Hotel Kerobokan

by Kathryn Bonella

  Sonia was unrepentant. The time she was arrested in Hotel K’s visiting room would lead to her sixteenth incarceration in the jail. She’d do stints of three or four months here and there, and then a longer stay. But she clearly wanted to get caught. She never bothered trying to conceal her identity or cover her tracks, despite her intelligence – which revealed itself in her skill and ingenuity at luring men and in her fluent English. But her arrests were always a spectacle. She fought ferociously, once even stabbing a policeman.

  The arrest went well, although at the beginning Sonia refused to be taken to the station. She tried to run away several times when the police put her in the car. They had to call the station for backup. When the policeman Nyendra entered the car Sonia suddenly attacked and stabbed him in the neck with a knife. He was caught off guard and pulled away. Luckily other officers turned up at the scene and rushed him to hospital. Nyendra was treated and had to have several stitches. They didn’t know where the knife came from. During questioning Sonia who is known at Kerobokan as Black Monster, admitted to stabbing the policeman.

  – Denpost, July 2003

  Sonia’s crimes were as audacious as she was. She started her career stealing tourists’ bags from the beach, and slowly graduated to poisoning men’s drinks in bars, until they were so bleary eyed she could slip her hand into their pockets and steal their wallets. She went from that to meeting western men in bars around Kuta, going back to their hotel – ensuring the receptionists saw her – and sleeping with them. Then she’d either drug them and steal their stuff or return the next day, ask the receptionist for her room key and then empty the room of jewellery, watches, mobile phones, cameras, cash and credit cards. While her victim was still out enjoying the Bali beaches, she’d be splurging online with their credit cards. A drunken night of holiday sex with Sonia Gonzales could be very costly.

  The accused, Sonia Miranda Gonzales, 22, really is daring and doesn’t repent. The very dark skinned, East Timorese woman, nicknamed Black Monster, is also very cunning. She’s at least been in and out of prison four times for stealing tourist’s belongings in hotels. Black Monster is willing to sleep with those tourists before stealing their stuff … It was revealed during the trial that the big lipped woman’s victim was a foreigner called Jorge Salasar. The accused carried out the act on May 8th around 10 pm in room 3027 at Wina Hotel. She came to the front desk asking for the key to room 3027. The front desk staff gave her the key without suspicion because she was often seen with Jorge Salasar who stayed in that room. It was also revealed that the accused had spent the night before in his room.

  – Denpost, August 2002

  According to the public prosecutor, other than becoming a ‘frequent prisoner’ the act of the accused has disturbed the circle of hotel owners as she often stole at hotels with the target of in-house guests. Her last operation was carried out on August 20 at Panorama Cottage II, Kuta. The accused smartly posed as a tour guide. She came to the hotel and borrowed the room key of Joel Tarming, a Swedish tourist. Strangely, the front office staff believed her due to her sweet lips. With the key in hand, the accused Sonia Gonzales freely took the belongings of Joel Tarming in the form of electronic devices and 17 million rupiah cash. The accused delivered the key back to the hotel receptionist and casually left the hotel.

  – Denpost, December 2001

  Sonia was a curious dichotomy; charming and charismatic one minute, but like a deranged lunatic the next. She dressed in trendy outfits, styling herself with flair; she was rarely seen in the same clothes twice, thanks to the sizeable wardrobe she’d bring into Hotel K, most of it bought online with stolen credit cards. She’d also check in with a full makeup kit, turning part of her cell into a theatrical dressing room. If Sonia had been a movie star, she would have been paparazzi manna, biting into every banal day with a new edgy story. But she was a star only on the Kerobokan stage, acting out daily scenes to give everyone a bit of a show. Her antics were tireless. She’d abuse someone, then return with her guitar and sing them a song she’d written in apology. When Schapelle Corby was sentenced to twenty years, she spent months yelling out, ‘Ha ha, Corby, you got twenty years’. She’d bang her head with a rock until it bled, she’d start screaming for no reason, and she often made feeble suicide attempts. But instead of flashbulbs, she got flashes of Nita’s coconut milk splashing down her face.

  Sonia wants to kill herself for a trick only, just to get some attention from the security. One time I had to call security for help when she drank Rinso. Another time she tried to kill herself by hanging but a girl had already grabbed her around the waist by the time she kicked over the chair she was standing on.

  – Nita

  The afternoon she performed her chilling trapeze act, she stepped up on a chair inside the cell toilet, put a noose around her neck, then stood as still as a statue, waiting for an inmate to glimpse her in the pose. Not until a girl frantically ran in and grabbed her around the waist, did she kick away the chair. But her well-choreographed stunt turned unexpectedly dicey. The girl wasn’t strong and Sonia started slipping through her arms, the noose tightening around her neck. Screams fast drew a crowd. Girls helped to hold her as someone slashed the plastic cord. Sonia was safe but her neck was laced with deep red welts that she proudly showed off around the jail for the next few days, like designer bling.

  But drinking Rinso was her more regular thing. The catalyst one morning was simply a guard refusing to let her out of Block W to go to the visiting area; standard practice if a prisoner hadn’t been called to a visit. Sonia turned on a tantrum like a two year old. Used to her psychotic behaviour, the guards just sent her to clean the drains. As payback, she drank a couple of mouthfuls of Rinso and started vomiting. Yells for Nita Ramos preceded the ritual pouring of coconut milk. The guards’ counterblow was to ground Sonia in Block W for three months. She upped the ante by drinking a few more mouthfuls of Rinso after lockup. There was the usual insane wait for keys before Nita patiently dispensed her antidote, yet again. Sonia was still punished. During her three months stuck in Block W, female inmates brought her food, drinks and magazines, and Nita bought her cigarettes in return for massages. Sonia had an uncanny ability to win sympathy despite antagonising every other inmate.

  One morning, after a three-month stint in cell tikus, three guards arrived to release her back into Block W. They were ready for her inevitable angry spit. But when guard Herman opened the door, Black Monster was quiet as a mouse. When his eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw why. She had hanged herself. Three weeks earlier, a popular male inmate had also been found dead in a toilet cubicle. This looked like a copycat suicide. Black Monster was strung up in an elaborate noose, her head flopped to one side, her tongue hanging out of her mouth. She’d finally done it. Herman went in to grab her. But, just as his hand touched her, she sprang at him like a tormented ghost, screaming and clutching at him with tentacle-like arms. Herman flew back against the wall. The other two guards ran off screaming. Sonia was laughing as she casually untied the noose and pulled the cord up over her head. The guard sat on the floor, gasping for breath. The stunt had worked perfectly. Sure, she’d do a bit more time in purgatory, but it was worth it. Now she’d be the talk of the jail.

  That girl is one of a kind. You ask if I’ve ever been afraid of anyone. Among all the men in Kerobokan, I’ve never been afraid of nobody, but I would be afraid to share a room with Sonia. She made me shit scared. I would be shit scared to share a room with her.

  Why?

  Because she might stab me. I would never be able to relax and sleep with Sonia in my room, she’s a lunatic. She loves it in Kerobokan. Everyone is shit scared of her. The only woman, I think, who would face her is Australian Renae Lawrence. Renae would hit her harder but she would come and stab Renae. She is mean and she’s crazy. That’s the kind of person I’m afraid of.

  – Ruggiero

  CHAPTER 9

  THE BLUE ROOM

  Everyone is fucking everyone in every corner they c
an find.

  – Mick, Australian inmate

  Black Monster was unusually cooperative and solemn as the guards escorted her across the jail back to Block W after another long stint in cell tikus. She quietly slipped in through the steel door, almost unnoticed, with her head hanging and her eyes staring at the ground. Her subdued re-entry to Block W was because she’d got the shock of her life. She’d just been told she was seven weeks pregnant.

  Inside Block W, the escorting female guard walked along the gravel path between the cells, breaking Sonia’s news as she asked who would take her into their cell. Black Monster trailed forlornly behind. No-one wanted her. She was too much of a headache. Finally, one cell agreed to take her in. The cellmates knew that life would be edgier and more disruptive with Sonia, but cell leader Trisna felt sorry for her. Black Monster was soon herself again, playing up the pregnancy to get attention, relishing the jail-wide speculation about who the father was and where the conception had happened.

  I would rather cut my cock off … I wouldn’t do it. I would never get her pregnant.

  – Ruggiero

  The cellmates spent many nights stroking Sonia’s belly, praying the baby would have a better life. But as her pregnancy progressed, she became more stressed. She was scared of giving birth and worried about who would take care of the baby, as she had nowhere to live and no family in Bali. Late one night, two months before she was due, she cried out in pain. Nobody thought Black Monster was faking it this time. She lay on a dirty mattress with her knees up in the birthing position, clutching at her stomach, gasping for breath between long, bloodcurdling screams. Tears poured across her temples and down the sides of her face. The cellmates screamed for help. They all thought she was going to have the baby that night. But the doctor finally arrived, gave her some medicine and settled her down.

  Sonia gave birth in a local hospital two months later, two weeks after finishing her sentence and checking out. A few weeks later, she returned to visit her friends in Hotel K and to show off her tiny infant. Jaws dropped as prisoners took a look at Black Monster’s baby girl. She was beautiful, with milky white skin and curly blonde hair. Sonia’s stints in jail had always created talk, but this inspired frenzied gossip. Who the hell was the father? The intense intrigue was fuelled by Black Monster’s own stories. As the baby was being cared for by French inmate Michael’s mum, she convinced everyone that Michael was the father. Then her story changed to him being Brazilian drug trafficker Marco, the most wanted man in Indonesia. He was big news. He’d run like a crazy man out of Jakarta Airport when customs officials discovered thirteen kilograms of pure Peruvian cocaine hidden in his hang-glider frame. Sonia had never met him. But she now claimed he was the father of her child.

  The true identity of the father was eventually revealed in a late-night drunken confessional between Australian inmate Mick and Scottish prisoner Robert. It transpired that Robert had simply grabbed some quick dirty sex when he’d been locked in an isolation cell in the tower next to Black Monster. A guard had come in and asked, ‘You want some fun, Robert?’ He was drunk. He did. The guard unlocked his cell, then stood back to watch. Black Monster was still locked up in her cell. She stripped, bent forwards and through the bars she and Robert had sex and conceived a beautiful baby girl.

  Robert knew the baby was his. One night he told me, ‘I rooted her’. I said ‘What?’ ‘It’s my baby.’ How? I asked. ‘I was drunk. Guards say, “Do you want to have fun, Robert?”’ But the next morning, Robert said, ‘Don’t tell anybody, don’t tell anybody’. He already had two kids in Scotland. The baby’s mouth shape, the eyes, and the curly blonde hair were all like Robert. I gave the adoptive parents a photo of Robert and said, ‘In case one day the kid asks about the father, this is him’.

  – Mick

  Within a couple of months, Black Monster was back inside Hotel K for biting a woman at a nightclub who was apparently trying to steal her new European boyfriend. She took her baby girl from Michael’s mum and with her into Hotel K, where there was no shortage of clucky females. But she changed her mind after a few days, and sold the baby to an inmate’s family for four bags of shabu.

  As time passed, Black Monster did nothing to dispel the myths about the father. His true identity stayed an unusually well-kept secret inside Hotel K. Robert seemed to have a unique power to scare Black Monster into submissive silence, although the ongoing intrigue suited her as well. But most prisoners had accepted the little girl was Frenchman Michael’s baby.

  Pregnancies didn’t usually provoke this much interest, as inmates often conceived, some giving birth and keeping the baby for a while, but many aborting their foetuses by self-inflicting rough daily stomach massages. Some girls, especially those who’d worked as callgirls in Denpasar and Kuta karaoke clubs, had shredded their wombs from so many brutal home abortions. One 22-year-old prisoner regularly awoke screaming in pain as her pureed insides started to slip out. Her cellmates knew the drill. Two held her arms and stroked her forehead, while another pushed a foot up between her legs to stop anything leaking out. She’d seen the jail doctor, who advised her that he could do nothing, but suggested it might help to wear a tight girdle. This seemed to do the trick temporarily but her insides were irreparably damaged.

  Hotel K was a sex-crazed little world, despite a belief among inmates that the drinking water was spiked with libido-lowering drugs. A walk through the jail could be like walking onto the set of Boogie Nights, with prisoners giving blow jobs up against trees or fences, thrusting away behind Iwan’s furniture-building workshop or in the visiting room. Nowhere was sacrosanct. Prisoners banged away in the church toilet, the temple toilets, the library toilet, the cells, the medical clinic and even in the boss’s office. If the drinking water was spiked, the dose wasn’t strong enough.

  When the jail boss unexpectedly turned up one Sunday afternoon, he walked into his office and straight into a porn show. A male prisoner and a woman were thrashing away under his desk. ‘Fuck off, get out,’ the inmate yelled without looking up, angry for the intrusion because he’d paid 50,000 rupiah ($7) for privacy. The boss walked to his desk, his black lace-up boots stopping right next to the prisoner’s head. The prisoner looked up, shocked. Suddenly the pair was scrambling for their clothes. The woman ran straight out the door, grabbing awkwardly at the sides of her dress as she tried to pull it down over her breasts. The prisoner was made to stay and explain. He stood uncomfortably in his underpants, clutching his shirt and shorts in a bundle against his chest.

  He told the boss that the woman was his wife, who he rarely saw; they were lonely and missed each other desperately. The boss was lenient. He bellowed at the prisoner for fucking in his office, and then dismissed him with a casual wave of his arm, sending him back to his cell without punishment. But the boss soon heard he’d been conned. The woman was a hooker. The prisoner was sent to cell tikus for a few days until he was able to organise some cash to pay a guard to let him out.

  As with drugs, mobile phones and plasma televisions, sex was officially not allowed in Hotel K. But this did nothing to stifle the prolific fucking; it simply forced prisoners to use their naturally devious instincts so they didn’t get caught. Some simply waited until the more amenable guards were on duty so they could sling them some cash. Many did it at the changing of the guards at midday, when there was a ten-minute blind spot in the supervision. It was a frenetic ten minutes of lunchtime fucking. But if prisoners got caught in compromising clinches by strict guards, they could suffer a brutal bashing.

  One afternoon, female inmate Komang got a pass out of Block W by telling a female guard she needed to talk to the jail security chief about her case. In truth, she’d just got a text message from her boyfriend in the men’s block, saying he’d be waiting for her in the music room if she could get out. Their little rendezvous started well; they met, stripped and started having sex. But it ended badly. The female guard noticed Komang was still not back in Block W twenty minutes later and went searching for he
r. She quickly realised she’d been conned. No-one had seen Komang go to the offices. The guard started to panic, thinking Komang had escaped on her watch.

  She instigated a jail-wide search. It didn’t take long to find Komang in the music room. She was naked and alone. Her boyfriend had abandoned her. He’d dived though a window into the adjoining kitchen as soon as he heard someone tampering with the door handle. Guards grabbed the naked girl, dragged her outside and bashed her, smashing her in the face over and over. For the next week, Komang sat sobbing in Block W, with two black eyes and a bloated face. Her boyfriend had also been badly bashed after he was caught running naked through the kitchen.

  The impact of making sex illegal in Hotel K was to turn it into a booming illicit business. Behind the backs of stricter guards, the sex industry in the jail thrived. The doctor rented out a room with a mattress in the clinic for sex. Guards as pliable as plasticine and hungry for cash sanctioned sex, some even partaking in it, many lining their pockets by working as pimps to book callgirls, organise sex nights and rent out offices.