Let's Go Mad

by Rob Binkley

  We sat on the sand watching the skin go by while ours sizzled in the sun.

  The tourists had come out to play. I heard four different languages being spoken at once, none of them English. Bali felt like a melting pot of all the cultures and religions that came before us, but with a party atmosphere and a Planet Hollywood thrown in for good measure.

  Fair warning: Kuta Beach may turn off some travelers who are “looking for Paradise Lost”—and they have a point. People come to Bali for various reasons, but if you come to Kuta Beach, it’s for sun, sand, sex, and surfing. There’s not much to do besides hang out on the beach, eat nasi goreng (chicken fried rice), party in the open-air bars, or have unprotected sex with strangers. If you’re not into those four activities, you may want to skip Kuta.

  As you can imagine, Brian and I weren’t bored here at all. We were still decompressing from America and unloading nearly thirty years of conditioned baggage from our past lives. We made a decision to “let it all go” so our souls could be free to move about the planet without any lingering stress. For the first month, we didn’t even mention our lives were in flames back home. None of that resurfaced until we began to run out of money. At this point, we were still just two expatriates starting over, and our journey had just begun.

  I spent our first day reading and reflecting on how I got halfway around the world to drink all these Bintang beers before noon. I decided my personal goal for the trip was to get out of my comfort zone, and to test my values to see if they were true or just conditioned responses to life I was repeating over and over.

  I think a lot of people come to a point where they wonder, “Is my life really my own, or am I living someone else’s dream?” I had to find out. I knew I needed strange and weird experiences to help me understand who I am and what I wanted to become.

  Brian, on the other hand, is strange enough of an exotic bird that he probably is who he’ll always be: a paradox, an enigma, a man-child in perpetual flux who will never settle down because to do that would be to die.

  Or at least that was how he seemed to me on day one.

  It occurred to me that I was getting torched. There was a lot of cloud coverage, but the equatorial sun could not be stopped. My skin wasn’t used to being attacked with such intensity. After about an hour of tanning, I took shade in one of the many bars on the beach. Brian stayed out on the beach, intent on getting skin cancer, while I worked on my liver disease under a nearby palapa.

  I watched Brian strut around in his brand new Speedo while Indonesians scampered around him. “If success is measured by free time, we’re the two richest guys in the world!” Brian yelled to me. He was high on freedom. Brian would never wear a Speedo back home, knowing his pasty ass looked ridiculous, but here he didn’t care. Besides, all the Europeans were doing it.

  A quick observation about the locals: They must be ancestors of the prehistoric Flores Man who once roamed these parts and was three-feet tall. All the natives around here seemed to be no more than five feet tall. I never considered myself vertically blessed (at six feet), but here I am a giant. Brian, at five-foot-nine, seems to like his newfound advantage.

  When the sun set on our first full day, it finally hit me how amazing it was to be unplugged from America. The pressures of modern life are greater than most people understand. Once you’re relieved of all adult responsibilities, life becomes really pleasant. My soul was opening up. With the stress slipping away, all that was left was the capacity for joy and experience.

  I wanted to drink in the world through one giant beer bong.

  Our afternoon buzz was wearing off. We decided to go forage for ice, Coca Cola, and Jack Daniels for our room so we could have “relaxers” before we went out. The problem was, by the time we tracked down the Jack Daniels, it was so hot our ice had melted. This was our first learning experience: Always buy ice last when shopping near the equator. When we returned to our room, sheets of rain came down so hard it made us double the speed we normally drank our relaxers.

  After a day of wide-eyed wandering, it was time to experience Kuta’s nightlife. Being two outgoing bastards, we hit all the bars and socialized with everyone we met. We took advantage of one of the most exciting features of traveling—getting to know other travelers and learning from their experiences, attitudes, and cultures. By the end of the first night, we felt like we’d met everyone on the strip.

  The following day started late since most people stayed out until four o’clock in the morning here. We got up around two o’clock in the afternoon and had eggs and banana pancakes and juice. Then we pretended to surf or sit on the beach, as close to topless European girls as possible.

  Brian was pissed at me all day because I kept dropping the “gay game” on him last night, and ruined his chances with a girl named Simi from Denmark. He told me to “stop salting his game,” or he would throw me in the ocean. I didn’t listen.

  Brian walked around the beach introducing us as “two obnoxious Americans” to every attractive woman who spoke English. “We’re like Dumb and Dumber. No, fun and funner!” Most people had no idea what he was talking about, but Brian had us pegged.

  He was getting as red as a lobster, so he skipped the second night out to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and tend to his jet lag and equatorial sunburn. But I knew he really wanted to find a pay phone to call his security blanket of an ex-girlfriend back home. Sucker.

  That night, I was walking home from the Shari Club with a guy from Vancouver named Ken. It was five o’clock in the morning, and we had just scored some warm beer and low-grade pot. We came upon two enormous frogs having sex. Ken and I sat there staring—should we interrupt them or just watch? I felt like a pervert.

  “This can’t be normal,” I said.

  Ken replied, “Ya know, I heard if you lick them while they’re having sex you can get high from their sexual excretions.”

  “Really now?”

  Ken bet me a bag of weed I wouldn’t do it. I took the challenge. I leaned in slowly so as not to disturb them, but when I saw the grotesque sight up close, my tongue recoiled. To save face, I grabbed the frogs and ran screaming up to a couple of Swedish girls. “Look at these frogs having sex!”

  The girls were not happy to see a longhaired American holding two copulating amphibians. They ran away terrified; I gave chase and calmed them, but they didn’t trust my crazed biologist act. Needless to say, they declined to join us for our afterparty.

  Ken and I kept on moving to our guesthouse on Poppy Lane, which was impossible to find. We got lost in the neverending maze of streets that seemed to go in circles. We finally found our way home, and woke Brian to make him smoke a joint with us. Brian sat up eager to get high; he lit up the joint with pleasure. “Why do I smell an Italian kitchen?” I asked.

  “I want pizza!” Ken could smell it too.

  We were too ripped to realize we had bought a joint of Indonesian oregano. Brian spit it out after two drags. “You woke me for this??”

  I looked at Ken then started howling.

  “Amateurs….” Brian shook his head. “You really are the dumbest smart guy I know.” Brian went back to bed.

  It wouldn’t take long for this smart guy to learn that in Kuta every shady deal was just a bit shadier than normal. Travelers must develop a sixth sense about these things. I was still on the low end of the learning curve.

  The next afternoon we were at a bar called Tubes when some guy asked Brian where the best surf was. Brian came up with a good answer without having a clue. After the surfer left I said, “You have no idea where the good surf is, you idiot.”

  “He doesn’t know that.”

  “So you just made shit up?”

  “No, I … read it.”

  “Where? Tell me. Where did you read it?”

  Brian was ashamed. “In your stupid book, okay?”

  I smiled. “That’s all I wanted to hear.”

  Later in the day we bobbed on two rented surfboards just off the coast
at low tide and stared up at the sky. “Shouldn’t we try to surf at some point?” Brian mused. “We’re Californians, we should be surfers.” We decided to give it a shot. Tomorrow.

  Later that afternoon brought magic, one of those sublime moments I will never forget. We swam in the rain with our new friends Kim, Omar, and Josephine. Surfing illiterates, we bodysurfed on one-foot waves while lightning storms crashed down around us.

  Torrents of rain came so Dede, a four-foot-tall Rastafarian guy we met on the beach, invited us back to his hut. He made us milk and honey tea. It was a great place to hang out while the lightning passed. I felt like I was among friends even though we hardly knew any of them.

  “Dudes …”

  Josephine interrupted Brian, “I’m not a dude. Don’t call me dude.”

  “Correction—dudes and dudettes—this has been such a great day with all you good people. Are we, like, forming a new subculture here?” Brian laid on the comic naïveté.

  “We would if any of you Yanks had any culture,” Omar said, which always drew a laugh. The stupidity of Americans is a punch line that never gets old, no matter what country you visit.

  We all shared our unique perspectives with the group while we rode out the storm. I didn’t know it then but, after a short lifetime of travels, I’ve discovered times like these are what backpacking is all about. Traveling is not about the high you get from attending huge parties or experiencing seminal moments of glory like “running with the bulls” in Pamplona or bungee jumping off the Space Needle in Auckland. The satisfaction comes from the joy you take from small bonding moments like these—sipping milk and honey tea in a rainstorm with good friends.

  This is what you remember.

  After a week in Kuta, we were watching our rupiah. Brian came up with an idea “to bridge the gap with the locals.” He decided to get a job to pay for our drinking habit. Brian flagged down a Wells ice cream vendor walking by with the standard greeting.

  “Apa kabar?!” (Translation: What’s up?) “Can I buy that shirt off your back?”

  The ice cream vendor knew enough English to be bribed. Brian bought his shirt and offered to switch places with the vendor. He gave him his seat on the beach and a tumbler full of Jack and Sprite.

  The vendor agreed. “Terima kasih!” (“Thank you!”) He happily took a load off.

  Brian grabbed the cart and walked up and down Kuta Beach selling ice cream; I rang the bell. We sold frozen delights to all the sunbathing Europeans and Australians. Brian even used his disguise to hit on the ladies, including one of the topless German birds we met our first day on the beach. She flirted back, buying the largest phallic-looking ice cream stick in his cart.

  Brian served it up with a smile, “On ze house, schöne frau.” (“beautiful woman”)

  “We’ve got a candle back in our room that looks just like that thing,” I said. “You and your friend should stop by.”

  The moment was ruined when her fat, drunk boyfriend in a thong emerged from nowhere to claim her. The upside was Brian got a tip from him. “If you can get a tip from a German, you know you’re doing great.” I patted him on the back and we kept on moving.

  That night, on our way home from another party, Brian and I ran into a little Indonesian boy that wanted to sell us magic mushrooms. I had read somewhere they could either be poison or crap, but they had to be better than licking frogs. The mushrooms didn’t look like any I’d ever seen, so we asked the little fella if he would eat some first.

  “If you start tripping, we’ll buy them.”

  The kid got scared, probably because we were towering over him trying to shove his own product down his throat. In broken English he said, “Men who aren’t safe, aren’t safe here,” and he ran away into the night. We just stood there and watched him.

  “Was it something we said?!” I yelled to no avail.

  “An ominous warning,” Brian said. “Take heed.”

  “Oh well … no mushrooms for us.”

  We called it a night.

  Our dreams of enlightenment were drowning in a sea of Arak Attack cocktails (made with a rice liquor that’s eighty percent alcohol) and bottles of imported whiskey. Our days were blurring into one long party haze with our new Aussie friend Felix, who had coerced Brian and I into getting blotto every night. He had become a fixture with us, a gregarious devil of a man who didn’t give a crap about anything. Felix was even crazier than we were. He had a hearty personality and a penchant for binge drinking (like us) and all things fun.

  At first sight, Felix appeared sane. We ran into him one night at a country and western bar on Kuta that had a brothel in back. He was a normal-looking bloke who ironically (or insanely) dressed himself up like a tourist from the 1980s with a Hawaiian shirt, hat, and camera around his neck. He looked like Hunter S. Thompson.

  I first laid eyes on him when he bumped into our table on the way out of the brothel’s back door. He nearly knocked over our table full of drinks. “Next round’s on the klutzo!” He threw down some change and we were off.

  He sat down at our table and went into his life story. “The first thing you should know is I don’t normally bang hookers!” He inserted a two-dollar tip into the assless chaps of a prostitute walking by. “That’s the cherry right there!” The Chaps Girl kept walking unfazed; her chaps were full of tips much larger than his.

  “Got my heart stomped to bits by my future, now never-to-be wifey. Left me at the bloody altar in front of God and everybody…. It was public brutality!”

  Felix said he was heartbroken and looking to drown his sorrows with booze and women. “The order is not important!”

  Brian was into him immediately. “At least you have a reasonable life goal set for yourself.” And that was that. I never dried out enough on Kuta to know exactly when we veered into dangerous ground, but it was around the time Felix joined our gang.

  A few days later, the Muslims on the island were fasting for Ramadan. Although Indonesia is mostly Muslim, here on Bali the vast majority of the natives practice Hinduism. The ones who prayed to Allah were easy to spot.

  When the sun set on our island paradise, the local Muslims came out to eat just as Felix, Brian, and I ventured out to our favorite bar, The Bounty. There we befriended two Swedes named Nick and Lars.

  Lars, who amazingly worked at a 7-11 back home, mentioned “slam dancing was still a big craze in Sweden,” so we did some male bonding on the dance floor. Everyone smashed into everyone while the girls stayed on the sidelines. It was great if you’re an idiot into masochistic fun. I kept falling down but the Swedes would pick me up and throw me back into the air.

  This lasted until three in the morning. Worn out, I abandoned Brian in the mosh pit to drunk-dial girls back in America, with no success.

  The next night, the gang was back at The Bounty where it was the usual debauchery. I spent hours talking to a Danish girl about the Great Dane, who I totally guessed was Macbeth. My second guess would have been MacGyver. She told me everything about “ladle laws.” I had no idea what a ladle was, so I just kept smiling and nodding.

  Brian was holding court in the middle of a group of Danes, who were humble people that were very proud of their culture in which everyone has a responsibility. Their government advocates traveling two years after high school to better understand what they want to do as adults. America seemed out of touch in this regard.

  After our educational talk, one of the drunk Danish gals told us she had soaked a tampon in tequila earlier and was wearing it around to get a buzz. “Are you for real?!” Brian roared. “Can I stick one up my ass and get drunk?”

  “Bend over!” She called Brian’s bluff.

  The longer we stayed in Bali the clearer it became that some of these island lunatics would sniff a bee’s butt to get a buzz.

  The Bounty was offering two-for-one drinks until midnight. Brian ordered twenty shots to get all the Danes drunk, then he gave me the bill. We all got so blasted Brian and I ordered another round and began th
rowing shots in each other’s faces, making a general nuisance of ourselves.

  By two o’clock in the morning, I had all the liquid courage I needed to leap up on the dance podium where I boogied like an epileptic off his meds. I would never pull a move like that in the States, but here inhibitions were out the window. It didn’t take long before I was yanked off the pole.

  When I was pulled down, I saw a roomful of faces frowning in my direction. Even in my inebriated state, I could tell the locals didn’t appreciate our exhibitionist American attitudes. We didn’t know it yet, but we were accumulating a growing legion of silent enemies just waiting to pounce.

  We left The Bounty and staggered to our other favorite haunt, the Sari Club (which years later would be blown up by terrorists with 202 people inside). We jumped up and down on the dance floor screaming, “Let’s go mad!” with Felix leading the way.

  I grabbed a policeman named Danny and we went around the club talking to everyone. I bought Danny a few drinks. I thought now that we’re friends I could buy his police shirt from him, but he refused. Later, Brian came back wearing Danny’s police shirt—he said he gave him “an offer he couldn’t refuse,” but I never found out what that was.

  I warned Brian that impersonating a police officer would get him caned, but he didn’t care. “I want to see how many laws I can break!” He was getting stupider by the minute.

  By four in the morning we were all hammered. A group of us decided to go for a swim. Brian jumped in a motorcycle cab and took off with some Australian girls. Felix and I came out of the club just in time to see him flying down the boulevard, screaming, “E mayya hootsy cosa!” (which I’m sure means something obscene in Indonesian).

  A few seconds later Brian jumped from the moving cab and almost ran into a post in front of a couple arguing on the corner. He started talking to the couple. Brian said he asked the girl if she was okay when—bam!—her boyfriend hit him over the head with a beer bottle.