The Bali Diaries: Write It Out, Bitch

I want to break something.  Just crush something with my hands until they can't squeeze anymore.  Like an orange 'til all the juice is on the floor and there's nothing left between my cramping palm and shaking fingers but a dripped dry orange pulp of rind and see and chewy innards.  

FUCK.  Fuckity-fuck.  Cock.  Balls.  Shit.  Cunt.  Twat. 

Okay, I'm better now.  This is what I need to do.  I need to find a computer place, and just save the hard drive and I'll be fine.  I can do that today.  After breakfast.  And after that a surf.  A good long one.

[stop]

There's no saving things so thoroughly fucked, I guess.  At least they were nice and only charged me 35,000.  It's an empty hopeless feeling that grips me now.  No other words for it.  Empty.  Hopeless.  Dazed too maybe.  All this trying to think my way out of losing one month of work has left the inside of this poor little coconut stripped bare and dry and devoid of any goodness that was once there.  It's left out in the sun, open to rot it has.  I don't know what to do.  I don't know where to start anymore.  I'll salvage the drive back home I tell myself.  Salvage the pages on pages on pages.  But homes still a month away, and I pray, dear God, have mercy on that little drive until then, and let whatever crack-whiz I find in LA be able to rescue it.  Please.  I won't rewrite it here, and I hope that I'll never have to.  I just soldier on by hand 'til it cramps, by the pencil and paper, new chapters, new thoughts, not ones that have already been written.  Be brave and have courage with your fucking words.  

Hemingway, out.

The Bali Diaries: Kuter

There's a time for such dingy depravity as the city of Kuta and, for me at least, it doesn't come often.  The second time was out of a necessity of sorts.  For Mike, for love.  Well, for an ex-girlfriend.  We took a taxi this time.  200,000 for about an hour drive, and one the way, at the big hill just before Jimbaran, there's a line of standing officers of the local law picking motor bikes out of the traffic like fish from molasses and checking for, I'm assuming, international licenses.  My stomach spun a half turn in memory and I was suddenly glad we decided to spring for the cab.

We didn't know exactly where we were going, and we didn't have an address so when we saw a Green Garden Hotel on the main drag with all the hotels we told the driver to stop, but turns out it's the wrong Green Garden Hotel, go figure.

We were looking for the Green Garden Resort and Spa, which is conveniently a twenty minute walk away.  In the scorching mid-day sun.  With backpacks on.  "It's like the nature walk we never went on!" I say with a can-do smile and a fake attitude.

It's kind of like a nature walk, except instead of green trees and birds and bees and lizards and elephants we're walking down a shit-muggy street on a skinny shit sidewalk with random slabs missing and motor bikes constantly mounting it to get around the traffic of single lane city streets in this city with cars and taxis crawling both ways and bikes, bikes, bikes.  The air's nauseating, and within minutes my skin's sticky with sweat under the light weight of my backpack, and all along the way it's hotels, hotels on both sides, and fat tourists from Oz or Eastern Europe, and gift shops and restaurants - there's a Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. - and $1 movie stores in Circle K strip malls, and so many hole-in-the-wall massage parlors with women outside begging us, "Come in, please.  Massage. Please. Come in." The ladies are so-so, we walk by.  It's just like a nature walk.

Bleh.  When we get to the Resort and Spa some twenty minutes later, the girls aren't there.  The place is pristine.  There's a pool and spa (of course), and a bar/restaurant up some stairs by the front desk, and there's scented little birdbaths full of flowers everywhere and glossy stone statues of couple in the nude.

"I don't get it..." Mike says trying to get a hold of Alix.  He's texting her on What's App, but it's in vain.  There's no response.  The last thing he'd heard from them was that they were just leaving Singapore. "They should've landed an hour ago."  He's lost-puppy-dogging and antsy.  There's nothing we can do though, so I tell Casa Nova to leave a note at the front desk, and in the meantime we should probably have a beer or three.

To the beach.  Bin Tangs.

"Tell me again why we can't stay with them?" I say sitting down at a table on the beach.  I sip slow from my beer, as always, and keep my feet moving as the ants are thick in the sand and finding it too easy to shoot up my legs.

"Because man, it's her birthday.  She wants to be with her friend."

"I thought she wanted to be with you."

"Yeah, well... I don't know.  It's fine," he says.  "We'll just split a cheap hotel around here.  There's gotta be one somewhere."

I really don't care either way.

[stop]

The Bali Diaries: Zen Lunacy

Nate eyes me funny, "I'm not meditating, I'm just sitting here."

"That's true meditation," I say.  "Think of nothing."

I put a towel over Nate's head like a dick (in a cum rag), while he sat there on the white tile with a pillow underneath, and one leg crossed over the other, hands together, palms up and thumbs together like some tattooed blond-haired bodhisattva.  He'd just finished reading my copy of the Dharma Bums (it's not even mine, it's Katarina's) two days ago and was discovering the Zen Lunatic within.

I talk to him in a deep voice after he throws the towel off and says, "I need to be aware of everything, Becky!"

"You need to be aware of nothing," I say, slightly sarcastically Buddha.  "Empty your mind of every thought, don't think of the day, don't think of me, or you, or these words.  Don't think.  Just let it wash over you like a rock in a stream that just sits and is.  That's you."

He probably hates me.  I'm laughing inside.

"Count without numbers, Nate. Be without feeling," I say as I walk inside.  "Let that be your eternal mindset."

The Bali Diaries: Kuta Balls

Kuta's different.  If Uluwatu was a beautiful girl, which it in many ways is, then Kuta would be the shorter stubbier sister that drank too much and gave it up way too easy.  She's fun, for a night or two, but's she's needy and most always tries to take advantage.

Our first foray into the big city was one of disgraceful disappointment, miscalculation, misfortune, and a lot of bending over and just taking it.  We'd decided against our better judgement not to wear helmets.  After all, we never needed them in Uluwatu.  The roads down at the tip of the Bukit are a pretty even mix of helmets and free flowing hair.  There's more sunglasses than helmets in Uluwatu.  There's also next to no police.  Anywhere.

Kuta's a different ballgame entirely though.  I began to realize this on the highway halfway through Jimbaran where we were pretty much the only ones on the road without helmets.  Kuta isn't a place where you want to stick out like a sore thumb, and we weren't in the city, off the highway but five minutes before a man in a yellow reflective vest and a funny hat comes running out into the middle of the street blowing his whistle and waving his arms to flag us down.  

We pull over by his little booth and he asks to see our licenses so we show him, and he tells us to come sit on the bench in his little booth.  He shows us a piece of paper, apparently with laws on it, and scrolls down with his finger to the lines about helmets and all I can make out is a word that looks like helmet and a price that says 500,000.

"No helmet," he says.  And then he scrolls his finger more and says, "No license."  The price by that reads one million.

Fuck.  "We didn't know," we say, and in honesty, we didn't, but something tells me that's not going to matter.  And, big surprise, it doesn't.  He tells us he can either write us a ticket for not wearing helmets and not having international licenses, or we can just pay now for the helmets and not have to come back to Kuta tomorrow to show at court at 8:00 in the morning.  We pay, gratefully, and when we ask for a receipt or a note or something in case we get pulled over again, he tells us not worry and just say we already paid.  What a nice guy.

We were trying to meet up with Steve to go party and rage the night away, but we were already lost as all hell and had no idea where we were going.  Steve said they were going to Seminyak for sunset so we asked the officer where that was as politely as one can after forking over 500,000 RUP.  He pointed us down the road with a smile that only seemed half-condescending, but looking back, I'm suer he was fully laughing at us behind that smile because not a kilometer down we're stopped again at a stoplight, not by the light, but by a trio of officers this time with their own little booth and everything.  By this time, the sun's already set. We pull our pants down once again and bend over, pay the fee, and turn our bikes back toward Uluwatu with our tails between our legs.

The Bali Diaries: Where Everybody is Wayan

Or Ketut.  In one of Nate's travel books we learned that there are only four names in Bali among the locals because of the caste system.  First born is Wayan.  The second's Made, the third's Nyoman, and the fourth's Ketut.  Man or woman.  And after that, come kid four, they just go back to Wayan and start over.  It makes sense kinda, or not sense, but I understand why everyone   has the same name here now.  If it makes sense or not is still up for debate, I believe.  It must make for pretty interesting roll calls at school, ah, but I guess that's what last names are for.

Lucky for me the people in Paris, specifically the girls, aren't named based on the tenets of the caste system or my book that's beginning to grow harder to write over here would be quite repetitive as far as chapter titles go.

Here's what I think I'll do with that, the book that is.  Each chapter needs to cover something about the whatever the fuck I was doing over there, like a grand overview in each chapter, at the beginning before I dive into the laconic dialogue and wandering.  That's what Steinbeck did right?

There has to be something more.  Maybe about the writing in some chapters, maybe the grocery habits, something I don't want to write more than once.  Maybe about the particular girl, or maybe about that seductive city itself.  Something.  I guess it'll come to me.  I need to write all the other stuff first, I suppose.  I can't write the beginning of the chapter until I've written the rest of it.  All the pithy stuff, because maybe then, with any luck, I'll be able to suck some truth out of it.

The Bali Diaries: Rooster Techno

Our mornings are split now, between Jiwa Juice, the quaint little Spanish cafe by the base of the hill by our new place 3D Homestay, and our old familiar haunt Mango Tree, the place across from Padang Padang Inn.  The walking commute couldn't be beat in the mornings, but all the late night yelling surely won't be missed.

We've grown into old men over here in the South Pacific, and today this old man craved banana pancakes, and Mango Tree has the best so that's where I find myself today with a pencil scribbling away waiting for them to grill.  We walked in as we used to everyday to the early morning electronic dance music they open the place up to before switching it to some trancy island music with a flute.  

Somedays the early songs are some good old gangster rap Snoop Dogg, but today it's fast house and when the rooster crows it's always somehow meshes perfectly with the beat like it's some action on a DJ soundboard in the club.  It's hilarious.

Good morning. 

The Bali Diaries: Cock Crow

That's what I write to now.  Not to music anymore.  No tiny buds in my ears, no wires dangling down.  Just Sacha's silly hat on my head so I don't pull my hair.

And here the breeze carries the rhythm in my head, like a trance house steam sizzle rustling through the trees.  The roosters chime in whenever they so feel like it, and it always seems to work.  Kinda.  Even if it doesn't really, it's funny as hell, and that works for me.

It's a lazy life here to be sure.  Simple.  Not much to do in the grandest way.  Not much to need either, just a good meal here and there, a decent surf if it can be managed and most times it can.  Uluwatu always has waves, and when the swells hit, there's always waves everywhere.

So I'm clear of the dreaded wilderness now.

It's strange.  Ever since my death-gripped seven day dance with the devil, every vice has seemed to loose appeal.  There's a craving that used to be there that isn't anymore.  There's no insatiable lust.  No finding for a smoke whenever I see one.  And it's been three days now and what's most weird is I don't particularly care for a Bin Tang or any booze for that matter.  So much more than that is the desire for a fruit juice because hot damn, they're delectable!

There's an incredibly pure feeling of clarity that keeps washing over me, like I have a lovely little rain cloud of it over my head pouring down on me all day.  I care for precious few things now, which is funny to write because I feel like I've been saying that forever, but now I see the airiness of my past.  The precociousness.  The pedestal I perched myself on like some lofty busted philosopher, and the fool that all self-proclaimed thinkers are, or at least have leading them around by the hand in their heads. Because that used to be me.  And I say used to with clasped hands and a prayer that it is sincerely so.  

The Bali Diaries: Hell Hath No Paradise

Heaven done sent me an angel I believe.  And yesterday of all days.  A Friday night at Mango Tree, brought me, somewhat, out of the five day daze of weight loss and pain.  She came down in the form the of purveyor of that fine establishment.  It’s right across the street from our dear Padang Padang Inn so we end up eating there all the time.  She saw me last night, and I must’ve looked particularly wretched because she asked if I was all right.  “I’ve been sick,” I said.

“Oh, no,” said she.  “Have some ginger tea.  And eat light, fruit and veggies.” So I ordered the Mediterranean salad, which upon seeing it come out probably wasn’t my best bet.  It looked delicious, don’t get me wrong, all oily and covered in feta cheese, but I only took one bite before my stomach lurched and found myself floating on stumbling legs to the bathroom in the back.  To yack, I thought.  The chunder never came though because I spit out the acid like I always do.  But my body wasn’t done in there, and I turned bottom-side and let flow with an all too familiar shudder and a whisper, “Fuck.”

When I returned to the table, there was a cup of filmy liquid beside my plate, and as I sat down Mike told me to drink it.  “It’s lime water.  Her husband said it should kill the bugs inside you.”  Through all the grogginess, it made perfect sense.  You squirt it on reef rash to kill bacteria.  The shit cooks fish for crying out loud.  It’s strange and silly to me when those moments of clarity come.  One sip felt better than anything I could recently remember, and I thanked her one thousand times.

The Bali Diaries: Delirium Tremens

Not the beer, but the tired desperate feeling that comes so unceremoniously after three days of peeing from my butthole.  I don’t want to deserve this anymore.  And I remember why I wrote “DOG” on a random piece of cardboard now.  Yes, they’re everywhere here, roaming free on the roads, at the beaches, all curious cute and for some reason always young, all pups.  It wasn’t that though.  I remember now.  There was a little voice in my head that night and it said in a sharp whisper, a girl’s tone, someone familiar but I can’t remember who. She said to me, “You’re a dog, Brian. You’re such a dog.” And she despised me when she said it.  In my mind’s eye, I ticked my head to the left, because I knew what she meant, but I wasn’t sure if being a dog was such a bad thing really.  He’s loyal.  He’s most always a true mirror.  He reflects, he’s reciprocal.  There’s no games with him except stick and ball and belly rub and right behind the ears.  And yeah, he wants to fuck a lot, but he just wants to make you happy.  He’s man’s best friend.  

And then there’s man on the other hand.  We’re scheming, deceitful, and so many times despicable beings.  A dog can be this, but not on its own.  It needs a man to model after.  We’re wretched.  We’re never satisfied.  Even with paradise right behind us.  

Listen to me, wow.  The pain of my digestive tract is coming through my fingers.  I can’t wait to be through this.

The Bali Diaries: Dog

There’s “DOG” written on a piece of torn cardboard that used to be the packaging for one of my leashes.  I remember writing it there way late two night ago.  Early early Monday morning  before the gods of this land decided to exact their devious revenge for the way I treated Aga.  She deserved better, and my, how fun it would’ve been.  But Sundays at Single Fin seem to have a mind of their own.  A bitter taste is in my mouth now from that night’s decisions.  And it’s not just the grapefruit extract that Nate promises will make everything better.  I should’ve stuck with Aga, but I somehow ended up on the beach at Padang Padang with some woman from New York.  She looked my age, but she told me she was 29.  It was a desperate hour.  

And then in the morning something didn’t feel right, and as the day progressed it got worse.  Dehydration.  Diarrhea.  Delirium.  My head was feather light when we went to surf Balangan, and last night the cold chills gripped me and every joint screamed and my fingers shook and trembled to try to grab something that wasn’t there.  Aga was gone.  I probably deserved this.

The Bali Diaries: Cotton Jones In The Morning

Mother fucker this place is amazing.  I don’t know what it is.  The weather? The insatiable merry-go-round of beautiful girls? The impeccable surf?  The food?  The new friends?  Who knows.  It’s probably all of that and more.  Like the little things.  Like the dogs roaming Dreamland beach.  And the roadside roosters and brown cows.  The little fires, and the dead kitties.  

There was a party on the beach last night at Padang’s with the tide slowly rising.  The Polish girl was there, and I only say girl because she’s three years younger than me.  When they’re younger they’re girls, when they’re older than me they’re women.  That’s just How my mind works.  But this girl is intriguing.  As soon as the homies bail, she grabs me by the hand and says, “Let’s go hang out somewhere.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere.” So we march-stumble down the beach, around a rock to seclusion and she pulls me down to the sand with her and puts her lips to mine and her tongue to my tongue and like nothing we’re rolling and grabbing until she flinches.  “My pussy’s burnt from the sun today.” She’d been naked sunbathing on some secret beach down 500 stairs not far from Uluwatu.  “And it’s a shame because I want to have sex with you right here right now.”  In that moment I thought to myself how funny Polish accents are.  How cute.  How deliciously seductive and to the point.  She put her hand down my pants and grabbed me in a firm grasp.  

"But my lips," she puckered. "They are good for sucking, no?"  They were.  Moist, full red Jolie lips, glistening in the moonlight, they were.  "Let me. Please."

[stop]

The Bali Diaries: The Animals For Miss Caulker

We’d stepped off into greatness, we had.  Straight off the plane, the swell was roaring.  Eight feet, ten feet, twelve feet.  Just epic.  Big boards at Padang.  No more EPS at the points I told myself as the Bill Johnson chattered off the bottom at Dang-Dang.  Fun boards at Dreamland.  Left-hand racers, and beers, and a beautiful Polish woman and noodles make that place heaven.

The Bali Diaries: The Bali Bums

We wake up here, now, with nothing more before us.  It’s a strange feeling after two days of just one more step.  Two more legs of the flight.  One more Ambien.  Three more hours in Singapore.  One more purchase at the airport.  One more airplane meal.  One more security check.  A cab ride, a homestay, a mo-ped.  One more meal at Yeye’s.  A surf, a shower without soap, and a quiet night out.  

The bed’s hard and thin, just softer than a box spring I take it, and my neck offers a chime of complaint on both sides today in the early light.  But still, we’re here.  The morning’s all clouds and cricket calls and sticky sweat that’s not really sweat, but a moist film on the skin and everywhere.  On the tile floor, on the desk, on the door.  Humidity is Bali’s blanket, and we, her weary travelers.  I want to surf my brains out.  But first, a good stretch.