you will--those local men on the beach who hang about in the shade and seek to sell chicken. I’m not talking about the sort of chicken that is commonly fried, baked, or barbecued. No, this chicken is of the human variety, of the female gender--those girls, those daughters of men, who find themselves without money, a home, a job, a guardian, quite without pity or charity, continually up for bargain like cheaply made baubles and trinkets in the market. They receive but a pittance of their own wage, along with the opportunity to be housed, in a communal sort of way, to eat, to be clothed--all according to the magnanimity of the pimp. The going price is 500,000 rupiah, about 50 US dollars. This includes the room, one hour of time, a beer, a massage, a bath, a condom, and pretty much anything else within the limits of human depravity that can also be fit into the space of one hour.

Now litter is not wholly without appeal, at least in some limited sense. It may be, for instance, that the Big Mac carton, yet seaworthy as it tops a nearby wave, inspires a vague notion of hunger, or the orange Fanta can, snuggled in a nest of sea anemone, gives rise to thirst, but God help the man who is offered a 17 year old girl and straightaway seeks to consume another human being, as if she were nothing more than a bit of meat for his appetite.

Five hundred thousand rupiah, as I have said, is asked; but of course it is only the rare man who will end up paying this price, and the rarer pimp who will not ask a good deal more at the outset. It is a game of negotiation, of lie and bluff. Everything here is got by bargain--shirts, hats, sunglasses, paintings, watches, bracelets, and human beings. The beach boy starts high, forever hoping for the jackpot--a callow Westerner, a white man with money--and the wise, yet hungry customer starts out very low indeed.

In broken English the pimp paints his fresco of paradise--a cliché, a joke, a lie, a dream--while the customer, already containing at least two or three drinks and probably more--continually checks his wallet, hems and haws, careful to show that he is a man to be reckoned with, and no fool.

One hundred thousand rupiah sounds like a lot of money, but of course it is all relative. It is nothing to the common Westerner on vacation, much to the pimp, and without pertinence to the prostitute herself, for again she will receive but her pittance and her pittance alone.

It is, at the present rate of exchange, about 11 US dollars.

I am told that one is taken by taxi or motor bike up the road a piece and onto the winding back lanes. Where light is dim, where wild dogs wander, where children cry and squalor thrives, the man is let out to a Kos-Kosan, a central dwelling coupled to four or five small rooms. Each room is equipped with a toilet and a bed. The driver winks, money is exchanged, and the nervous yet anticipant purchaser finds himself facing perhaps fifteen, perhaps twenty, perhaps thirty women--young, older, thin, fat, pretty, homely--the well endowed and the unendowed--the experienced, the jaded, the fearful, the hopeless--all the little girls now trapped within the value of their flesh.

What bargain has been worked this night, what price, what deal, what swindle made for this father’s daughter, for this mother’s treasure, for this young woman’s heart and soul?

The next day another man will visit the beach. There he will find the same trash--unbothered, irremovable, as permanent as the sea itself--and despite the whiteness of the sand, the long sighing of the breakers, the majestic rise of the inland hills, the play of a child’s laughter on the breeze, he will do his business, make his killing, and reap the life of another human being--never seeing, never hearing, never imagining that paradise, rightly judged, had been available all along and quite without cost--free for the asking, albeit with this one caveat attached: He must seek in truth, ask with honor, and embrace with the sort of thankful compassion that should be the common currency of all men.

*

But the Bali beach boy is only the tip of iceberg--a small player, rightly reckoned.. I mention him first only because he was my own first experience of this peculiar institution after my initial arrival on the island. He is a scrapper, a scavenger, a jack of all illegal trades, and some legal ones as well. He prowls up and down, like a hungry lion, so to speak, seeking whom might be devoured, or whom he might offer for devouring, in the case of the chicken. It is commonly a community effort--no one gets the whole victim, but only each a piece--say a flank, or a thigh, a finger or a nose. He is the middle man, and less than the middle man. He is one head on the totem pole, a link in the chain. It’s all about networking, you see. This man has connections, whether they be to boat owners, diving instructors, drug dealers, or whore house proprietors.

Maybe the Bali boy starts with a boat. Everyone wants a boat ride, don’t they? Snorkeling?

Fishing? It is, in any case, a safe, a neutral starting point.

Mister, you want boat? One hour only? Swim? Snorkel? One hour, very cheap for you.

Right.

It is his first card only. No worries, there‘s more to come. His pockets are full of options, each more tempting than the last.

How about a driver? A motor bike?

No?

How about magic mushrooms then? How about a girl, very young, young girl, 17 years only.

Mister, you want?

A wink of the eye then, a lowering of the voice, a confidence, a newly forged friendship.

My goodness, this Bali beach boy is friendly.

Perhaps a man had started out for a walk on the beach. Perhaps he had stopped to eat in one of the beach front warungs, or more probably one of the upscale restaurants with the bule prices. Perhaps the beach boy watched him along the way. And then the next thing he knows, this man is riding on the back of a scooter, bound for the dark end of a back street in Legian or Kuta, with maybe a stop at the ATM along the way--for there is more available, as he learns, than the one hour only, the quickie, the single bottle of beer. It is the party of his lifetime. He did not look for it, it looked for him. Maybe it has become two hours, or three, or the full long night. Maybe one girl, maybe two. You name it. The sky the limit as long as his pocketbook is fat. And it is fat, always, for the vacationing Westerner here on the island of Bali. This man, common enough in his own country, is rich now, a man of means, the whole pallet of the paint of life set before him.

The taxi driver is another link in the chain--not, again, the pimp, but the middle man, the man who knows, the man who facilitates. Take a walk after dark and see for yourself. A man alone, just walking like that? What else can he want but a woman? The driver slows down, creeps up to the curbing, beeps his horn once, rolls down his window. Where are you going, he asks? What do you want? Young woman, yes. Very young, maybe 17.

He does not take no for an answer. He creeps and insists, insists and creeps. He argues the value of his offer. He knows what you really want.

Money is got by all means here, and the competition is stiff, very stiff indeed. The man who is not quick, the man who is not saavy, plays at ruin and starvation.

And so the meter runs. And so the alley opens to the light at the end of the tunnel.

*

Bali is an island of stunning beauty. There is the beauty of the deep blue Indian Ocean, the beauty of the Bali Sea, the beauty of the sugar-white sands of Seminyak and the coal-black beaches at Klungkung. There are the stately palm and deciduous trees which shade the long sighing coastline, and the jungle canopy upcountry which brushes at the wall of the hard blue sky, while chattering monkeys tell the strokes and cicak and tokay lizards critique from below. Above all the mountaintops shoulder through the last of the high green thatching--Batukau, Batur, mighty Agung, counted to be the center of the world by the people--seven links on Bali all together in the ring of fire that stretches all the way from the Asian continent to the islands of Sumatra and Java, simmering to the depths like troubled giants, yet gracefully sleepy for the time being.

Lovina in the north winks at Sanur in the south, having much in common--Sengaraja nods toward Kuta--Candidasa, adorned in ceremonial gold, spills its pearls to the temple in the sea and whispers with the breaking surf about gods and rites and offerings tucked into baskets made of hand cut fronds.

It’s classic, almost a cliché, a picture book place straight out of the glossy pages of a coffee table album. But there is more, and what is more is more of a secret nature, and the height of what is more is higher, and the depth is deeper. Here is the unpaved alley with its one room dwellings hewn from stone almost as if they had been carved rather than erected--no glass in the windows, no door in the doorway, no bathroom aside from the field out back. Here are the children I meet every day on my way down the alley to the Circle K store, sitting on the entry step and wall, intent on a game or marbles among the puddles, who rush forth to meet me on sight, shrieking hello, Mister, hello, hello, hello, overjoyed at having mastered this much of the English language. Here, further down, is the man who eternally repairs an old VW, and his buddies who watch as they smoke Kreteks, and his wife holding his baby by the Marigolds which spill over the wall to the brim of a bucket filled with ancient black oil.

What is the beauty that breaths behind the glossy page. It is in the lettering on the last wall before the alley lets onto the street, in the words which hang from the crawling ivy, bright, insistent, unknown.

Some months back, seeking to make some extra cash, even if only in Rupiah, I began to do some work writing and editing for a magazine called Bali Style. This is a slick, Western style production prepared in Bali and printed in Jakarta, generally covering all things unaffordable, otherwise unattainable for the local population--fine linens and ceramic ware, five star hotels, sprawling new white walled villas, walk in closets with sliding ladders and shelves for the shoes, jewels for Dutch necks and English fingers.

All that glitters is not gold;
Often have you heard that told:
Many a man his life hath sold
But my outside to behold

We call these things precious, sumptuous, lavish, exotic, succulent, luscious, divine. These are the words we use. And when we run out of such words, we use the thesaurus to find more. We paint our Western picture. We build our castles on the sand and atop the crumbled wall. There are people, I will tell you honestly, who come here to Indonesia, and yet never actually arrive.

So one day during an editorial meeting--a foreign thing in itself--I found myself daydreaming, exhausted, disheartened by luxury, and I began to construct in my mind a different sort of issue of Bali Style. I called it, in my mind, Bali Style--The Real World Issue; and the article I wrote, in my mind, in my daydream, went like this:

Those who are familiar with Bali Style magazine will find our current issue a bit of a departure from the norm. No Villas here, no Ming Dynasty “vawses,“ none of the usual glitz and glimmer. Rather, we shall visit the real world, and hope to impart a new, more down to earth taste for the palate of our typical reader.

Here, dear reader, is the classic Balinese homestead. This simple one room dwelling is made completely of stone on the outside. It is also made of stone on the inside. In fact the stone on the inside is the backside of the stone on the outside. It is, in short, the same stone, inside and out.

Within these understated walls we find furniture in the well-loved antique style, genuinely aged, cleverly constructed from mossy planks of pre-used lumbar found in the pristine field out back (which is where the pre-used nails were found as well). On the armoire, brightly nostalgic in the classic red and yellow hues of 1950’s plastic ware, sits grandma’s unfinished bowl of mie goring, although grandma herself has not been seen for several months’ time and may, it is thought, have succumbed to Dengue Fever.

From the square eco-friendly front window (for it has no glass or other impediment to the cooling breeze), we turn and take three steps to the far side of the dwelling, careful not to stir the dust along the way. There in the corner sits a tiny cane, propped just so, waiting for its tiny owner to return. And a chicken. Beside the cane and the chicken are a few pellets of chicken shit, as well as one dog turd.

Lighting throughout the house is unobtrusive, as indirect as a tongue in cheek comment--none of these glaring overhead globes, which do, after all, require electricity, not to mention money for payment of the electric bill. Therefore, we are inclined to call the interior lighting here a suggestion rather than a shout, a rumor rather than an actual fact.

Mother’s bed is on the eastern wall, nestled beneath several rather artistically imperfect stones that jut from the wall and serve as convenient natural nightstands. Or handholds if need be. Father’s bed is there too. As are the beds of junior and his two brothers.

A short distance further into the interior of the home (and I do mean short), we find we are actually in the backyard. In fact, we find ourselves standing in the bathroom. It is a sharing of space, a dialogue with nature. Again, the accent is on simplicity, on intimate relationship with the land. And the evidence of this relationship is all about--so watch your step folks!

*

What is beauty? Yes, the young woman also, the maiden from Sumatra, the kampung princess from Jawa Selatan. She is the girl who works the side street in Kuta, the one who goes by taxi two and three times a night to the hotel in Legian, the one who sits at the long bar in the dark club on Jalan Danau Tamblingan in Sanur and waits, facing the street, legs crossed elegantly at the knee, for someone to notice, and pause, and check his wallet.

On Jalan Danau Poso my wife has a salon. We do hair and nails and massage. Next door is a short lane which leads to a brothel, and next door to that another. Other services are offered there, but the girls regularly come to our place to spend, in a way that seems incredible to me, their hard earned wages on manicures, pedicures, cream rinses, and gossip. But of course the gossip part is free, and there are a million good stories to go around, believe you me.

At first I did not understand who these girls were. I noted only (ever callow I) that there seemed to be a lucky surplus of beautiful women on our street. They would sit and talk, inside or out, waiting one turn in the chair for another, and eat their lunch outside--nasi kuning, mie goring, bubur ayam--at the table where I also sit and write.

Here the daylight pays the night’s price, and the exchange is made in smiles, in words, in pampering and primping. Here is where they care for themselves, body and soul, redeeming their wages for the rewards of friendship and common conversation. In short, they become real people again. And these are the people I have come to know, the real women, the girls, some of them not much more than children, come to remove the masks of night in favor of those made of cooling cosmetic creams and lotions, wrinkle reducers, face rejuvenizers, skin pore cleansers, eye socket balms, mustache removers, exfoliating ointments, and whatever else of chemical mystery is served up in my wife’s salon. They are Ayuh, Ketut, Gina, Dewi; from Java, Sumatra,
Surabaya, Jakarta. In Bali they make their money, and send a goodly portion back home. They say that they are working as beauticians or clerks, waitresses or cooks, so that the money they send will not be tainted.

Meme had grown chunky in the months that had passed since we first met. She had made a particular friend of my wife, and would appear daily at the salon from around the corner, just to talk. Every day, or so it seemed, she grew a little bit larger. It happened also, in suspicious coincidence, that her clientele began to fall off and wither. So it happened that my wife began to worry for the girl’s welfare.

“Meme can’t get any customers,” she told me. “There are too many girls next door.”

Too many girls next door? Was that the problem, really? But the competition is stiff, you see? The candy store is overstocked.

Nonetheless, I made no comment, other than to suggest that she might consider a change in career.

“Change to what? There are no jobs here--especially for a girl like Meme. She’s got no training, no education, no skills.”

Other than the skill she is already plying. This was the sentence so very clearly unsaid. And indeed it is so--for Meme’s experience, her training had started long ago--first at the hands of her father, then of her uncle, then back to her father, and so sadly on. Meme worked even then, and not for money, but only as a human barrier to keep guard over her much younger sister.

What is right, after all? What has honor? What exactly is exchanged in trade?

I feel so bad for her,” Louis said.

I could not help but think that a diet might be a place to start, but I did not offer this as an opinion.

“I’m going to call some people,” my wife said.

“For what?”

“To try to help her.”

“You mean--”

“Yes! What else? It’s the only thing she knows how to do.”

“So now you’re a pimp?”

“If that’s what it takes!”

“Well for Christ’s sake,” I objected.

“Don’t say Christ,” she answered. "Don't take the Lord's name in vain."

I don’t understand my wife. I don’t understand her thought processes. Moreover, since my wife is a woman, I guess I don’t understand women in general. I mean, what are we talking about here? Prostitution, right? Women degraded at the hands of men, purchased like so many loaves of bread.

But Louise is a realist, not an altruist. When the day is done it is not high morals that matter, but food in the mouth, rent on the table. It is a hard course to argue, for we argue starvation against survival, crucifixion against contentment.

In the end I merely mentioned Weight Watchers as a possible good.

But weight, I was told, did not matter. Rather, it was not the weight of one girl that had become problematic, but the weight of many.

One late night, already a long time in bed, we were awakened by a phone call. It was Meme. Something was wrong. The police were on patrol. Meme was hiding. Hiding . . . Where? In the bushes on the grounds of the Mercure hotel?

I picked these things up piece by piece, scattered as they were among a lot of other pieces and all strewn about in the chaotic manner of the Indonesian language spoken in rapid bursts of slang.

“Tell her to come here,” I said, allowing a groan to escape at the end. “Tell her to take a taxi.”

“Don’t be scared,” Louise was saying into the phone. “Don’t be scared, Meme. Just stay there, okay. Just stay in the bushes. My husband will come and get you.”

And then she turned to me and said:

“Pleeeeeese”

*

We will say in conclusion that once a year the police in Sanur do an official sweep, rounding up the girl on the street, the underage worker, visiting the brothel and the chicken bar and such like. It is, as I say, a once a year event--and perhaps always the same day at that, a sort of holiday on an island already overrun by holidays--Galungan, Nyeppi, Ramadan, Christmas, and so on.

This was the day Meme hid in the bushes at the Mercure, and the night she stayed in our spare room at the house. It was the night the police arrested a 17 year old, a 15 year old, and a 14 year old girl. And exacted a fine on the owner of the brothel which had furnished the same.

And then back to business as usual.

Oh, the officers still visit the brothels--once and twice a week at that--but only for graft, to collect their fee, the cost of departmental blindness. And the Bali boys are back on the beach, and the taxi drivers hale from the dimly lit streets. And the girls--well, the girls are as prolific as ever in the long sigh of the many eons of time.

Chicken, 6

Some months back, seeking to make some extra cash, even if only in Rupiah, I began to do some work writing and editing for a magazine called Bali Style. This is a slick, Western style production prepared in Bali and printed in Jakarta, generally covering all things unaffordable, otherwise unattainable for the local population--fine linens and ceramic ware, five star hotels, sprawling new white walled villas, walk in closets with sliding ladders and shelves for the shoes, jewels for Dutch necks and English fingers.

All that glitters is not gold;

Often have you heard that told:

Many a man his life hath sold

But my outside to behold

We call these things precious, sumptuous, lavish, exotic, succulent, luscious, divine. These are the words we use. And when we run out of such words, we use the thesaurus to find more. We paint our Western picture. We build our castles on the sand and atop the crumbled wall. There are people, I will tell you honestly, who come here to Indonesia, and yet never actually arrive.
So one day during an editorial meeting--a foreign thing in itself--I found myself daydreaming, exhausted, disheartened by luxury, and I began to construct in my mind a different sort of issue of Bali Style. I called it, in my mind, Bali Style--The Real World Issue; and the article I wrote, in my mind, in my daydream, went like this:

Those who are familiar with Bali Style magazine will find our current issue a bit of a departure from the norm. No Villas here, no Ming Dynasty “vawses,“ none of the usual glitz and glimmer. Rather, we shall visit the real world, and hope to impart a new, more down to earth taste for the palate of our typical reader.

Here, dear reader, is the classic Balinese homestead. This simple one room dwelling is made completely of stone on the outside. It is also made of stone on the inside. In fact the stone on the inside is the backside of the stone on the outside. It is, in short, the same stone, inside and out.

Within these understated walls we find furniture in the well-loved antique style, genuinely aged, cleverly constructed from mossy planks of pre-used lumbar found in the pristine field out back (which is where the pre-used nails were found as well). On the armoire, brightly nostalgic in the classic red and yellow hues of 1950’s plastic ware, sits grandma’s unfinished bowl of mie goring, although grandma herself has not been seen for several months’ time and may, it is thought, have succumbed to Dengue Fever.

From the square eco-friendly front window (for it has no glass or other impediment to the cooling breeze), we turn and take three steps to the far side of the dwelling, careful not to stir the dust along the way. There in the corner sits a tiny cane, propped just so, waiting for its tiny owner to return. And a chicken. Beside the cane and the chicken are a few pellets of chicken shit, as well as one dog turd.

Lighting throughout the house is unobtrusive, as indirect as a tongue in cheek comment--none of these glaring overhead globes, which do, after all, require electricity, not to mention money for payment of the electric bill. Therefore, we are inclined to call the interior lighting here a suggestion rather than a shout, a rumor rather than an actual fact.

Mother’s bed is on the eastern wall, nestled beneath several rather artistically imperfect stones that jut from the wall and serve as convenient natural nightstands. Or handholds if need be. Father’s bed is there too. As are the beds of junior and his two brothers.

A short distance further into the interior of the home (and I do mean short), we find we are actually in the backyard. In fact, we find ourselves standing in the bathroom. It is a sharing of space, a dialogue with nature. Again, the accent is on simplicity, on intimate relationship with the land. And the evidence of this relationship is all about--so watch your step folks!

*

What is beauty? Yes, the young woman also, the maiden from Sumatra, the kampung princess from Jawa Selatan. She is the girl who works the side street in Kuta, the one who goes by taxi two and three times a night to the hotel in Legian, the one who sits at the long bar in the dark club on Jalan Danau Tamblingan in Sanur and waits, facing the street, legs crossed elegantly at the knee, for someone to notice, and pause, and check his wallet.

On Jalan Danau Poso my wife has a salon. We do hair and nails and massage. Next door is a short lane which leads to a brothel, and next door to that another. Other services are offered there, but the girls regularly come to our place to spend, in a way that seems incredible to me, their hard earned wages on manicures, pedicures, cream rinses, and gossip. But of course the gossip part is free, and there are a million good stories to go around, believe you me.

At first I did not understand who these girls were. I noted only (ever callow I) that there seemed to be a lucky surplus of beautiful women on our street. They would sit and talk, inside or out, waiting one turn in the chair for another, and eat their lunch outside--nasi kuning, mie goring, bubur ayam--at the table where I also sit and write.

Here the daylight pays the night’s price, and the exchange is made in smiles, in words, in pampering and primping. Here is where they care for themselves, body and soul, redeeming their wages for the rewards of friendship and common conversation. In short, they become real people again. And these are the people I have come to know, the real women, the girls, some of them not much more than children, come to remove the masks of night in favor of those made of cooling cosmetic creams and lotions, wrinkle reducers, face rejuvenizers, skin pore cleansers, eye socket balms, mustache removers, exfoliating ointments, and whatever else of chemical mystery is served up in my wife’s salon. They are Ayuh, Ketut, Gina, Dewi; from Java, Sumatra, Surabaya, Jakarta. In Bali they make their money, and send a goodly portion back home. They say that they are working as beauticians or clerks, waitresses or cooks, so that the money they send will not be tainted.

Meme had grown chunky in the months that had passed since we first met. She had made a particular friend of my wife, and would appear daily at the salon from around the corner, just to talk. Every day, or so it seemed, she grew a little bit larger. It happened also, in suspicious coincidence, that her clientele began to fall off and wither. So it happened that my wife began to worry for the girl’s welfare.

“Meme can’t get any customers,” she told me. “There are too many girls next door.”

Too many girls next door? Was that the problem, really? But the competition is stiff, you see? The candy store is overstocked.

Nonetheless, I made no comment, other than to suggest that she might consider a change in career.

“Change to what? There are no jobs here--especially for a girl like Meme. She’s got no training, no education, no skills.”

Other than the skill she is already plying. This was the sentence so very clearly unsaid. And indeed it is so--for Meme’s experience, her training had started long ago--first at the hands of her father, then of her uncle, then back to her father, and so sadly on. Meme worked even then, and not for money, but only as a human barrier to keep guard over her much younger sister.
What is right, after all? What has honor? What exactly is exchanged in trade?

I feel so bad for her,” Louis said.

I could not help but think that a diet might be a place to start, but I did not offer this as an opinion.

“I’m going to call some people,” my wife said.

“For what?”

“To try to help her.”

“You mean--”

“Yes! What else? It’s the only thing she knows how to do.”

“So now you’re a pimp?”

“If that’s what it takes!”

“Well for Christ’s sake,” I objected.

“Don’t say Christ,” she answered.

I don’t understand my wife. I don’t understand her thought processes. Moreover, since my wife is a woman, I guess I don’t understand women in general. I mean, what are we talking about here? Prostitution, right? Women degraded at the hands of men, purchased like so many loaves of bread.

But Louise is a realist, not an altruist. When the day is done it is not high morals that matter, but food in the mouth, rent on the table. It is a hard course to argue, for we argue starvation against survival, crucifixion against contentment.

In the end I merely mentioned Weight Watchers as a possible good.

But weight, I was told, did not matter. Rather, it was not the weight of one girl that had become problematic, but the weight of many.

One late night, already a long time in bed, we were awakened by a phone call. It was Meme. Something was wrong. The police were on patrol. Meme was hiding. Hiding . . . Where? In the bushes on the grounds of the Mercure hotel?

I picked these things up piece by piece, scattered as they were among a lot of other pieces and all strewn about in the chaotic manner of the Indonesian language spoken in rapid bursts of slang.

“Tell her to come here,” I said, allowing a groan to escape at the end. “Tell her to take a taxi.”

“Don’t be scared,” Louise was saying into the phone. “Don’t be scared, Meme. Just stay there, okay. Just stay in the bushes. My husband will come and get you.”

And then she turned to me and said:

“Pleeeeeese”

*

We will say in conclusion that once a year the police in Sanur do an official sweep, rounding up the girl on the street, the underage worker, visiting the brothel and the chicken bar and such like. It is, as I say, a once a year event--and perhaps always the same day at that, a sort of holiday on an island already overrun by holidays--Galungan, Nyeppi, Ramadan, Christmas, and so on.

This was the day Meme hid in the bushes at the Mercure, and the night she stayed in our spare room at the house. It was the night the police arrested a 17 year old, a 15 year old, and a 14 year old girl. And exacted a fine on the owner of the brothel which had furnished the same.

And then back to business as usual.

Oh, the officers still visit the brothels--once and twice a week at that--but only for graft, to collect their fee, the cost of departmental blindness. And the Bali boys are back on the beach, and the taxi drivers hale from the dimly lit streets. And the girls--well, the girls are as prolific as ever in the long sigh of the many eons of time.

Chicken, 5

It’s classic, almost a cliché, a picture book place straight out of the glossy pages of a coffee table album. But there is more, and what is more is more of a secret nature, and the height of what is more is higher, and the depth is deeper. Here is the unpaved alley with its one room dwellings hewn from stone almost as if they had been carved rather than erected--no glass in the windows, no door in the doorway, no bathroom aside from the field out back. Here are the children I meet every day on my way down the alley to the Circle K store, sitting on the entry step and wall, intent on a game or marbles among the puddles, who rush forth to meet me on sight, shrieking hello, Mister, hello, hello, hello, overjoyed at having mastered this much of the English language. Here, further down, is the man who eternally repairs an old VW, and his buddies who watch as they smoke Kreteks, and his wife holding his baby by the Marigolds which spill over the wall to the brim of a bucket filled with ancient black oil.

What is the beauty that breaths behind the glossy page. It is in the lettering on the last wall before the alley lets onto the street, in the words which hang from the crawling ivy, bright, insistent, unknown.

Chicken, 4

Bali is an island of stunning beauty. There is the beauty of the deep blue Indian Ocean, the beauty of the Bali Sea, the beauty of the sugar-white sands of Seminyak and the coal-black beaches at Klungkung. There are the stately palm and deciduous trees which shade the long sighing coastline, and the jungle canopy upcountry which brushes at the wall of the hard blue sky, while chattering monkeys tell the strokes and cicak and tokay lizards critique from below. Above all the mountaintops shoulder through the last of the high green thatching--Batukau, Batur, mighty Agung, counted to be the center of the world by the people--seven links in the ring of fire that stretches all the way from the Asian continent to the islands of Sumatra and Java, simmering to the depths like troubled giants, yet gracefully sleepy for the time being.

Lovina in the north winks at Sanur in the south, having much in common--Sengaraja nods toward Kuta--Candidasa, adorned in ceremonial gold, spills its pearls to the temple in the sea and whispers with the breaking surf about gods and rites and offerings tucked into baskets made of hand cut fronds.

Chicken, 3

Perhaps a man had started out for a walk on the beach. Perhaps he had stopped to eat in one of the beach front warungs, or more probably one of the upscale restaurants with the bule prices. Perhaps the beach boy watched him along the way. And then the next thing he knows, this man is riding on the back of a scooter, bound for the dark end of a back street in Legian or Kuta, with maybe a stop at the ATM along the way--for there is more available, as he learns, than the one hour only, the quickie, the single bottle of beer. It is the party of his lifetime. He did not look for it, it looked for him. Maybe it has become two hours, or three, or the full long night. Maybe one girl, maybe two. You name it. The sky the limit as long as his pocketbook is fat. And it is fat, always, for the vacationing Westerner here on the island of Bali. This man, common enough in his own country, is rich now, a man of means, the whole pallet of the paint of life set before him.
The taxi driver is another link in the chain--not, again, the pimp, but the middle man, the man who knows, the man who facilitates. Take a walk after dark and see for yourself. A man alone, just walking like that? What else can he want but a woman? The driver slows down, creeps up to the curbing, beeps his horn once, rolls down his window. Where are you going, he asks? What do you want? Young woman, yes. Very young, maybe 17.

He does not take no for an answer. He creeps and insists, insists and creeps. He argues the value of his offer. He knows what you really want.

Money is got by all means here, and the competition is stiff, very stiff indeed. The man who is not quick, the man who is not saavy, plays at ruin and starvation.

And so the meter runs. And so the alley opens to the light at the end of the tunnel.

Chicken, 2

But the Bali beach boy is only the tip of iceberg--a small player, rightly reckoned.. I mention him first only because he was my own first experience of this peculiar institution after my initial arrival on the island. He is a scrapper, a scavenger, a jack of all illegal trades, and some legal ones as well. He prowls up and down, like a hungry lion, so to speak, seeking whom might be devoured, or whom he might offer for devouring, in the case of the chicken. It is commonly a community effort--no one gets the whole victim, but only each a piece--say a flank, or a thigh, a finger or a nose. He is the middle man, and less than the middle man. He is one head on the totem pole, a link in the chain. It’s all about networking, you see. This man has connections, whether they be to boat owners, diving instructors, drug dealers, or whore house proprietors.

Maybe the Bali boy starts with a boat. Everyone wants a boat ride, don’t they? Snorkeling? Fishing? It is, in any case, a safe, a neutral starting point.

Mister, you want boat? One hour only? Swim? Snorkel? One hour, very cheap for you.

Right.

It is his first card only. No worries, there‘s more to come. His pockets are full of options, each more tempting than the last.

How about a driver? A motor bike?

No?

How about magic mushrooms then? How about a girl, very young, young girl, 17 years only.
Mister, you want?

A wink of the eye then, a lowering of the voice, a confidence, a newly forged friendship.

My goodness, this Bali beach boy is friendly.

Chicken

In ecologically sensitive times such as ours, litter is not pretty anywhere. Of course, it never has been pretty, but there is just more of it now, and so we are more aware of it than ever. The island of Bali, in this regard, is no different than anywhere else. We have our share of floating, blowing, huddling, homeless garbage, in the street, in the sea, in the gutter and on the highway--and in fact, to be honest, more than our share.

Depending upon the strength of the tide, the direction of the submerged ocean stream, I may sometimes find myself swimming alongside empty Lays Potato Chip bags, double cheeseburger wrappers, the daily ceremonial offerings to the gods, and the occasional plastic diaper.

There is no readily discernible garbage, I mean sanitation, service in Bali. There seems to be no regular scheduling of men or trucks--and God knows where the occasional men and trucks that do happen by take this stuff once they collect it. Pressed for an answer to this riddle, I might guess that a good deal of it is deposited in the field just a block down from my house, for I cannot begin to imagine how else it got there except by plan.

One will see these haphazard trucks, circa 1950, roaring up the highway, streaming miniature clouds of gravel and non-biodegradable refuse in their wake, but where they are going, no one knows. I do note that the river just up the Bypass, and just before you reach the Matahari Mall, is very often choked with a sludge of manmade refuse, and so maybe that is where some of these trucks relieve themselves of their loads. I think it must be so--for, again, how else could the situation have arisen?

In any case, what I want to talk about here is more than your common, run of the mill sort of litter. No, what I want to address is Bali’s very particular version of litter--or garbage, if you will--those local men on the beach who hang about in the shade and seek to sell chicken. I’m not talking about the sort of chicken that is commonly fried, baked, or barbecued. No, this chicken is of the human variety, of the female gender--those girls, those daughters of men, who find themselves without money, a home, a job, a guardian, quite without pity or charity, continually up for bargain like cheaply made baubles and trinkets in the market. They receive but a pittance of their own wage, along with the opportunity to be housed, in a communal sort of way, to eat, to be clothed--all according to the magnanimity of the pimp. The going price is 500,000 rupiah, about 50 US dollars. This includes the room, one hour of time, a beer, a massage, a bath, a condom, and pretty much anything else within the limits of human depravity that can also be fit into the space of one hour.

Now litter is not wholly without appeal, at least in some limited sense. It may be, for instance, that the Big Mac carton, yet seaworthy as it tops a nearby wave, inspires a vague notion of hunger, or the orange Fanta can, snuggled in a nest of sea anenomi, gives rise to thirst, but God help the man who is offered a 17 year old girl and straightaway seeks to consume another human being, as if she were nothing more than a bit of meat for his appetite.

Five hundred thousand rupiah, as I have said, is asked; but of course it is only the rare man who will end up paying this price, and the rarer pimp who will not ask a good deal more at the outset. It is a game of negotiation, of lie and bluff. Everything here is got by bargain--shirts, hats, sunglasses, paintings, watches, bracelets, and human beings. The beach boy starts high, forever hoping for the jackpot--a callow Westerner, a white man with money--and the wise, yet hungry customer starts out very low indeed.

In broken English the pimp paints his fresco of paradise--a cliché, a joke, a lie, a dream--while the customer, already containing at least two or three drinks and probably more--continually checks his wallet, hems and haws, careful to show that he is a man to be reckoned with, and no fool.

One hundred thousand rupiah sounds like a lot of money, but of course it is all relative. It is nothing to the common Westerner on vacation, much to the pimp, and without pertinence to the prostitute herself, for again she will receive but her pittance and her pittance alone.
It is, at the present rate of exchange, about 11 US dollars.

I am told that one is taken by taxi or motor bike up the road a piece and onto the winding back lanes. Where light is dim, where wild dogs wander, where children cry and squalor thrives, the man is let out to a Kos-Kosan, a central dwelling coupled to four or five small rooms. Each room is equipped with a toilet and a bed. The driver winks, money is exchanged, and the nervous yet anticipant purchaser finds himself facing perhaps fifteen, perhaps twenty, perhaps thirty women--young, older, thin, fat, pretty, homely--the well endowed and the unendowed--the experienced, the jaded, the fearful, the hopeless--all the little girls now trapped within the value of their flesh.

What bargain has been worked this night, what price, what deal, what swindle made for this father’s daughter, for this mother’s treasure, for this young woman’s heart and soul?

The next day another man will visit the beach. There he will find the same trash--unbothered, irremovable, as permanent as the sea itself--and despite the whiteness of the sand, the long sighing of the breakers, the majestic rise of the inland hills, the play of a child’s laughter on the breeze, he will do his business, make his killing, and reap the life of another human being--never seeing, never hearing, never imagining that paradise, rightly judged, had been available all along and quite without cost--free for the asking, albeit with this one caveat attached: He must seek in truth, ask with honor, and embrace with the sort of thankful compassion that should be the common currency of all men.

My Own Comment Is ....

I've said this before, but I'll say it again--it is keenly annoying to me (as well as disheartening) that comments most often posted here concern unwanted, unsolicited, unwelcome crap like advertisements for penis lengthening pills or hair products or pyramid schemes, and etc. and so on. WTF! One looks to make a meaningful connection and all he gets is a damn door-to-door salesman. Enough with the random crap, a'ight!

The Grace of God

Next time you get up tight about the Christian Right, consider this:

Recently the publisher of the short-lived Indonesian version of Playboy--a 'toned down' version of the magazine which displayed no nudity whatsoever (yes, people really did buy it for the articles), was arrested in Java and slapped in jail. At the initial hearing the charges were dropped and the man was released. This, however, gave rise to an immediate uproar from muslim extremists, demanding that the man be returned to jail (obviously, the will of the law and the court meant nothing). Forthwith, the publisher fled to the shores of Hindu Bali. If was not far enough. A few weeks later he was tracked down and arrested in Bali and returned to Jakarta, where he is now back in jail and facing a two year sentence.

If not for the grace of God . . . .

Does Human Morality Arise from Brain Chemistry?

Well it's a no brainer, right? And I do mean no brainer.

Yes, the latest scientific/medical research, along with follow-up studies from Harvard and Cambridge universities, suggests morality may be a function of serotonin levels in the brain (the high level indicating, I would guess, sainthood, the low level the serial killer).

So at last here is the answer to all societal woes, to crime and violence, bigotry, avarice--in a nutshell, as the apostle Paul put it, to adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries, and the like. Hallelujah.

We need only dispense citalopram on a universal scale in order to have done once for all with this sad fallen world of ours and thereby enter the new--paradise, the New Jerusalem, Shangri-La, the Brave New World!

Somebody say Amen!

The Color Scam

According to the Bali Times (9/3-9/2010), "Bali Police Chief, Hadiatmoko, acted this week to stop police unfairly targeting foreigners (i.e. white people)--especially those on Motorbikes . . . following complaints of harrassment." And etc.

It's about time right.

We all have our stories to tell--which of course is something that makes the case all the more apparent. In my first four months in Bali I was stopped four times in traffic and paid some 400,000 Rupiah for the traffic infraction of 'being white.' The first time around you pay whatever the officer suggests, as you don't know the game (the scam, that is). After that you learn to argue ever more forcefully, you learn to negotiate, you learn to dicker. You learn not to carry more than 30,000 Rupiah in your wallet, hiding the larger money elsewhere. You learn to speak more Indonesian. You learn to say "Hell no!"

The last time I was stopped, my wife happened to be riding on the back of my scooter. As soon as she took her helmet off, and the officer noted she was Indonesian, he said "Oh, okay," and went on his way.

One hardly needs to strain at conclusions here.

Some time later, in a great error of political incorrectness, I joked to my half-black stepdaughter that now I knew what it is like to be 'a nigger.' This did not go over well at all, for you simply do not use that word, ever, never, for any reason whatsoever. Relationship does not matter, nor the status as parent, as friend, as protector; nor does history or trust or time or levity.

What matters is skin color.

But wait . . . that's exactly what I'm saying.

In any case, black or white or yellow or brown, being a target based on skin color is creepy. It's disheartening, maddening, frightening, and insulting. You are reduced for the personal use of the man who misuses authority, backed simply by his own majority color--most especially because no ticket is ever actually contemplated nor given, for the only point is the transfer of the money in your wallet to his.

Pencuri

I had not heard of so much as one incident of theft here in Bali until yesterday when someone stole my friend's bicycle. He had left it unlocked in front of his house, but this is not an uncommon practice. I will often leave the doors to my house unlocked so that friends can go in and out. I regularly leave my laptop on a table at the beach while I swim. I very rarely lock my helmet into the scooter seat, but just hook it onto the handle bar.

Of course one theft does not an epidemic make, but it is disturbing nonetheless. All it takes is one person without conscience I guess.

More disturbing than the theft itself, however, is the advice given thereafter by a neighbor here to the effect that all things should be locked and watched during the days preceding Ramadan, as, according to him anyway, Muslims will often steal and sell things in order to raise money to go home for the religious observance.

One needs hardly comment on the absurdity of cause and effect here.

In Bali I have never felt anything other than utterly safe and secure. Any person, man, woman, or child, can walk down the long, unlighted alleyway to the Circle K store without being accompanied by fear or suspicion. If you approach the group of young men, for instance, gathered around their motorbikes, they will simply greet you, move aside if need be, and maybe ask you where you are from, how long you will stay, and whether you like Bali.

Time and time again I have walked alone, anywhere, everywhere--in the alley, on the beach, on the front street or the side street, and have not once felt threatened or unsafe. When you pass someone--when someone passes you--you don't glace his way warily or walk faster, or hold on to your wallet or purse. On the contrary, you exchange a friendly greeting, maybe stop a moment to talk.

The isolated theft, therefore, seems all the more insulting, all the more out of place, and all the more unfortunate. We are not insensitive to such things, as is the case in America, nor do they seem just part of the way life is. The people of Bali have not yet come to that sad state of mind. And happily they yet have a long, long way to go.

Apa Yang Lain ....

What else?

I can say without qualification that I DO NOT miss rain. Rain type rain, I mean. It does of course rain here in Bali, occasionally, but this rain is warm and brief. It is a happy sort of rain that makes you laugh--like taking a quick shower with your clothes on, a la The Three Stooges, and then drying off within minutes when the sun returns. The rain in Oregon, on the other hand, is cold and constant and gray and depressing, and it drove us indoors for days at a time.

Living in Bali is a bit like camping. One spends the lion's share of his time outdoors. One cooks outdoors, eats outdoors, reads and writes outdoors, relaxes outdoors.

There is a flavor of the rustic in so many of our daily pursuits. One does not take water from the faucet for instance (unless one wants to contract some sort of bacterial illness). Rather, one gets his water from a five gallon jug, and when the jug is empty he refills it at the water warung down the street.

Laundry is hung from lines on the back patio after being washed and rinsed with soap and water on a board. We are cavemen here--cavemen from the 1950s--reliving the childhood of postwar America.

We buy gas in bottles, and the amazing thing is not so much that we buy it that way, but that they sell it so. The whole structure of the place is ready to explode and collapse, but it never does. Day by day people walk to the store or the market and carry home their purchases on the tops of their heads. At the market you buy not only your fresh chicken but your flies as well, and bring both home to be divided and properly dealt with before cooking.

We do not have ovens in Bali. Or at least most of us don't. We have bunson burners, hot plates, with propane tanks. We do not roast or bake, we fry or steam. Two or three ovens fired up at one and the same time might well cause a complete collapse of the power grid here (such as it is).

We have no cakes, no pies, except those that are bought in the grocery store (having been shipped from the bakery).

Missing You America, Please Write Soon

People here in Bali will often ask whether I miss America. My immediate answer to this question was for the longest time simply "No." But things that are new and different have a way of excusing themselves from the more sober sort of examination that comes with the passage of time, the growth of day to day familiarity. What seems at first endlesslesly curious and unique begins to be humdrum and commonplace. Such is the condition of the wandering spirit of man--it cannot forever tolerate sameness.

So do I now miss America? I have thought the thing over anew. And I can say that there are after all some things that I miss. One of them is competence.

Competence? It sounds a bit strange yes? But here is what I mean. I miss the orderliness of America, the reliability that is built into so many facets of everyday life. These are easily taken for granted. They are just there.

I'm talking, for instance, about mail that comes every day, not mail that comes maybe, not mail that comes if you're lucky. I'm talking about a legal system that is accessible, a legal system that can be used if need be by any person possessing a phone and a phone book. I'm talking about streets and highways with signs, with lights, with arrows, along with a shared knowledge of what these signs, lights, and arrows mean. I'm talking about a shared conception of rules for the road, where flow is determined by obediance, not by belligerance.

I miss the cup of Starbucks, the Grande cappuccino, made with real milk.

I miss the structure, the effortless seeming organization, the predictability of prices and places, the transit system, the freeway, the parking lot, the shopping mall; karmel korn, candied apples; the Fred Meyer store just down the block that has everything and more.

I miss the sheer abundance of America, the availability of everything. I miss Hollywood Video, and oh my God the Barnes and Noble Bookstore!

Can I live without it all? Most definitely so. But does it seem different now than it seemed before. Yes, it does indeed seem so.

Proverb of the Day

Looks like rain.

--Buddha

Is this politically incorrect? Is it culturally insensitive? Oh well, lighten up. All in the spirit of fun. The ideology that has no sense of humor is bound to wither and die, for humor is often the function through which we best understand ourselves and our beliefs.

I remember once hearing a joke about Jesus. Standing before an angry mob about the stone a woman caught in adultery, Jesus said "Let that person among you who is without sin cast the first stone."

Straightaway a good sized rock flew in.

"Mommmm!" Jesus said.

Now that has always seemed funny to me.

Another joke goes like this: Whose prayers does God hear best--those of the Christian, the Jew, or the Muslim. It is the Muslim, of course . . . they use loudspeakers.

It may be suggested that a lack of humor is always accompanied by an increase in intolerance, for the offense taken is not toward God--certainly not for His sake, for He has no need to be defended by poor creatures such as us. Rather the offense is the result of peevish self interest and a poverty of true self-esteem.

A Day in the Life

My wife is in America. We talk via Skype and Gmail. Along about noon today we have a little fight about money. She is very tired--I can see it in her eyes--and she is in a mood. So I cannot help but laugh, which makes things worse.

So I take a walk over to the Circle K to pick up a Bintang. Classic. The White Dog follows me, as usual. She persists in believing that she is my dog. When she tries to come into the Circle K with me the cashier asks whether she is my dog and I answer Bukan, no. But I admit to knowing where she lives. The fact is, the White Dog lives as an uninvited guest in my house. But she is not my dog.

On the way back I pass a boy peeing from outside the doorway of his house into the alley. This is a penis with some power, for the stream barely misses me.

Awas, I say. Watch out!

The boy says Hi Mister . . . hi . . . hi . . . .

"Oh, Hi," I answer. What else is there to say?

But he's not done. He says hi until I turn the corner at the end of the alley and head down the street to my house.

As I pass the warung there--the one that sells Absolut bottles filled with petrol, cigarettes, cheese crackers, and other necessities--the man asks whether I want to buy something. He always asks that.

Tidak, I say. Tidak, makasih. I always say that too. It means no thank you, but thanks for asking.

By the time I talk to my wife again, perhaps a half hour later, she is in a chipper mood.

No worries.

It is like this every day in Sanur, Bali, Indonesia.

The Hopeless Bastards

A couple weeks ago I stopped into a bar here in Sanur called The Arena. It's one of these nice looking places smack-dab on the Bypass and generally avoided by people who know how the price ranges work in our little tourist village. In short, bars like this one cater to the bule--the white man--summoning him in with bright lights, striped awnings, soft, dark wood within, of floor and bar, tables and chairs. And, oh yeah, air conditioning day and night.

Nonetheless, I went in, just wondering. I did not have money for food--not at their price anyway--but I did salivate for a time over the menu, with its offerings of bacon and cheese sandwiches, chicken cordon bleu, weinerschnitzel with mashed potatoes, beef steak (of all things), and a plethora of other culinary delights not tasted nor even ogled in six long months.

Having salivated by and by to exhaustion of the source, which naturally left me with a dry mouth, I ordered a beer.

Then it was that I met Adam, an Australian, and Ari, his beautiful Balinese wife. They were eating actual food, from the actual menu. I was envious, and I suppose I wanted to move my nose just a bit closer to their plates. So I struck up a conversation.

Adam, as I soon discovered, is the editor in chief of a slick Western quality magazine called Bali Style. I made haste to tell him that I am a writer and editor myself (yeah right), and straightaway offered by services. And it just so happened that he needed some help.

I knew there had been a good reason for coming here. I guess I just felt it in my bones. Plus I was thirsty.

Well, I learned thereafter that Wednesday night at The Arena is trivia night. You make a team, you get two pages of obscure questions, and then study these for the next hour or so, in between beers, until the master of ceremonies calls in the answers.

We decided to enter the competition. Why not? At the top of our questionnaire Adam wrote in a name for our team. The Hopeless Bastards.

Now the obscurity of these questions was quite uncommon, even for obscurity. We had not a clue. And so we guessed.

And we won. We won first place. The prize was a large pitcher of Margaritas.

The following Wednesday found us unable to repeat our inexplicable victory, however we did win third prize, which was two pitchers of beer, and so we were happy enough.

Now Wednesday approaches once again, and once again I will give my opponent (general knowledge, that is) my best shot. Sadly Adam will not be present, having had to return to Australia for a time, and so I am left simply to hope that at least one additional hopeless bastard will show up.

The Road Less Traveled

I am misguided. By my own brain. I blame this on MS.

Most detrimentally affected is wit. A witticism delayed is a witticism lost, for wit relies on the quick addition, hinges on the unanticipated allusion. Wit seizes the moment--this moment, the one just passing at the speed of light, not the one that pops up a half hour later, long after the subject had been dropped and all but forgotten. The witticism offered at such a time is more akin to the sudden outburst of a Tourette sufferer--all but meaningless, distinctly awkward.

The brain of the MS sufferer has fallen into a habit of detours. It simply cannot travel direct from point A to point B, but must instead traverse a goodly part of the alphabet first. The thought, the response, the action intended thus shows up at its destination panting and ragged, like the man who is critically late for an appointment he must in any case attend. He arrives, and yet manifestly out of sorts.

I give the following as an example, a simile:

The other day I drove my motorbike to the gas station, perhaps a half mile from our home, and quite along the confines of a straight line. This part of the journey went without event. I arrived, I filled my tank, I paid my 10,000 Rupiah.

Upon departure from this midpoint, however, I found the route of initial success--the Jalan Ngurah Ra By Pass--clogged with unmoving vehicles and quite impassable. When the driver of the motor vehicle, like the central nervous system, finds himself faced with stasis, he seeks an alternate route, for he has found the most essential artery out of order.

So it happened, upon exit from the gas station, that I turned left instead of right.

I do not say that the return journey home was without interest of its own, just that the events along the way possessed no practical kinship with the mission at hand. There exists the road that is wide and straight--the dash between the A and the B--and there exists the forest of alternative paths, twisted, crimped, noodle like strands which, for all their effort, go no farther in essence than the straight line, but only take much more time to do so.

I saw new houses, I saw new children, I saw new dogs. I ran over a new dog. I smelled new smells, craned my neck to see the tops of new trees. I nearly missed running over two chickens. I made decisions--turn right, turn left. I found dead ends. I found a hole in the road, two feet deep. I saw new garbage, strewn about by the new dogs. I saw a toad by the side of the road inexplicably entering the mouth of a snake.

By and by I arrived home. I told my wife of my adventures and she responded that I was late, that she had been waiting nearly an hour, and was now herself late for her appointment at the beauty salon.

And then I remembered the first point, the very reason for my journey. I remembered the letter A, long lost in the alphabet soup of possibilities. In short, the reason I had gone for gas in the first place was so that I could get my wife to her appointment at noon.

Remembering this however, as can be readily appreciated, is a far different thing than actually doing it.

And so it goes. The maze of necessary alternatives, that process which typifies the attempts of the afflicted central nervous system to succeed, is, like the delayed witticism, a mere spectre, an echo--not only wholly irrelevant, but wholly without hope of redemption.

I See It All

From my chair
I see it all
I see it all
ongoing
from the palm fronds
waving
at sapphire morning
to the unfinished painting
propped by the wall
and the hidden rat
with night black mane
who jets
from secreting canvas home
to the folded feet
of the stonework Buddha
poised at the foot
of the waterfall
I see it all
I see it all
from the yellow glow
of the Balinese jaw
to the flame of the candle
in my wife’s Asian eye
which misses nothing
for captivity there
what better place
for my heart to dwell
than the broken stones
that make the road
or the hammered mosaic
tattooed in the wall
yes my love I see it all
and walk where I would
and where I will
and walk from my chair
to the smoldering hill
to taste perchance
what no one else can
the nectar of fire
the flowing land

Language

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart. Nelson Mandela

If you want learn speak Bahasa you must speak Bahasa, the man at the Jazz Bar and Grill said.

And he is right. You must simply speak, abandoning care, forcing yourself. Jangan malu--don't be shy.

This of course gets easier with every large Bintang you drink, and so it is good also to drink whilst you are learning.

It is good to have the live music as well, and the louder the better, for the most cogent sentences end up being those which are shouted above the din of the saxophone, drums, and electric bass. At the very least, there is no mistaking that you have spoken and have been quite definite about it indeed.

Most nights at the Jazz Bar and Grill the guests are invited to sing. This is also good for breaking down the barriers of self consciousnenss. After offering a bad rendition of Fly Me to the Moon, what, after all, does one have to lose?

It is the willing listener that constitutes the most complete classroom--he who receives, comprehends, corrects, and encourages all in one sitting. He gives and he receives, for his native ear is perfect while his native tongue seeks like instruction. Language itself becomes friendship, the will to assist, the will to understand, the will to communicate what is perceived--without which the world itself cannot exist.

As the Fan Turns

It has been written, and statistically proven, that the defensive armament of the Second World War bomber, the fabled B17, comprised of two 50 calibre waist guns, a ball turret in the belly, a top turret, a gun bay in the tail and a gun bay in the nose--made in reality such little impact on attacking fighter planes as to be almost completely ineffective, thus nullifying any practical justification for their presence.

Nonetheless, the morale factor exerted on the bomber crews by these otherwise worthless tools remained so significant that the extra attachments, despite, the added weight and the expenditure of valuable ammunition, were retained throughout the war.

My intention, by way of this long introductory metaphor, is to apply in essence the same leaky raison d'etre to the presence of ceiling fans in the common Indonesian home. The fact is, these fans do nothing toward accomplishing their intended mission--that is, to dispel at least in some measure the oppressive heat that lurks between the walls. No, nothing at all. They may push the heat about to some degree, this is true--but this may in fact just stir the same to a more vigorous boil. High speed, low speed--it makes no difference. They whirl, they make a noise, they cast their sluggish tar-like shadows, but they do not cool the air in the least.

And yet we run them day and night, despite the mildly irritating sound they make, despite the expenditure of electricity, because to have not even this much to fall back on--the morale factor endowed by the tireless turning of those aerodynamically shaped blades, we should be hopeless indeed and perish from suffocation of the spirit.

A Gift

This morning I received in the mail a Writers' Market, complements of my agent. Given that I have so far not written anything apparently saleable for him, I consider this a grand and uncommon gesture of the kindest sort. Luar biasa, they say in Bahasa Indonesia--literally outside normal.

Thank you, Neil.

Fishing

A fisherman who casts his bait in the water four and five times and catches at least one fish is happy.

He who casts his line, catches nothing, yet gets bites is hopeful, and so continues.

The fisherman who fishes and yet gets not even one bite is a disappointed man indeed.

No News

I set out to write something and end up messing around with the Designer for an hour, most of the time just trying to return it to where it was before I started messing around.

Lesson of the day: Don't touch it again!

Graduated today to Kelas IV in Bahasa Indonesia. Since I am my own teacher, I administered the graduation, and added honors. I was, after all, first in the class.

Traveled down the Bypass to the Grammadia (Indonesian book store) near Kuta. What a nightmare.

Second lesson of the day: Stick with the store in Denpasar.

Having a beer at the coffee shop (go figure) this evening and then will see what's going on out at the salon. The busy life of a retiree.

So, as the saying goes, No news is ... well, no news, actually.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Snore

I just this evening noticed that there was a typo in the subtitle of my blog. Professional, ain't I?

Tired today, and the rain had me down. Guess I've gotten spoiled. We have a rainy day maybe once a month, and I'm bummed.

But anyway, we went into Denpasar this morning to buy a wedding gift for my daughter and her fiance, then came home and fell asleep.

The good news is that now I can stay up all night. Watch out Sanur!

Boldness

So what if I just want the old design back? Can I get it?

Hanging out at the salon again today, still working on the Bali sketches. The more I write, I write the more. Strange phenomenon. Only begin, as Goethe said:

Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute;
What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it;
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

Met a friend down at the beach last night. Very windy. First time I've seen that here. But not cold. Mild. Mild enough for shorts and shirt sleeves. The wind was picking up the white on the breakers and making it feel like light rain. I could not determine what was more beautiful--her eyes or the ocean.

Beauty here in general comes at you constantly from every direction, in every season, at every hour of the day and night. It rides on the wind, weaving through the palm trees on the sea shore, ambles up the path to the town, lingers outside the warungs, looking in for a moment, then makes it's way through the crowded pasar, rearranging hats and headdresses along the way. It sneaks along the alleyways, ruffling stray dogs, sniffing at the garbage bins, smudging the chalken slogans on the wall. It dreams with you at night, wakes with you in the morning.

Damn the Designer!

Who wants to join the I Hate the New Designer Club? Sheesh. Or at least they should block users with MS. How many of us, I wonder, have already messed up our blogs beyond repair? Have a little consideration for those of us who cannot think straight! Include a warning label or something. Designer may be dangerous to those who suffer from multiple sclerosis or other cognitive disorders.

Well, drinking Bintang and eating complimentary peanuts here at Sindhu Beach, Bali. Would that the Bintang was also complimentary. With tourist season upon us, they have once again raised the price, having learned, apparently, that beer is one of the main food groups for Westerners.

Someone did tell me the other day that it makes hair grow (beer does, that is). Then again, the same guy told me that Dick Cheney was the actual President of the United States during the Bush administration.

Well, maybe it does make hair grow.

Mark Twain once said that people should be careful about health books, as a misprint might possibly cause death. In the same spirit, I suppose that one should be careful of doctors, for a misdiagnosis might have the same effect.

New Designer

Seems like I messed up my blog with the nifty new blog designer. Try to fix it now. I have so far at least returned it to a readable format, albeit a pretty plain one. Sorry folks. Never was much good at art work. The fact is, in school my art projects used to be shown in front of the class as examples of what not to do.

Wanted: Rich patron (patroness) to support struggling (almost starving) writer in Bali.

Qualifications: Well, must have money.

Reward: Seven percent of proceeds from all published material from this date to my demise.


All applicants may apply via comment at this site.

And the Relapse Goes On, and On, and On ....

When you've gone an extended period of time without experiencing MS symptoms, say 6 months of good health, it is hard to deal with the symptoms when they recur. It's almost like getting MS all over again. You've learned a new life during your period of good health, and now suddenly you're back again to the fatigue and the confusion and the aches and the stumbling gait.

In short, it's a real bummer. This morning I tried to live the life I have become accustomed to, and the next thing I knew I was dead asleep in my bed. Mind you, this was this morning, after I had just got done sleeping the whole night.

I woke up, surprised to find that I'd been out like a light for four hours. I remember that sometime during those hours my son was trying to ask me a question, and I just couldn't understand what he was saying. I just couldn't wake up. It reminds me of when I had mononucleosis. Always does.

In the morning I had gone up to the cafe for coffee, just as I always do, taking my laptop along with me--and I sat there in a daze, entranced, completely unable to do the things I had been doing every morning since February 2010.

When I walked back home I kept trying to correct my gait so that people on the street wouldn't think I was drunk. I feel like wearing a sign, the same way I used to feel--a sign that says I HAVE MS--CAN'T WALK, CAN'T THINK, BUT A NICE GUY IF YOU GET TO KNOW ME.

Now how long do I have to endure this when I have better things to do?

Relapse

Having gone three years, to the month, without an MS relapse, I am now finally suffering one. This has come in much the same way as my first really noticeable attack in the Spring of 2005. At that time (and now this) the symptoms occurred mostly in my brain and manifested themselves in the form of confusion, inability to concentrate, forgetfulness, and a general sort of spaced out feeling. Along with those symptoms there is another which doctors say they have never heard of--but I sure have, and I know other MS sufferers who have as well. This is a sort of sound/sensation inside the head. It's like you can hear it, but of course you're not hearing it with your ears, and you can feel it as a sort of random pulsation, dashing from this point to that, like a electrical storm within the brain. It tends to cause a headache, and it makes me feel lightheaded and faintly nauseous. There is also the occasional feeling that I am about to faint.

In 2005 this was diagnosed as ... well, as 'We don't know what this is ... and then later, in 2007 when I had my second attack, the first was rediagnosed by another neurologist and another radiologist as 'classic MS.'

So that's where I stand--hoping the old CNS will repair itself quickly and restore my brain at least to its already (post 2005) level of functioning.

Funny how much you can forget about these things when you're not having to suffer them. I had just almost turned into a normal person, but now here we go again.

One Day I Woke Up

Sometimes I feel like I have plodded through the most monotonous sort of life. You wake up one morning and realize that two-thirds of the thing is behind you, and that you have done less than one-third of what you wanted to do and meant to do. You find yourself quite suddenly up agaisnt a deadline, and your work barely begun. You decide therefore that you will hurry from now on, you will burn the midnight oil, you will light the candle at both ends. And then you take a nap.

You curse the fates for having arranged things differently than you had planned for them to do, and then you realize that you yourself have been largely responsible for the course of your own fate. And so you curse yourself instead.

What about all those years you spent inside a vodka bottle?

What about your own decision to marry the one whom you knew you shouldn't have? Did not everyone tell you so at the time?

What about that book you were writing--the one you were going to return do, and never did.

Well, what about it? It is all done with, after all.

All the News from Bali, and Less

So many men here in Bali with "man purses." I don't know folks. I just can't get myself to go that far. Not that it wouldn't be convenient sometimes--seeing as how we are often wearing shorts or swim trunks without pockets. But still. The laptop case is a man purse, right? And I seldom go anywhere without my laptop.

I guess what I really need is a smaller, lighter weight laptop, lest I end up looking like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

I tried to read that book once, and just could get started--which is ironic, since Les Miserables, by the same author, is just about my favorite book of all time.

Now I realize that writing down stuff like this is convenient for me but of little interest to you, the reader--if indeed you are out there to begin with.

Well, so what? Wnat to make something of it?

White dog's pups have still not opened their eyes. Mostly they just lie in the cupboard under the sink and sleep. Ah, but I have been here before (though a long ago), and so I know that this peaceful arrangement will not last. Yes one day they will open those eyes, all ten of them, and stand on their little feet, all 20 of them, and then there will be hell to pay in our home.

Four of the pups have already picked up names along the way. One we call Sally, because she just looks like a Sally. Another is called Jimmy, another Jimmy-Spot. To the runt of the litter my son has given the name Grunty. Why the last pup has not yet a name I do not know The fact is, I cannot even picture that dog in my mind. He or she may as well not even be here.

Perhaps we will call it The Invisible Dog, or The Dog Without a Country (though I hate to think of the nickname it would end up with). Anonymous dog. X? Dog Number Five?

Well, I'll keep working on it.

Curiosity

Just curious. If anyone is actually reading this blog, please click on comments and say "Aye," or "Here," or "Yes," or whatever term of affirmation is personally preferred.

How?

How have we missed
one another
with so much sand
in the glass--
Time seemed once
a feast of days
unending
ever springing from the core--
We walked
and the prints of our feet
were eternal--
So long ago now
Now sunken to weed--
What is real
becomes a dream
My one love lost
to the overgrown grave

Mythic

A curious byproduct of daily sunshine, the sweltering heat, the breeze on the beach, the Indian Ocean in your own front yard is the inclination to just kick back and do nothing. You are lulled to a stupor, a state of aimless gazing, lost in wandering patterns of thought as if you had laid dreamily back into the core of a kaleidoscope.

You ride your motorbike down to the beach front cafe, lugging your laptop along. You take your usual seat at your usual table and the man brings your usual coffee, and by the time you open the laptop and take the first sip of coffee you find yourself well within the grasp of peaceful indolence. The big plans you brought with you have trickled out somewhere along the road and so you jot down isolated thoughts in your blog, those things that buzz lazily about, lighting on your hands and feet, easily caught for their own torpor.

What did I mean to do? What I did mean to say?

A white woman of German heritage sits at a table nearby. You look at her through your sunglasses, she looks at you through hers. You may be really looking, you may not be. Who can prove it? It is something that is left to the imagination, just like the work you meant to do, the novel you meant to write.

Maybe you will write a poem instead. A poem about a German woman in sunglasses, quite unable to hide the brazen gaze--desire, mystery, romance. A myth in the making.

In what is mythic we find our sum. Here is the desire after all--living without being touched or disturbed, the sand, the sea, the breeze, the breakers, the man, the woman, the midday sun. The myth engulfs. We are tasted and swallowed, and human willpower is the delicacy of fondest choice.

This is Bali, the island that eats, the paradise that consumes its prey.

I'll give thee fairies to attend on thee,
And they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep,
And sing while thou on pressed flowers dost sleep

The Man From San Francisco (start to finish version for your reading ease)

A few days back I happened to be talking to a guy from San Francisco--Castro Valley, actually--whom I met at a place down the street called Angels’--a chicken bar, I was told to begin with, a place of ill-repute--not a whore house, mind you, but an unsavory institution frequented by drunk white men and managed by young women of lower societal standing--Javanese no less, Sumatrans, certainly not Balinese. These were girls who had come from foreign locales--more than three hours distant by ferry--to reap the fruits of paradise, that which they had not sown to begin with. In short they were mercenaries, leeches, interlopers--chasers after the foreign tourists who ought to have been the sole prey of proper young Balinese women.

I had been forewarned not to visit this bar by one of the proper type girls mentioned above. There were bad people at the bar, she said--bad sorts of women, well known for doing bad sorts of things. I believed this at the time, having not yet seen for myself; but the knowledge, far from deterring, had in the main set motion to the famous Episcopal maxim of St. Paul:

So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members.

Ah what a wretched man am I.

And soon a disappointed one as well; for there were no chicken at all in this bar as I was to find it, but only the drunken white men, with whom I had already been perfectly well acquainted back in the States--half a sum leading to much less than half the appeal in the original equation.
In any case, I had started out to talk about the man from San Francisco, to whom I will now return.

Though I have lived in Bali but a few months now, I have met far fewer Americans than I should have thought I would. The notions of ignorance are no less potent for their chimerical source, and so I was surprised to find myself most often in the company of Dutch, Germans, British, and Australians, and the American as rare as the bald eagle itself. Oh, and of course there were the Balinese.

I had over the previous couple of years learned to speak Indonesian to some degree from an impatient tutor (my Javanese wife), so that I knew enough now to make myself understood, and especially where urgent matters are concerned--i.e. Where is the bathroom, How much does this cost, I’m lost can you help me, and such-like. According to my friend Victor, an ex-patriot Brit with three years in Bali under his belt, all you really need to know how to say is Bintang (beer) and pergi sana (go away), but I think the economy there is just a bit less than sound, for when push comes to shove, or even to a tap on the shoulder, Vick must depend upon his Balinese wife, and who knows what she is really saying. Right?

The point I mean to make is that neither my English nor my Indonesian has been very suitable when it comes to conversing with tourists (or bar hoppers) who are speaking German, Dutch, French, Italian, Russian, Portugese, or Norwegian (or Canadian either for that matter, though this particular cultural barrier belongs to another article altogether).

So it has happened, at Angels’ bar anyway, frequented as it is by people of all nations (except, curiously enough, the Indonesian nation), that language has been put back two or three eons, resulting in a return to the linguistic repertoire of the cave man--hungry, thirsty, sleepy, horny, and so on.

Happily however, the Bintang consumed at these bars, when applied in a liberal manner, serves to mitigate the effects of this barrier to the extent that whether one is being understood or is himself understanding becomes superfluous--for the flow of the spirits, as alcohol is called here in Bali, has carried on its current the universal brotherhood of man, the shared experience of human existence. We live, we know, we understand. Who needs language anyway?

Ladies and gentlemen, what you are reading has been written, up to this point, over a period of seven days or so--a period during which, for the latter part, I have been quite ill with the flu, or with food poisoning, or dengue fever, or . . . well with something . . . and I find just now, upon this particular entry, that I have quite forgotten what I meant to say about the man from San Francisco (who is in any case, if memory serves, currently away from the island on a business trip to Vietnam).

But wait--Ah yes--the forbidden bar, the den of iniquity, the sober warning, the birth of curiosity (indeed I would not have known what sin was except through the law ), capitulation, the man from San Francisco.

Avast--Thar she blows--the White Whale!

Many of us who suffer from the dumb-i-fying effects of multiple sclerosis tend to poke fun at ourselves. We do so in order to make both explanation and excuse. Aside from that, it does tend to be a rather hilarious disease, as diseases go, and so it is hard not to indulge in such humor. What, for instance, is more naturally comic than the basic prat fall--the stumble, the clumsy struggle to regain balance, the ensuing downward spiral of conniptions, and the final crash landing?

Think The Three Stooges, think Jerry Lewis, think Dick Van Dyke.

Or, when it comes to the mental side of awkwardness, just think Mister Bean, think Mister Dick. Think Mister Magoo.

I look with amazement upon the ineptitude of my mind, with fresh surprise at every sudden disappearance of data that should have remained where I had saved it the day before, with a keen curiosity toward where my train of thought had left the track, where it may have gone wrong, what it had done whilst not being where I left it. Strange, very strange indeed. I am the author of I know not what, the sailor of an ever changing sea. I begin and I end, but the port of departure and the final destination have nothing to do with the journey between.

This, as I would suppose, makes things a bit difficult for the reader. A plan is wanted, structure, intent--an A and a B and a C. You expect an equation, you expect a sum, and you expect an arithmetic nice and snug in between.

And so do I, so do I--if only my stir-fried brain would conceive!

Firstly, then, there was a bar.

Secondly, I went there.

Thirdly, I met a man from San Francisco. Castro Valley, actually.

He was sitting at one end of the bar, that nearest the street. I parked my bike, paid the attendant 1000 Rupiah to put down the kickstand, then politely waited to be accosted by the fabled women of the night--though, as mentioned above, there were none. Pretty waitresses, yes, but these were creatures of a different sort altogether--Javanese, as I have mentioned, Sumatrans, but hardly working girls of an inappropriate sort (aside from being from Java and Sumatra, that is).

Clearly this place had been confused with another by the young woman who had initially warned me away--a place just down the road, at the East end of Sanur--Yes, that one, the house of the rising sun--that place where mama told you not to go. That ain’t the way to have fun, son . . . that ain’t the way to have fun, no-o-o, as even Three Dog Night had long ago cautioned.

But this we will leave (most likely) at seeming, as it does, part of another story, and will make no judgment at this time of the worthiness of a thing not fully addressed.

What prompted me to sit by the man from San Francisco in the first place? It was the fact that there were no other stools to be sat upon. And how very American is that, right? Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam. We must have our elbow room--for in the theater we leave an empty seat in between, in the restroom we leave anywhere from one to five unoccupied urinals (depending upon the availability of inoccupancy), and in the bar we leave at least one empty stool.

This, interestingly enough, is not the practice in Indonesia. Here, if there is no seat available, they will sit on your lap. People are in the habit of rubbing elbows as if there were a basic need for more elbows than just their own. They will share from your plate, exclaim enak! (delicious) in the friendliest manner, and then offer you a bit of baked fish from their own. These are people who ride their motorbikes in such close proximity that one would find no challenge at all in linking hands and forming an impromptu chorus line (but for the lack of suitable music, that is).

In short, here in Indonesia fellowship precedes the actual presence of society, whereas in America we strain at the idea of community from the outset, as if each person were no more than a stubborn turd. We have nothing to do with each other--not until it can’t be helped, anyway.

Apologetically, then, I shuffled into the seat at the crowded bar, explaining that it was the only seat open. This he understood perfectly well, and graciously surrendered the unoccupied stool. Offering his hand, he introduced himself as someone or other and asked where I was from. From America, I answered. Well, he too was from America. San Francisco. Castro Valley.

“Ah! I have a cousin there!” I said.

“Really!”

“Yes!”

“Now that’s a coincidence!”

“Isn’t it though!”

The reader has no doubt noted the exclamation marks that punctuate my rendition of this brief exchange, and perhaps has wondered why they are there. Did we really exclaim in such a manner--as if there were something endemically miraculous about the United States or San Francisco? Yes, we did!

When one has been absent from his Country, absent from his culture, absent from his language for any fair amount of time at all there is a certain shock of familiarity that rides on the wings of the simplest utterance. We did not know it beforehand--before, that is, leaving our native land--but we are inextricably linked through a mystery of birthplace, shared experience, a mutual history, a companionship of knowledge, the rhythm of language, a fellowship of words We both apprehend and are apprehended--and in this we expend no effort at all. We remember and we are remembered.

From place we move to age, from age to era, from era to particulars.

Haight Ashbury in ‘65. Yes, we were both there. The summer of love. Flower children. A girl with a rose tucked into her hair, and this the whole of her attire. Rowan and Martin. The Smothers Brothers. Race riots, drugs, The Doors, The Rolling Stones, the Hell’s Angels, Patricia Hearst, Vietnam. The Kennedy’s, Bobby and John. Has anybody here seen my old friend Martin . . . .”

We find ourselves separated not only by place, but by time, by the years, by the stealthy progress of our own lives, until one day we wake up in 1968 while the rest of the world has moved along to the 21st century. At the center of our being lies a natural fondness for what is no more, but for the mysterious realm of memory, the possessive embrace of the past. A certain period of time--not this time, but that time--which yet breathes and lives as if it were now--seems to define the very core, the aura within, a numinous aggregation of all that has made and continues to make--time and experience and love and music and joy and fear and knowledge and wisdom--this person, this heart, this dying star.

“What does your cousin do there!”

“I don’t know! I’ve not seen him in the longest time!”

But now, yes now, somehow we are together again.

I miss you, Dave . . . or is it just my own youth?

And so we changed the subject to Bali, as in What the hell are you doing here anyway, man?

It’s a dream, pure and simple. A dream, no matter how you tell it. And it’s complicated. It’s usually complicated. We all have a reason for being here. We did not simply fall from the sky. No, not we, but Bali itself. The island of Bali fell from the sky.

For once upon a time in the mid 1950s an American city, some American towns, and a sea green swathe of countryside were suddenly removed from the face of the earth, taken mysteriously to the sky, preserved in the heavens in an air-tight bottle, and not seen for the next 50 years or so.

Did anyone notice? No, not really. And that’s not so strange as it may at first seem. Remember, this was the 1950s, and so this city, these towns, this sea green swathe were much the same as any other city, town, or sea green swathe.

In due time, shortly after the turn of the century, the absent land mass reappeared, crashing
back to the face of the earth like a giant, mauve colored beanbag chair. Walls were cracked, foundations splintered, some things were set sideways, some things set on end--yet all in all it remained of one piece, albeit a bit petrified here, a bit dog-eared there.

And they called it the island of Bali.

It was the man from San Francisco who came up with the general notion, and I who have extrapolated above.

“You know the weird thing about this place?” he said. “It reminds me for all the world of my own boyhood in Cali.”

“It’s only one letter off,” I observed.

We were halfway through our second Bintang. Yang besar.

‘Wowwwww man . . . that’s like far out, yeah?”

Far out, yes; and a classic moment as well. Beam my back, Scotty, scroll the years, uncover the treasure, grind the gears. All the man needed was the stub of a joint and a ring of smoke to circle his head--a halo, and at Angels’ no less.

In Bali the dogs run wild, as they did in the States when I and the man from San Francisco were kids. That was in the 1950s too, before the leash law came along.

Oh give me land, lots of land under starry skies above, don’t fence me in,” the dogs said.
But they did. And they were.

I remember even now being astounded at the unfairness of the thing. How cruel it seemed, How intolerant. How unnatural!

We had a dog, of course. Everyone did, except those people who had voted in favor of the leash law (which, come to think of it, would have made them the majority). I remember watching, standing helplessly by, as our dog discovered for the first time that a leash would stop him from charging down the grassy bank of our lawn to chase a squirrel or a car or a bird.

Twang! Choke! What the bloody hell?!”

Ah, but here in the unspoiled land of Bali the dogs congregate in little family groups, the center hub of which will be a house or a villa, a market or an alley. They know their territory and are known by the same. One dog will attract another, one female will attract a male, puppies will come along, and the family unit will expand (unless the puppies happen to be eaten first).

During the day, through the hours of heat, the dogs will sleep, lounging on porches or underneath trees or in the open doorway of a family dwelling. They do not go into the houses, these dogs. It is the structure that makes the home, not what is within. They gather scraps, pass bones back and forth, raid the garbage, always making do with whatever can be had.

At night when the heat begins to disperse, when the ferns and the palm leafs gather dew, when the streets become quiet and the puddles from the day wink back at the stars, the dogs will roam, push boundaries a bit, see who lives around that corner or over yonder grassy knoll. They go in twos and threes, though a half dozen more linger close behind. Little wars break out, disputes are renewed, land is taken and land is lost, marriages are made and children conceived. This is their world, first given then made--a world of purpose and personal choice.

Nowadays the authorities have begun to cull the packs because of the rise in the incidence of rabies and the threat this poses to the general public. Several people, up-country, have been bitten. At least one child has died. In the wee hours of the morning one can sometimes heat the sound of gunshots--a solitary, lonely sound it is, like the pop a light bulb makes when it shatters.

What has happened to Lulu, mother?
What has happened to Lu?
There's nothing in her bed but an old rag-doll
And by its side a shoe.

“What was that?” San Francisco wondered.

“Poem. Charles Causley. Was just thinking about dogs.”

“Oh. Cool.”

“What has happened to Lulu?”

It seemed to have been a question in both our minds, for both our brows seemed wrinkled more than usually so. I and this man had much in common. Three--no four--Bintangs for one thing.

“What ever happened to Baby Jane?” he said.

“Exactly. And Bobby Sherman.”

“Whatever happened to penny candy?”

“Bobby socks.”

“Going steady”

“Wow, right on. But get this, man . . . Whatever happened to love?”

“I have spent most of my life in love,” I answered.

“Me too, man, me too. Except for the married part.”

“Ah well, put a woman in the garden, and first thing you know she comes up with a snake.”

“Snakes! Oh yeah, I can tell you about snakes! Came home one day, went down the hall, and there was a cobra sitting right in front of my bedroom door!”

“Jesus!”

“Oh yeah. Sitting up, you know, with its head cocked back.”

“What did you do? Call someone?”

“Nah. It was sitting on a sort of throw rug, you know, so I just dragged the whole thing out the back door and heaved it into the bushes. Now I just don’t go out to the yard anymore.”

This made perfect sense, actually. Things are done simply here in Bali. You don’t call pest control, you don’t fumigate, you don’t set a trap--you step on it, or shoot it, or give it a good swift kick. Or you simply stay away from it.

“You know what else is the same?” my friend said. “Uniforms. Everyone here has a uniform, just like when I was a kid back home. You go into a supermarket and they all have a uniform on. You go into the Hardy’s store or the Makro or Carrefour and they are all dressed up like the Verizon guy or Air Force captains or some damn thing. You know who the employees are, that‘s for sure.”

“So true.”

“I’m not just talking about a nametag, man, I’m talking about a freaking uniform, from head to toe. These supervisors back home talk about representing your place of employment--but this here, man--this--is representation, just as representative as it can get.”

And it is, it‘s true. Here the employees dress as employees, not as people who just happen to be walking about. Here every school student wears a uniform, complete with vest and tie. The restaurant workers, the parking attendants, the gas pumpers, the bankers, all wear a uniform. We all have an identity, we all have a function. Nothing comes in disguise.

Close your eyes baby
Follow my hear-heart
Call on the mem'rie-ie-ies
Here in the dar-ark
We'll let the magic
Take us away-ay
Back to the fee-eelin's
We shared when they'd play

In the still of the ni-i-i-i-ight
Ho-old me darlin', hold me ti-i-ight
Oh-oh-oh-oh...
Shoo-doop, shoo-be do, shoo-doop, doo
So real, so-o-o right
Lost in the fifties tonight

“It’s weird,” the man from the 50s, the man from San Francisco mused. “I feel so out of place, so alien sometimes--and yet I feel at other times like I’m back home, twelve again, hanging out
in my old neighborhood. It’s a trip, man. It’s like the Twilight Zone. I can’t tell sometimes whether I’m a square peg or a round hole.”

“It’s like your inside is out and your outside is in.”

“Yeah, you’re outside is in and your inside is out.”

“So come ah--ahnn. Come ah-ahnn.”

This last was intoned in unison, perhaps somewhat musically, startling the bartender and causing a moment of confusion.

“Mau Bintang lagi?” she asked--for she thought we wanted more beer.

The winters in Bali are terrifically hot. The summers are just a bit cooler. The winters are humid, heavy, stifling. In the summer there is usually a breeze. It’s upside down, it’s inside out. It’s hot when it should be cold and it’s warm when it should be hot. It is another planet, resolving around a brighter sun. It is a Star Trek episode, and I and the man from San Francisco are Kirk and Spock, finding ourselves, due to transporter error, at the old A&W on 82nd avenue, ordering from a carport through a box on a post while young waitresses clatter by on roller skates, carrying platters while coin dispensers jingle on their belts.

Fascinating, Captain.

Indeed.

Four or five dogs wander by. No one takes note.

“When I was a kid my family was very poor,” San Francisco said. “Very, very poor. But you know what? I didn’t really even know it at the time. I just remember having lots of friends, and being outside all the time, playing with whatever stuff we found--pop cans, sticks for swords or guns. Someone would always have a baseball and a bat. That’s all you need to play, right? One ball and one bat. And our diamond was the four street curbs right in front of our house.”

“Here the kids play soccer,” I added. “And it’s the same thing. They got one ball, and they all got feet. I see them in the alleys all the time. The garbage can is the goal. The boundaries are the walls on either side.”

“Now every street back home is a freeway.”

“Right on.”

“I used to wonder,” he said. “I mean, when I first came here I used to wonder why there were so many kids running around. I thought, man this place is overpopulated as hell, and all these kids got nowhere to go. But then I got to thinking about it--thinking about when I was a kid, like I was saying--and I realized that it was the same back then, in my old town, and the only reason you don’t see it anymore in America is because all the kids are inside the house, playing X-Box and Play Station, watching TV, freakin’ Nicolodeon 24 hours a day, the Disney Channel, MTV, HBO. Hell, most kids here don’t even have a TV, and they certainly don’t have an X-Box or a laptop.”

No, they certainly don’t. Nor do they have much in the way of food, or clothing, or healthcare, or dental care, or transportation, or air conditioning, or strip malls, or supermarkets, or drugs, or alcohol, or rock concerts, or mosh pits, or pistols, or skate parks, or sewage facilities, or clean water, or automatic car washes, or washing machines, or stereo systems, or home movie theaters, or ice cream parlors. Or money.

What they do have is simplicity. What they do have is community. What they do have is the family, a system of faith, several in fact, a necessary inventiveness, a homemade sort of joy, a fellowship with their environment, the day, the night, the sea, the beach, the crickets and the cockroaches, the Cecak and the Tokek, the music of nature, a knowledge of the songs, a paucity of crime, an effortless respect for the fellow human being.

Timothy Winters has bloody feet
And he lives in a house on Suez Street,
He sleeps in a sack on the kitchen floor
And they say there aren't boys like him any more.

“Hm. What’s with all the Charles Causland?”

“I dunno. Seems like my mom was somehow related to him. Cousin or uncle or uncle’s cousin or something.”

“A monkey’s uncle.”

“Uncle Sam.”

“Right on.”

“My mom used to make me and my brother memorize these things,” I explained. “I didn’t much like it back then, but I’m kind of glad now. Comes in handy sometimes.”

“We hold these truths to be self evident--”

“Yeah, like that.”

Together we thought about it. It was growing late. Most of the Dutch had left, and the English, and there was just me now, and the man from San Francisco, and one Italian guy half asleep on his elbows.

“You know what the cool thing about this country is?” the man from San Francisco said. “The cool thing is that old guys like us, old men, are considered attractive.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“It’s not that it means anything. Not really. It’s not like I’m going to run out and marry a 17 year old girl. It’s just . . . “

Just what? Exactly what? Had we found ourselves back in time again? Twenty-five again? Thirty-two again? Had we also disappeared, once upon a time, been taken to the sky with that slice of nostalgia, and dropped now where old is new, where cracks in a wall denote strength of foundation, where wrinkles mean reliability, and poor insight seems a habit of rumination?

“It just makes me feel human,” he concluded. “It makes me feel worthwhile. It makes me feel like all these years have added up to something other than just old age.”

I thought about that. It seemed to be true. How long had we been together, this man and I? An hour? A lifetime? How long had we spent in explaining ourselves to one another?

“Tomorrow I go to Vietnam,” he said.

“Tomorrow my wife comes home from the States.”

“Far out. You must be happy,” he said.

“Must be. Or if I’m not, I should be, right?”

Here in Bali they love Americans. They love Vietnam. They love Barach Obama, they love Arnold Schwarzenegger. On TV you can see Happy Days and the Flintstones and LA Law, but you cannot see the movie 2012 because it runs contrary to Muslim sensitivities in Jakarta. You can, however, buy the pirated DVD, right there in the pirated DVD store. It will cost you only 2 bucks, although it may not work. Buyer beware.

And so we said our goodbyes. We said goodnight, safe trip, good luck. I’ve not been back to Angels’ lately, only when opportunity knocks. The wife has indeed returned from the States and will not leave again until August, three months. She does not approve of Angels’, because of the chicken there, she says. But I know one thing--there are no chicken at Angels’, only young girls who scratch out a living and sell no more than Bintang and pleasant dispositions.

Something else I know as well. There is at least one good man who frequents Angels’. Maybe even two.

So come one angel, come on ten
Timothy Winters says "Amen
Amen amen amen amen."
Timothy Winters, Lord. Amen