By pure, insane coincidence—and it’s still difficult to believe—there happened to be a policeman in the office on the day that Wyan pulled the knife. I have a sneaking suspicion that Nick’s wife may have organised this. She happened to be making a statement to the policeman at the time and she is an intelligent woman who is very protective of her husband. However I have no proof of this and when I asked Nick about it later he said he had no idea the policeman was in the building.
Either way, I have never been so glad to see a Balinese policeman in my life.
The policeman was in a back office all along. He had been brought in to solve the problem of pilfering and must have heard the commotion. The policeman pushed through the group and charged at Wyan, grabbing Wyan’s knife hand. He had a gun but didn’t pull it; it was probably a blessing, who knows who he would have shot. He took Wyan’s knife hand firmly in his grip, stepped behind him and placed an arm about his bull neck.
Wyan stared at us, an animal deprived of his prey. He lunged forward and the policeman struggled to hold him back. The policeman screamed at Wyan in Balinese. I don’t know what he said but it seemed to make him relax. The tension left Wyan’s body and he slumped slightly, the policeman twisted Wyan’s arm behind his back, shoving it up high. Wyan let the knife fall and it clunked to the ground. I stared at it and again wondered at the damage it would have done to a body. The policeman pulled Wyan backwards and pushed him through the front door, then loosened his grip, spun Wyan around and spoke to him harshly. Almost immediately Wyan’s head slumped into his neck; he looked like an oversized child receiving a scolding.
When the policeman finished he turned his back on Wyan and marched back into the office. As soon as he was safely inside Nick screamed, “Somebody lock that fucking door!” And somebody did.
Wyan stumbled a few steps towards his motorbike then turned and raised his muscled arms above his head like a gorilla. He screamed at us through the window, climbed on his bike, and left.
We let out a collective sigh of relief. We would find out later that Wyan had spent the night smoking shabu-shabu and that he had planned to take his revenge for getting caught in the truck scam by stabbing someone.
Wyan’s uncle, Rap, told us this, and when asked why he hadn’t warned anybody Rap said that he was afraid Wyan would kill him if he said anything.
We all thought it was over, even Dave came out from behind his desk. Everyone spoke at a hundred miles an hour trying to put the bizarre events into some sort of perspective.
It was an odd scene and one that was about to get even weirder. Wyan’s motorbike suddenly screamed back into the carpark and he rode up to the front door of the office. We all panicked. “Keep that door locked,” Nick demanded, but he had no control over the policeman, who promptly walked over to the door and opened it.
Nick and I stood together and I heard him mumble, “Oh fuck.” I felt the same way but I didn’t say anything, I was too nervous.
The policeman stood in the door frame and exchanged a few words with Wyan, then turned and spoke to one of the staff in Indonesian. Nick must have understood the Indonesian. “Do not give him the knife. You will not give him the knife!” he yelled at the staff member. The staff member looked from Nick to the policeman and there was an obvious conflict, his boss had told him not to do something while an Indonesian policeman had told him to do it.
Nick screamed again but the policeman grunted and held out his hand. The staff member picked up the knife and handed it over and the policeman then passed the knife to Wyan.
Nick shook his head in disgust. “Fuck me,” he muttered, and I almost laughed. I guess he thought the policeman had decided to side with Wyan. In the end we needn’t have worried, the policeman spoke to Wyan who got back on his bike and left.
The policeman walked back into the office and he must have seen our shocked faces because he looked around, smiled and then said in English: “Don’t worry he gone now. He just wanted his knife back.”
There was nervous laughter all round, then Dave piped up: “Only in fucking Bali would they hand the knife back to the assailant.”
There was no work done that day or for the next few days. Nick shut down the office and Dave, Nick and I went to the pub and got smashingly drunk.
Dave phoned his wife who had connections in the army, and she organised for a solider to be posted in front of the office for the next month. When Dave hung up the phone he joked, “Only in Bali would you have to hire security to protect yourself from your own security.” It was to become Dave’s catchphrase, but I couldn’t fault the honesty of the statement.
Nick would meet Wyan again face to face so he could sack him. By all accounts everything went well, but I thought it was a crazy, brave, thing to do.
Nick told me later that Wyan had asked him why he was being sacked and he’d answered, “Wyan, you pulled a knife in my office and you threatened to kill me and my staff.”
Apparently Wyan’s reply was: “I’m a security guard, I’m supposed to carry a knife.”
The Wyan problem was soon solved. Made was connected to a Balinese gang based in Singaraja, his brother was high up in the gang and considered to be a very dangerous man. The brother sent down a few thugs to threaten Wyan and Wyan and his gang backed down from a proposed confrontation. Again you just never know who you are dealing with in Bali.
From that point on Nick made it policy not to hire gangs into our company. We’d learnt from our mistake but we still had two gang members in our employ. Rap stayed with the company for a while but he was eventually caught with two prostitutes in one of our villas and was promptly let go.
One final gang member was harder to get rid of. He made numerous threats against Nick and our company and even tried to recruit Wyan against us. Luckily Wyan didn’t like him and he used the information to get back in our good books. We got rid of him only when another company came to us about poaching him and we gladly let him go.
Eventually the trouble passed and we were able to get to a stage where we didn’t need army or police protection. We no longer have security in the form of muscle and we now prefer to use connected lawyer types—a dangerous game in itself.
To this day I still see expat businessmen hiring gang thugs to work for their companies. I guess there is some sort of allure in being seen with gang members and there is, of course, the safety issue of doing business in Bali, but this is not a good course of action. Gangs are gangs and these guys are criminals and they are very dangerous—we learned this the hard way.
Yank the Yank
Living in Bali can be a little like experiencing Chinese water torture. Things happen every day that annoy you, they build and build and eventually you crack. This happens to all expats and it doesn’t matter how calm a person you are.
Even the most experienced Bali hands still get ripped off. I have lived in Bali a long time and I still get ripped off on a daily basis. Nowadays I just realise it faster and ignore it more.
The other day, I went to buy a mirror for my motorbike. When I went to pay, I asked the mechanic how much it cost and the mechanic replied “Tiga puluh”, slang for Rp30,000.
The cashier shook her head, however, and said, “Tidak. Enam puluh. Bule!” (“No. Rp60,000, he’s a white man.”) The mechanic nodded his head in agreement with her.
The cashier didn’t realise I spoke a little Indonesian and I knew she had doubled my price because I’m white. I argued with her and got the price down but that was not important, I still had to come up with the energy to argue and I knew I might go through the same thing a number of times that day. The problem is that when you get ripped off on a regular basis—up to three or four times a day—it starts to wear thin.
Living and working in Indonesia can be incredibly frustrating. There is an endless list of complaints that I could put forward: people push in, cut you off in traffic, diddle bills, etc, but the truth is it is not my country and I choose to live here. I also believe that living in Bali offers numerous
advantages and that I’m incredibly lucky to have been given the opportunity to live here. My point is though, when four or five of these things happen in one day, when ten or fifteen of these things happen in one week, or when fifty or sixty of these things happen in one month, expats inevitably explode.
Every expat does this and they have different ways of expressing it but it happens on a regular basis. One friend found himself spending the night in jail because he chased down a dog with a BB gun after it tried to bite his daughter one too many times. Stupidly he chased the dog into the owner’s yard and the owner had him arrested.
Another friend pushed an Indonesian barman into a swimming pool because he over-charged him. This was bad behaviour and I don’t condone it, but whereas a two-week tourist might not have noticed or bothered with the over-charge, an expat will. This expat had spent hundreds of dollars in the same bar and had been ripped off by the same barman countless times … eventually he just snapped.
I have watched expats stand and scream in the middle of busy streets, I have watched them explode irrationally at waiters or hotel staff, and I have watched them wipe off whole tables because a bill is wrong. These are instances of overreaction and rude behaviour but what is generally the case is that a collection of negative occurrences have built up over time and the expat has just been pushed too far.
As recently as a month ago an expat associate was sitting in a bar when a young girl asked him to buy bracelets for the hundredth time. The expat told the girl he would buy a bracelet if she gave him a receipt. This was a stupid and demeaning thing to say, and I personally would have acted differently, but his defence was that the same girl had bothered him every day over a three-month period.
An Australian girl with an Indonesian boyfriend happened to be sitting in the same bar. She overheard the expat and called him a cruel fucking idiot. The expat told her in no uncertain terms to mind her own business. The Australian girl then prompted her Indonesian boyfriend to get his gang together and they beat the expat and his two friends with bricks and motorcycle helmets.
The expats were in their sixties while the gang and the Australian girl were in their twenties but apparently the Australian girl felt they deserved the beating. She egged her boyfriend on and gave the expats a serve-you-right mouthful when she left.
The expats that I spoke to felt that the Australian girl should live in Bali for a year and then evaluate if what was said to the girl was cruel. You can be the judge as to who was in the wrong, and perhaps you would say everyone, but the fact is stuff like this happens all the time.
Expats do act stupidly, and spitefully, towards Indonesians, and for the most part it is because they get sick of being scammed or taken advantage of. I am not saying this is the correct course of action, I don’t believe it is, but it does happen.
The other thing expats do is fight each other. Exasperation at the system, the country or the people builds and rather than take it out on the local populace these expats harbour their frustrations. Sometimes these expats meet and two time-bombs collide.
I must have had a bad day, week or month on the particular occasion when I lost my cool but luckily I chose a deserving bastard to lose it on.
Wade is a conman. He survives by befriending tourists then, after qualifying that their stay in Bali is short, he borrows money from them. Unsuspecting tourists hand over the cash, a meeting is set for the following day, then Wade disappears until the tourists leave Bali. This is one of Wade’s scams and I know there are more, but I’m using this one as an explanation because I have been given verification that he has done this on a number of occasions.
I have never had much time for Wade. When I first came to Bali I heard a story about him that convinced me to keep my distance.
Billy, my brother, is the kind of guy that likes to get amongst it. He would much prefer to live the same way as the locals than be stuck with a group of expats.
Long before I came to live in Bali, Wade and Billy lived in the same complex, which consisted of ten kosts, or apartments, that surrounded a large grass area. Wade’s kost happened to be a few doors down from Billy’s but the two didn’t socialise.
One night Billy woke to a girl screaming and he went to investigate. The screams happened to be coming from Wade’s kost. Billy walked up the front steps of the kost and banged on the door. Wade answered the door drunk and berated Billy for disturbing him. Billy looked past Wade and saw an Indonesian girl in the corner. She was sobbing and it was obvious from her injuries that she’d been beaten.
Billy grabbed Wade by the scruff of the neck, dragged him down his stairs, threw him onto the grass then challenged Wade to hit him the same way he had hit the girl. Wade remained on the ground and refused to fight.
Billy left Wade and walked into his house, he collected the beaten girl and carried her back to his home. Billy’s Indonesian wife cared for the girl until the morning and the next day Billy and his wife helped her get home to her village. Wade moved out of the compound soon after the event.
When I first came to live in Bali, Billy told me this story and pointed Wade out to me. For obvious reasons I wanted nothing to do with the guy. Wade is American and and his face is pockmarked with very bad acne scars but because I had only seen him from a distance, I was unaware of his skin problems. When I had my run-in with him he was in his mid-thirties, stocky and fit.
Billy and I decided to walk from Kuta beach to Poppies One for a beer. Halfway to our destination, Billy dragged me into a roadside bar that just happened to be Wade’s hangout. We sat at a table a metre off the road and ordered a beer.
Not long after, Wade rode up on his motorbike. I do not know what sort of relationship Billy and Wade had after the incident at the kost but Wade seemed comfortable enough to stop. Billy introduced me to Wade and I got up from the table and shook his hand. It was then that I noticed his acne scars.
Wade looked sick, like he had caught some weird tropical facial disease. I didn’t mean to offend him but I asked, “Are you alright, what’s wrong with your face?”
Wade didn’t seem to take it well. “I’m going to join you,” he said, then went and parked his motorbike. When he returned to the table he looked at Billy and asked. “Did you hear what he just said to me?”
Billy shrugged, “No.” He didn’t have much time for Wade.
I realised my mistake. I didn’t care if I hurt Wade’s feelings but I didn’t want a confrontation. I stuck out my hand again, “Look mate, I’m sorry. Your face is scarred and I thought you were sick, it was an honest mistake.”
Wade refused to shake my hand. He ordered a beer, walked around the table and sat beside me. He put his face close to mine and fixed me with an angry stare. “Why did you say that to me?” he asked.
I sensed Wade was trying to intimidate me. I held his gaze but my chair backed onto the step leading to the road. If Wade had swung at me I would have toppled backwards; I was in a vulnerable position. “Hey mate, I said I’m sorry, OK. I didn’t mean anything by it, I genuinely thought you were sick.”
Wade took a sip on his beer and continued to stare. “What’s your problem, mate?” he asked.
I laughed, hoping it would ease the tension, “Listen mate, there is not much more I can do. I have apologised, alright.”
I smiled at him and moved my chair forward an inch. “I’m not laughing at your face, it’s just when Americans say mate it sounds stupid,” I replied. “No offence, maaate.”
Wade squared his shoulders. “Fucking Aussies,” he snarled, and continued to try and menace me. He picked up my cigarette packet and took out a smoke, then used my lighter. “There are too many fucking Aussies in Bali. You fucking Aussies think you own Bali.”
I leaned forward and held his gaze. I’d had enough. “Listen mate, I will make this simple. Don’t take my cigarettes, don’t try and intimidate me, and as for Australians taking over countries, take a look at your own country.”
Billy interrupted. He reached across the table and of
fered his hand to Wade. “No more,” he said, and waited for Wade to accept the handshake.
Wade took Billy’s hand; he twisted his hand over and strained to dominate the grip. Billy locked his wrist.
Billy and Wade stared at each other. They had their own battle of wills and I could see the hatred in Wade’s eyes. I guessed he hadn’t forgotten the night at the kost. Wade tightened his grip and yanked Billy towards him. Billy gave a little then then yanked back hard.
Wade flew forward and caught himself on the table. He gripped the edge and gave his best pull. Billy didn’t flinch; he yanked back with his considerable strength and pulled Wade across the table.
Wade let go of Billy’s hand and pushed himself up. “What the fuck, dude?” he asked.
Billy stared him down. “You want to make trouble, fucker?” he asked.
Wade puffed out his chest and pointed a finger at Billy, “What are you going to fucking do, man?”
I had seen and heard enough, Billy and I had been having a quiet drink and Wade had invited himself over. Maybe Wade was having a bad day but he was certainly trying to make trouble, he’d tried to intimidate me and he was trying to intimidate my little brother. Billy can handle himself, and he does not need me to stick up for him, but I’d had just about as much as I was going to take from the obnoxious American.
I didn’t like Wade, I didn’t like that he hit women and I didn’t like how he made his living. I admit that what I did next wasn’t really fair but to be honest I just thought, fuck it.
“Hey, Wade,” I called out.
Wade turned to me with a snarl on his face, “What the fuck do you—”
I didn’t give Wade a chance to finish. I wacked him and I wacked him hard. He flew backwards, and down he smashed through the wooden chair he’d been sitting on moments before.
I knew I had committed myself. Wade was younger, bigger, fitter and stronger than me. He also lived in Bali and I didn’t want any retribution. I had set myself on a course of action and I knew I had to make a good example, so I followed Wade down and threw punches all the way.
Bali Raw Page 14
