by Tod A
They know where I am headed. They know it before I know it myself. This is how it happens.
They can read it in your eyes. Whatever ill wind may have blown you here, you must be here for something, and that thing is found in the gangs off Bangla Road.
Picture a labyrinth of lanes, each one jammed with tiny bars, and every bar boasting cinnamon-colored girls named Nung and Gita, Suda and Wulan. Imagine an adult amusement park, an X-rated Disneyland. Imagine Heaven if the Devil ran the show.
The women are decked out in black biker jackets and schoolgirl skirts, short-shorts and go-go boots. There are cowboys and Indians, secretaries and stewardesses, nurses, nuns. You name it. Every kink and fetish is on offer, every sin on sale, and all served up with a smile. The music pumps from all directions as the ladies of the lanes sing out their sad refrain.
“Hey, Mister! Where you from?”
“Hey, Boss! You want drink?”
I know I should retreat to the Jayabaya and hide in bed. But something sucks me into the flow of the crowd. I walk straight ahead, looking straight ahead, trying to blend in, attempting to acclimatize.
“Hey, Buddy, what you looking for?”
What am I looking for? I’m here, aren’t I? I must be here for something. They have seen my type before: fresh meat, straight off the boat. I am green, that’s all. I just need some persuading.
“Yo, Boss! You need girl? How about me?”
They are young and sleek, any one of them mine for the taking. I only need to say the word and lay my money down.
Ashamed, I try to avert my eyes. But they see right through me, intercept me as I try to slide past, paw and grab at my clothes, hook me and reel me in. I am drenched and weak, my defenses down.
I am a starving man at a smorgasbord.
I am Pinocchio shipwrecked on Pleasure Island.
“Thirsty, Mister? How about a beer? Nice cold Oh-Cha, ja?”
Maybe just one beer. Why not? I’ll sit down out of the rain and rest up a bit. I’d already fallen off the wagon. What was one more beer? I go inside. This is how it happens.
“Oh-Cha.”
A bottle appears and my hostess pours it for me.
“What you name, Boss? Where you from?”
She doesn’t care what my name is. It’s all part of the script. It is tedious but I play along, biding my time, trying to get my bearings, waiting to see what I will do, wondering when I will submit to the inevitable.
My hostess is no conversationalist, but no slacker, either. When I take a sip she immediately refills my glass. As soon as I drain it another bottle appears. Soon, three bottles stand empty on the bar.
The wagon has departed. The wagon is long gone.
My hostess is no fool. She can tell I am not interested in her. No matter, she extolls the virtues of the other girls. Duan is ‘very young and beautiful,’ Preeti is ‘so sweet and so nice.’
Three American sailors stumble in. Soon they are dry-humping the girls to some inane ‘80s rap song. The bar-girls play along, flashing empty smiles to keep the money flowing—they are professionals, after all.
It feels like watching animals copulate. I pay my tab and flee the clutches of the hostess. As I hit the street she shouts after me.
“Hey, Mister! You don’t like girl? We have ladyboy!”
I buy a big bottle of Oh-Cha from a drinks shack and wander the back-lanes, passing darkened houses and shuttered shops, until I find the temple. I stand drinking under the eaves, weak and conflicted, as lone figures bear offerings through the rain. I picture myself back on the sweltering streets of Joro, aswarm with sweet young things.
I am not proud of my thoughts, yet something baser overpowers my shame. I have washed ashore here, alone, onto an island infamous for sin. There will be no witnesses. No one will ever know. Maybe if I can just find the right girl.
This is how it happens.
I re-enter the fray. Sweaty little men brandish handbills touting live sex shows. Transvestites cavort outside the drag clubs, betrayed only by their husky voices. The bar girls keep up the chorus, gyrating on the poles, strutting and posing, teasing and cajoling. I brush them all aside.
By now it is 2 AM. I must have walked every gang, must have seen a thousand girls, none of them right. I find myself outside some grubby joint on a dead end. I’ve given up.
And then I see her smile.
She is young, slim, graceful. She dances alone on the bar. I stand in the rain, staring, despite myself. Maybe it is the fever, maybe all the Oh-Cha.
We make eye contact, and she blushes—actually blushes!
My eyes are glued to the dancing girl. The others see my reaction and grin.
She draws me forward like a moving sidewalk. The fish is hooked.
I don’t care. I sit down and order a beer, watching her, helplessly. This is the one.
My drink comes. The song ends. The girl descends from the bar. By now she knows I’m here for her. Giggling, her friends goad her forward.
She approaches me, shy, embarrassed. She is twenty, maybe twenty-two, a country girl in a skirt and blouse, thin-waisted and narrow-hipped, her breasts small and high, her face flat and perfectly shaped, with dark almond eyes. She is sweet, with a smile as wide as an open field in summer. She reminds me of Wulan.
She asks my name. Her English is awful. I understand her, but pretend not to understand her. My name doesn’t matter, and I don’t want to know hers. She calls me Mister.
She speaks better with her eyes. She’s from one of the little fishing villages along the Mahabang, just moved here three months ago. I picture her bathing in the river at dawn, the sun illuminating water droplets on her face.
We chat about nothing for an hour or so, as I toss back pints of courage and she sips her overpriced kupu-kupus. Eventually I’m brave enough to ask her if she wants to go somewhere else. She does, but she tells me I’ll need to pay a ‘bar fine’ of a few rupees.
I leave with the girl on my arm.
I’m nervous and she is too. It’s funny—even a bit romantic.
A flower seller hands her a clutch of marigolds in honor of her lucky night. I buy us an umbrella, and we join the throng on Bangla Road.
I take her to a rundown disco and we drink some more.
She wants me to buy her cocktails, like we’re on a real date. She dances next to the table where I sit, bewitched by her flat brown belly. She’s still sizing me up, making sure I’m not crazy or dangerous.
Finally she says I can have her all night if I want her.
I do want her. I want her with a desperate intensity I haven’t felt for years.
We leave the disco and get a room at the Jayabaya, running the gauntlet of disapproving eyes in the lobby.
She wants to take a shower first. I light a cigarette and wait on the bed, watching the ceiling fan mark time, as the rain raps on the balcony.
She emerges wrapped in a white towel, blushing under my gaze. Rivulets run down her dusky limbs. She slides in next to me, covering herself with the sheet. She smells of lotus blooms and coconut milk.
I ask her if she’d like some music. She says she wants the TV—they don’t have one in the flat she shares with the other bar girls. I switch it on, but she doesn’t look at the screen. I follow her gaze to a gecko creeping across the ceiling.
Maybe back at the bar she can kid herself that her life is just a laugh, dancing to the hits with her roommates. But here—alone in a hotel room with a strange man—perhaps the TV chatter helps her forget that she sleeps with mayat for money. I feel a pang of guilt.
I stand and light another cigarette and lean at the balcony door, listening to the rain, watching the slow parade of umbrellas pass on the street below, as ads for skin-lightening cream and instant noodles play in the background.
Then I turn to gaze upon this Gauguin-come-to-life—the lines of her limbs
flowing gently across the landscape of the bed—and my guilt is drowned by lust. I’m with a prostitute, my first. I feel dirty, and it gives me a kick, like a bump of cheap cocaine.
I return to the bed and slowly pull away the sheet, then the towel. She hides her breasts with her hands. She must have done this before, I think, but not many times.
I say nothing, savoring what I see, knowing that tonight this girl belongs to me. She’s a carnival and I want to go on all the rides.
I kneel astride her, clasp her hands, and spread her arms into a crucifix. I want her to feel as dirty and desperate as I do. I want to pull her out of herself and down to where I’ve fallen.
I kiss her mouth. She puts her arms around me and kisses back. We are joined like the last souls in a desolate world.
I cling to her with all the pent-up longing of all my empty years—watching and wanting but never touching—with every drop of frustration and self-hatred in my body, for all my failures, for my marriage, for my lousy book. There is lust, and anger, and sorrow in this act—bound together into an unholy trinity.
I submit to the reptile brain, rutting like some beast in the mud, far from the eyes of God.
In a few minutes it is over.
We don’t speak. We just listen to the rain.
I still don’t know her name.
She is Blake, she is Wulan, she is nobody at all.
In the morning I awake, expecting to find the girl and all my money gone. But there she lays, her head buried in the pillow, the sheet hung on the cusp of her hip like the foothills of the mountain.
I smoke and watch the rise and fall of her chest. Eventually her eyelids flutter. She yawns and stretches, rises and smiles, saunters lazily to the bathroom without a word.
Before she returns from the shower, I get up and put a stack of rupees in her purse.
I watch her as she slips on her panties and bra, fixes her hair. I find her self-absorbed movements more sensual than the sex the night before. It is foreplay in reverse.
In the depth of my loneliness I realize that it is really these simple acts of intimacy I miss most—watching a woman dress and her comb her hair.
She picks up her purse, finds the rupees, and smiles.
“Thank you, Mister.”
She closes the door and she is gone.
This is how it happens.
{ 13 }
Until We Are Satisfied
My bike was still where I’d parked it on the pier, but my crash helmet was long gone. ‘Fuck it,’ I thought. ‘Buster never wore a helmet.’ I cranked up the throttle and headed west toward a sky like a Hallmark bereavement card, as the events of the night before replayed in my head.
I wasn’t proud of what I’d done. The Voices berated me for my weakness. I had fallen fast, low and hard. I’d gone back on the sauce. And I’d paid for sex with a girl half my age. But as I flew down the empty road—the sea breeze roaring in my ears—I told myself I’d committed no crime.
My night with the bar-girl was a transaction, nothing more. Cash for companionship—no sentimental strings attached. She’d left the hotel room with a smile on her face. If there were any real victims in my transgression they were my liver and my pride—and both had endured far worse in the past. With a few fleeting moments of human contact, the girl had eased the gnaw of emptiness that had nagged me ever since the divorce.
The rains in Joro had fallen even heavier than up north. Streams overflowed their banks, flooding the roads, forcing me more than once to pilot the bike through knee-deep water.
The turn-off toward Frank’s place was a mess. The river running down to the lagoon had risen, and several vehicles lay stalled in the flooded intersection. I turned right and headed to Cooney’s instead.
“The prodigal son returns,” Monty said.
Cooney, Monty, and Kubu were huddled at the bar, giggling conspiratorially over a plastic jug full of greenish-brown liquid.
“If it ain’t the most popular girl in school,” Cooney said. “What you been up to, mate? You look like the dog’s breakfast.”
“I got stuck in back-island for a while.”
“Rains?” Kubu said.
“That, and Dengue,” I said.
“Oh, you poor boy,” Monty said. “Dengue’s no fun at all.”
“You’ve been missing all the excitement round here,” Cooney said, with an odd leer.
“What the hell are you drinking?”
“This, Cowboy, is Colonel Cooney’s Patented Jungle Juice,” he said, holding it up to the light. “And it will bloody well bend your noggin like it’s never before been bent.”
“What’s in it?”
“Psilocybe cubensis,” Cooney said. “Plus a few secret ingredients for flavor.”
He took a long swig and offered the jug to Monty and Kubu, who both waved it away.
“And the best part, Cowboy? Completely legal. We’ve just been giving her a little spin around the block. Seems like by the time Galung Gong rolls around she’ll be just about perfect. Care for a snifter?”
I looked around at the trio, noting their dilated pupils. I shook my head.
“Fear not and rest assured, mate,” Cooney said. “This tonic is 100 percent non-alcoholic and completely organic—though it’s certainly not without its other medicinal properties, eh, fellahs?”
They all snickered like schoolboys.
“Thanks, but no thanks.”
“Suit yourself.” He stowed the jug away below the bar. “How about a beer, then? Grab a stool.”
“I’m on the wagon, remember?” I wasn’t about to tell Cooney that he’d been right: I hadn’t lasted two weeks on the wagon.
“Nonetheless, I have a feeling you might be wanting one in a minute,” he taunted. “Yeah, never a dull moment around here.”
“Why don’t you just tell him?” Monty said.
“Tell me what?” I said.
“I think you’re going to wish you stayed up back-island,” Cooney said.
“What? Why?”
“Everyone’s been trying to reach you, but nobody could get through,” Monty said.
“Lightening hit the cell phone tower,” I said. “Who’s been looking for me?”
“Who hasn’t?” Cooney said. “The boys in blue, the American consulate …”
“The police? Do you mind telling me what’s going on?”
Finally Monty broke the silence. “They found a body.”
“What do you mean? Where?”
“In the mud,” Kubu said.
“Over there in the mangroves,” Monty said, pointing. “Where the river meets the lagoon.”
“See what happens when you stop coming to the Saloon?” Cooney said. “You miss out on all the fun.”
“Do they know who it is?” I said.
“You mean was,” Cooney said. “That’s the curious part. It’s your long-lost boss, Herr Frank fuckin’ Fochs.”
All eyes were on me.
“This is a joke, right?”
“Afraid not, Cowboy,” Cooney said. “The coppers want to talk to you, and pronto. I’d hop on the first boat to Java and get the fuck out of Dodge while the getting is good.”
“Why should I? I didn’t do anything.”
“You don’t know the authorities here,” Cooney said. “They’re all about appearances—and turning a profit.”
“Cooney’s right,” Monty said. “You should leave as soon as you can.”
“I couldn’t if I wanted to. No passport.” I shook my head in disbelief. “Frank is dead?”
“Kubu saw the remains himself,” Monty said.
Kubu screwed up his face in disgust.
“Though there weren’t many remains remaining, eh, Kubu?” Cooney smirked.
“Fuck, I really can’t believe it.”
“This would explain his absence,” Monty said.
“They figure the body had lain there for about a week,” Cooney said. “Wildlife had already got to it.”
“Wildlife?”
“Dogs. Crabs. Lizards,” Cooney said, casually.
“Kubu said it was just a pile of rags and bones,” Monty said.
“And insect,” Kubu added, looking pale. “Lots of insect.”
“Are they sure it was Frank?”
“The sweeper said the clothes were Fuch’s,” Monty said. “They found Naga business cards. And there was a gold watch, engraved with his name.”
I had a quick flashback of Frank at the party—the floral shirt and the fuck-off Rolex.
“Uh-oh,” Cooney said, looking up the road. “I think our friends are back.” I could swear he was enjoying this.
A white van bounded through deep puddles as it sped toward us down the gravel road.
“Great,” I said.
“Now’s your chance, Cowboy,” Cooney said.
“What am I supposed to do?” I said, in desperation. “Swim for it?”
“If they catch Mark trying to flee, he’ll only appear more guilty,” Monty said.
“What do you mean more guilty? I haven’t done a god damned thing!”
The van pulled up next to the bar and three officers got out.
I lay down my head and moaned like a beaten dog. “You got any fucking beer in this place or what?”
I never got the chance to slug that beer. Against my friends’ advice, I’d naively boarded the police van that sped me to the cop shop to ‘help with inquiries.’ Rather than questions, I really could have used some answers.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate cops—every working class Irish American family tree has a few lurking in the lower branches—but they sure as hell can suck the enjoyment out of your day. Whatever the event—be it beer binge or Sunday picnic—cops will usually spoil the fun. And the situation I was in right now was no picnic. At the moment I was wishing I was a thousand miles from the nearest officer of the law—especially these three clowns.
It was all very pleasant and polite, at first.
Cop Number One, the guy with the glasses, sat behind his desk wearing the placid expression of a man who knew he held all the cards. The second cop, who could have been handsome if it were possible to ignore the gigantic mole on his upper lip, sat on the window sill with his arms crossed, grinning. The third cop leaned on a filing cabinet by the door, smiling and chain smoking, relentlessly.