Barbarian Days

by William Finnegan

  The sun came back out. The mud in the bay cleared up.

  I caught a ride into Teluk Dalam on the back of a motorbike. I had heard that there was a shop in town with a generator and an icebox. I found the shop, and put two large bottles of Bintang, the Indonesian version of Heineken, in the icebox. I wandered around town, sent Sharon a telegram reconfirming our plans to meet. Then, when the beers were cold, I packed them in sawdust and raced back to Lagundri. I presented them to Bryan on the second-floor balcony, still icy. I thought he might weep with joy. I nearly did. Few things in my life have tasted better than those beers. Even we were speechless.

  Everything had a valedictory feel. Bryan asked me to take a picture of him “for the grandkids.” He stood on the beach with his board, looking mock-heroically into the sunset. He was wearing a sarong, which everybody, including both local men and foreigners, normally did, but Bryan normally didn’t.

  The surf got good again. But it always seemed to be late afternoon, the golden hour. On our last evening, without any discussion, Bryan and I took off on a wave together—something we never did. We rode for a while, then straightened off and rode the whitewater on our bellies, side by side, across the reef, giving each other a fist bump as we glided into the shallows.

  • • •

  SINGAPORE WAS A SHOCK after three months in Indonesia. It was so orderly, rich, and clean. Sharon, when we met at the airport, was shocked by how aggressive Bryan and I were with cabdrivers and street porters. I tried to explain that we were suffering from post-Indonesia stress syndrome, and didn’t know how to act around people who weren’t trying to haggle us into the ground. It was true, but she seemed unconvinced.

  Our hotel room was air-conditioned. Sharon had brought an old-fashioned nightgown, elaborate, white, with a Victorian number of small buttons down the front. The gown could be simply thrown off upward, but the buttons were genius.

  Bryan went to Hong Kong to see friends, and we stole off to Ko Samui, an island in the Gulf of Thailand, where we stayed in a bungalow on the beach. It was quiet, lovely, Buddhist, cheap. (Later, I heard, hundreds of hotels got built there. At the time it was just fishermen and coconut farmers.) There were no waves, no electricity, good snorkeling. Sharon, fresh from Northern California, seemed a bit dazed by rural Southeast Asia—the ferocious heat, implacable insects, the lack of creature comforts. And yet she was in high spirits: relieved to have finished her doctorate, happy to have flown the academic coop. When we first met, she had been a Chaucer specialist, but she had ended up writing a dissertation on the samurai figure in recent American fiction. “The latitudes of tolerance are immense,” she liked to say, quoting Philip K. Dick—referring here to her flexible dissertation advisers, there to arcane sexual practice, and most often to a general philosophical effort to comprehend the unfamiliar. She had deep reserves of adaptability herself, and a kind of romantic interest in preindustrial life that I knew well, although in me, I realized, it had faded. I was glad, and very grateful, she had come. She announced that she was keen to go to the hill country in northern Thailand, and to Burma—Rangoon, Mandalay—and she said yes to Sumatra and Nias. Her skin began to lose its fogbound pallor. Her laugh kicked back in—that high-low laugh, with its throaty, theatrical ending that drew you in.

  I felt somewhat lost, truth be known. After Indonesia, I found the absence of hassling, the unbegrudged privacy on Ko Samui, unnerving. There was almost too much time and space in which to concentrate on each other. I was accustomed—deeply accustomed, by that point—to a different type of companionship. Also to constantly chasing waves, or at least slogging toward them. So this was my new life. We were both being careful—if anything, too polite. But we had brought a bottle of whiskey from Singapore, and when we broke that open we got more reckless. I had changed, apparently, become leaner and darker, and not just physically. I was more measured, even reserved, which Sharon found discomfiting. She, meanwhile, made pronouncements I found annoying. “These people have a very special love for children,” she said one day, watching a family pass down a dirt track. It was a sweet, or at least an innocuous, thing to say, but it gave me heartburn. She seemed to mean the Thai people—all forty-six million of them, perhaps three of whom she had met. It was just a style problem, I told myself. I had been speaking a different language—more cutting, ironic, masculine, permanently on guard against sounding silly—for a long time. I was fluent in that dialect, which had its lecherous crudities. I just needed to learn, or relearn, a new shared language. Sharon demanded to know why I got so particular with her—“hypercritical” might have been the word she wanted—after she had a few drinks. Was I so intolerant with Bryan when he got tipsy? The answer was no. So I bit my tongue when I had mean thoughts. It didn’t help that I was feeling vaguely unwell. I had been felled briefly in Singapore by another fever, which a doctor had said was malaria. It must have been a mild case, I figured, when the symptoms passed. Sharon urged me to eat more rice and noodles. I was all ropy muscle. A body needed some fat reserves. And it was lovely, I realized, to have somebody looking after me, looking at me, like that.

  We headed to Bangkok, where we reconvened with Bryan, staying in a big, seedy place called the Station Hotel. The city was hot, chaotic, exciting, exhausting, with bright river taxis racing up and down the canals, stunning Buddhist temples, great street satay, and a rather European-looking palace. An impressive amount of drug consumption and petty drug trafficking seemed to be taking place at our hotel, among both Westerners and Asians. The presence of multiple criminal underworlds was palpable in certain quarters of Bangkok. I had a couple of assignments from Tracks—pieces about Indonesia beyond Bali—and I worked on those. Bryan’s byline would also be on them—Australian youth expected no less—after he gave my copy a light edit. But the fees would be meager, whenever they found us, and I was increasingly worried about money. With an income tax refund received, incredibly, from that worker’s paradise, Australia, I had just over a thousand dollars. Sharon had less than that. A cherubic German hustler in Sibolga, Sumatra, had offered to buy all my traveler’s checks for sixty cents on the dollar—all I had to do, he said, was report them stolen and I would get a complete refund—and I now wished I had thought more seriously about doing it. The Station Hotel had more Asia Trail hustlers per square foot than any place we’d been. Maybe I could sell my traveler’s checks here. Bryan and Sharon both rejected the idea. It was risky and wrong and I would be out of my league. All true, of course. But our stints as illegal alien laborers in Oz had worked out well, had they not?

  The news was full of a humanitarian crisis on the Thai-Cambodian border. The Vietnamese army had driven the Khmer Rouge from power early that year, and a large number of refugees had been driven over the border. The Khmer Rouge had gone back to the bush and had forces in the same area, fighting the Vietnamese and increasing the general misery. I found myself poring over maps and news stories, wondering what it would take to get down there as a relief-agency volunteer. It was only a day’s drive away. Two young Frenchwomen I met at a café were going. One was a photojournalist, the other a nurse. There would be no money in it for me, and I hadn’t broached the idea yet with Sharon, but she had read Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers—indeed, it was in her dissertation. The literary action was in Vietnam, or at least in its endlesss aftershocks. Amid this scheming and war dreaming, I made up my mind and went to the local American Express office, where I reported that I’d lost my traveler’s checks. The clerk who took my false report seemed skeptical, causing my mouth to go dry with fear, but the German hustler turned out to be right. I had a full refund in a day or two. Still, I had no idea what to do with the original checks, which were now hot goods. Defrauding American Express apparently seemed to me a fine, Robin Hood–ish thing to do. I was sticking it to a corporation that normally stuck it to everyone else. Indeed, it seemed wimpy compared with the derring-do of some of my literary idols. Dean Moriarty stole cars for kicks. William Burroughs! Brya
n and Sharon were unimpressed when I told them about my caper. They suggested I flush the old checks down a toilet if I didn’t want to end up in a Bangkok jail.

  All this went away the following night, in any event, when I ended up instead in a Bangkok hospital. It was an excellent little garden hospital, the best my friends could find. My memory of that night, and of the subsequent days, is watery and dim. I know I developed a high fever, began to rave, and was too weak to walk across a hotel room, let alone resist the decision to hospitalize me. I know I was horrified by the fanciness of the place they took me to—it was a clinic for foreign diplomats, apparently—but was told firmly to shut up. The doctor was German. She said that my blood was “black with malaria” and that I should be flown immediately to the United States. At that point, my friends hesitated. I was able to make my absolute opposition to such a drastic measure understood, and they were reluctant to overrule me. There was discussion of my survival chances, and of all the malaria cases the doctor had seen in forty years in Asia. They did not put me on a plane.

  Dark days ensued. Wild, aching fevers turned into rattling, arctic chills. I lost a startling amount of weight, bottoming out at 135 pounds. (I’m six foot two.) The old doctor—her name was Dr. Ettinger—was severe but kind. She said that I was a lucky boy and would survive. Small nurses gave me big shots in both hips. I was so listless that I did not leave my bed for a week. Paranoia and depression annexed my brain. I couldn’t bear to think about the unpayable bill that was mounting up. Bryan and Sharon came daily and entertained me with stories from the Bangkok beyond the quiet lawns and hedges I could see. But it was hard for me to laugh or smile. I felt lost, spiritually, and the growing suspicion that I was wasting my life came back with a vengeance. I wished my father would appear and give me some concrete, comprehensive advice. I would follow it to the letter. Not that I wanted my parents to know I was ill. And they didn’t know.

  Then Bryan stopped coming to visit. Sharon was vague about his reasons. He was meeting with some people. I decided that the two of them were sleeping together. I went over in my mind, many times, an incident at the Station Hotel. Bryan had been sitting in our room. Sharon was taking a shower. She had strolled out of the bathroom naked, and Bryan had bellowed and covered his eyes. She laughed and called him a prude, while he groaned and begged her to put something on and kept his eyes covered. At the time, I had thought it was funny. She knew she looked great nude, and she got a kick out of shocking him. They were good friends and she knew that under his macho bawdiness was a certain primness and a strict sense of boundaries. So she enjoyed teasing him. That was all. There was no sexual tension between them, I thought.

  But maybe I was wrong. Or maybe she was having her revenge on me for being a selfish jerk, leaving her hanging forever while I chased waves. Once, exasperated by my travels with Bryan, she had shocked me by saying, “Why don’t you two just fuck each other and get it over with?” It was so off the mark and, in its fatuous literalism, not like her. But how well did I really know her? How well, for that matter, did I know him? I had never told him she said that, but I could imagine his reply if I had—“Right on, Tom.” It was his go-to quip, which I alone understood, when the subject was male homosexuality. But I had misjudged my friends before, and had been sexually betrayed.

  The nights were the worst. I felt trapped in a tropical version of Goya’s Pinturas Negras. Ghouls seemed to surround my bed, their shadows on the walls. My headache filled the world. I couldn’t sleep. I knew, rationally, that Bryan and Sharon had done the right thing by bringing me here. They had probably saved my life. I was getting good care. But the bill was now so far beyond my means, I would be lucky if they—and did that mean the hospital? the U.S. embassy?—let me buy an air ticket home. I would return to the States in disgrace—penniless, my health broken, a failure.

  Late one night, long after visiting hours, Bryan showed up at my bedside. He was carrying a large shopping bag. He didn’t say a word. He turned the bag upside down and dumped its contents—many fat, dirty bundles of Thai baht, the local currency—on my lap. It was a lot of money. It would be enough to cover most, if not all, of my hospital bill, he said. He looked exhausted, triumphant, angry, a bit crazed.

  I never got the full story, but I got the gist from Sharon. Bryan, seeing that my situation was desperate, had looked through my bags in our room and found the checks I had reported lost. (I had long forgotten, in my delirium, that they existed.) Then he had gone out and sold them, for sixty cents on the dollar, to Chinese gangsters. It had not been a straightforward transaction. He had refused to hand over the goods until he had payment in full in hand. The whole thing had taken days, and had turned into the haggle to end all haggles. It was all totally unlike Bryan, from beginning to end, and yet he had prevailed. For the two of us, it was a full role reversal. He took a huge risk, freed me from the hospital, and in the process freed himself from me.

  • • •

  SHARON AND I did make it to Nias eventually. It was monsoon season by then, though, and the rains messed up the waves. There were also fifteen surfers in Lagundri, and the reason why was presented to me on arrival: a ravishing photo of the ravishing wave had appeared in an American surf magazine. The era of semisecrecy was over. Fifteen guys would soon be fifty guys. Many people in the village, including children, seemed to be sick. It was endemic malaria, the losmen owners said. People begging for random medicines was even less funny now. I was taking a new prophylaxis for malaria—two, in fact—and still hobbling from the big injections the little nurses had given me months before in Bangkok. There were a few days of good waves. I found I had regained enough strength to surf. The volleyball, guestbook, and watch were graciously received. But these little tokens of exchange now felt, to me, gruesomely beside the point.

  We pushed on, always edging west. We caught a ship from Malaysia to India, sleeping out on the deck. We rented a little house in the jungle in southwest Sri Lanka, paying twenty-nine dollars a month. Sharon was ostensibly quarrying articles from her dissertation. I resumed work on my novel. We got Chinese bicycles, and each morning I rode mine, board under arm, down a trail to the beach, where a decent wave broke most days. We had no electricity and drew our water from a well. Monkeys stole unguarded fruit. Sharon learned to make delectable curry from our landlady, Chandima. A madwoman lived across the way. She roared and howled day and night. The insects—mosquitoes, ants, centipedes, flies—were relentless. At a Buddhist monastery down the hill, young monks held rowdy parties, blasting taped music and banging on cowbells till dawn. I heard a lot of anti-Tamil talk—we were living in a Sinhalese district—but this was before the civil war.

  I wonder now if Sharon had any interest in my grand travel plan, or if she even knew what it was. It was corny, so I never mentioned it, my ambition to go, without too many shortcuts, around the world. I remember, back on the morning I left Missoula, telling a friend there. We were standing on the sidewalk, surrounded by dim snowy mountains, outside the café where she worked. That day, I said, I was heading west, to the coast. When I came back—pause for hokey effect—it would be from the east. She cocked her head and laughed and dared me to do it.

  Sharon was interested in Africa, so our notions were still in step. We kept going west. We looked for a ship to Kenya or Tanzania, but both countries required visas that weren’t available in Sri Lanka. We ended up flying to South Africa. In Johannesburg we bought an old station wagon and made our way to the coast at Durban. We car-camped down through Natal and the Transkei to Cape Town. I surfed. This was 1980, still the heyday of apartheid. I continued to do my informal interviews of randomly encountered people. Here those yielded great hauls of weirdness: inscrutable evasions from polite black workers and country folk; the most relaxed and profound racism from white fellow campers. Sharon and I were on a steep learning curve, reading Gordimer, Coetzee, Fugard, Breytenbach, Brinks—their unbanned work, anyway. Every surfer was white, which was no great surpr
ise. For the next leg of our rambles, we had a bold idea: a huge tack to the north, “Cape to Cairo,” overland. But we were running out of money.

  In Cape Town we heard that the local black schools suffered from a perennial shortage of teachers, and that the academic year was just beginning. Someone gave me a list of township schools. At the second school I visited, Grassy Park Senior Secondary, the principal, a blustery fellow named George Van den Heever, hired me on the spot. I would teach English, geography, and something called religious instruction, starting immediately. My students, who wore uniforms and ranged in age from twelve to twenty-three, seemed gobsmacked to find a clueless white American standing in their classroom, wearing brown plastic loafers from Sri Lanka and a three-dollar striped tie bought that morning at Woolworth’s, but they swallowed their doubts and called me “sir” and were for the most part helpful and kind.

  Sharon and I rented a room in a damp old turquoise house overlooking False Bay, on the Indian Ocean side of the Cape of Good Hope. The Cape Peninsula is a long, spindly finger pointing south at Antarctica. At the peninsula’s base—its north end—sits a spectacular high massif, and the city of Cape Town wraps itself around that. The north face of the massif is Table Mountain, which overlooks the city center. The black people of Cape Town had been banished en masse from the city to a scrubby wasteland to the east called the Cape Flats—one of apartheid’s signature acts of rabid and remorseless social engineering. Grassy Park was a “coloured” township on the Flats—a poor, crime-ridden community, and yet far less wretched than some of the shantytowns that surrounded it. We lived, by law, in a “white area.” Since Grassy Park was only a few miles from the False Bay coast, my commute actually wasn’t bad. Out in front of our dank mansion, there was a wide, shapeless beachbreak, which I surfed when I wasn’t too busy grading papers or planning lessons.