September Update
Blok M update, September 2003
Status report
It’s been a busy, bustling month down the Blok, as the guys and their families return to Jakarta from their holidays and the kiddiewinks prepare for the start of their new school term. D’s Place is humming most nights, albeit later than ever (lift-off is typically between 10 and 11pm), and Everest is reportedly doing very well – especially on its music nights and the recently-introduced ‘ladies night’. Sportsman too is thriving, but Oscars and Top Gun seem to be still drifting in the doldrums.
On a sourer note, one of the revelling fraternity has had a nasty run-in with the staff at Lintas Melawai, one of whom turned belligerent and aggressive for no apparent reason (and certainly without provocation). As it’s reported to me, the LM management ignored both the event and a subsequent complaint. To mix metaphors, this is yet another nail in the coffin of the LM saga. So if you do decide to go to the place, be well aware that you’re on your own if trouble starts.
D’s ‘sexiest dressed girl’ competition
The latest innovation from the management is a Saturday night ‘sexiest dressed girl’ competition. And very successful it’s been, for two weeks on the trot – indeed, the only problem is that it’s been too successful, with many of the girls desperately trying to outdo each other by wearing diaphanous gauze tops with nothing on underneath, and slinky translucent skirts that leave very little to the imagination. click here to see pictures in the gallery
One dear girl goes right over the top, appearing in what might best be described as a skimpy off-the-shoulder neoclassical white gauze drape, the shortest of white skirts, and a headpiece resembling a crocheted bushranger’s hat that’s been badly mauled by some ferocious animal and then run over by a heavy truck. I say to my neighbour, who hasn’t yet clapped eyes on this vision of loveliness, ‘Don’t miss the one who looks like a nymphomaniac Little Bo Peep’.
One of the winners – who is exceptionally well-endowed in the mammary department – is wearing a particularly revealing top. ‘Are they for real?’ gasps a fellow-reveller, when his pulse and blood-pressure have returned to something like normal. By way of reply the Reveller quotes Shakespeare – ‘T’were excellent well done, if nature did all’. When she collects her prize, the Reveller rather naughtily comments that she won on points.
One of the girls is wearing a shiny red mock-leather mini-two-piece number, with matching thigh-length buckled boots. ‘All that’s missing is a whip and handcuffs’, the Reveller whispers to his stunned neighbour.
Flying lessons
En route for the Blok one Friday evening the hapless Reveller is knocked off his bike by a rogue bajay and takes a spectacular flight into the air and onto the road. No serious injury being sustained he picks himself up, checks the bike for damage, and continues his journey Blokwards. After all, duty is duty.
However, the ribs are bruised and this makes lateral movement excruciatingly painful – a tragic affliction for one who particularly enjoys his horizontal entertainment. So being – in a very literal sense – grounded for a few days, the Reveller spends his hours passively watching the action in D’s Place and chatting with his ever-consoling friends, whose mistaken belief that a copious intake of alcohol is the best cure for all physical ailments the Reveller does nothing to disabuse.
Memorable moments – the Reveller’s retrospective
Whilst convalescing after the bike accident one of my old friends and I are reminiscing about our early experiences on the Blok. After swapping yarns for half an hour or so, he urges me to write mine up as part of my Blok M scribbles – so here they are.
Looking back, it now seems incredible that I lived for almost a year in Jakarta without knowing about the existence of the bars and discos of Blok M. One day, a good friend of mine who is a casual visitor to the Blok suggests that we go down together for a pint and a shufti, so off we venture one fine Friday evening.
Driving into Jalan Pelatehan, my first reaction is that it’s so ordinary, shabby and run-down. Is this really the legendary home of the fabled flesh-pots and all-night discos?
We stroll down the road to Top Gun, which seems a bit forlorn and dead from the outside. Culture shock is too mild an expression for what I experience as we push open the door – I’m staggered to meet a solid wall of noisy, jostling, debauched humanity. Instinct quickly takes over however, and I apply the techniques that I learnt in Yugoslavia for getting onto crowded trams in the rush-hour – a couple of minutes later I’m at the bar, quaffing the first of a myriad beers and goggling in wonder at the young ladies. I’ve led a fairly sheltered life until this moment, which – it turns out – is my epiphany.
An hour later, one slightly inebriate and very happy camper is hauled out of the bar by three gorgeous young ladies who, in true Jakarta fashion, have offered me a ‘diskon’ – take two, and the third comes free. And that, gentle reader, is the loss of innocence and the birth of the Reveller.
It’s one o’clock in the morning, and Top Gun, like some antiquated clockwork timepiece, is slowly winding down. Fortunately there’s no Indonesian equivalent of ‘Time, gentlemen, please’, but it’s clear from the suppressed yawns of the bar staff and their yearning glances at the door that the same message is being communicated to the straggling revellers who either have nowhere else to go, or are in no fit condition to go anywhere. As those who can walk in a relatively straight line stagger out with their mates leaning on them for support, I am reminded of the wounded soldiers in that famous painting by Adolf Northern, ‘Napoleon’s Retreat from Moscow’.
In a moment of mental aberration I ask the girls I’ve been chatting with if anyone would like a lift home, and a chorus of voices from around the bar cry out in unison, ‘yes, please!’. Being a soft-hearted kind of guy I can’t say no to any of them, so I gallantly reply ‘OK girls, let’s go’. Opening all the doors of my Blazer, in they pour – giggling and hitching up their skirts as they scramble aboard. A quick head-count shows that there are at least twelve of the sweet things wedged into the seats and the rear luggage space – possibly more – so off we go to Buncit.
As we pull up at the traffic lights in Prapanca they open the windows and the upper section of the rear door and lean out, laughing and screaming for all they’re worth. A couple of cops look on in bemused bewilderment – obviously trying to think up some spurious traffic offence from which they can extort a bit of merokok from me – and a straggling pedestrian creases himself with laughter at this crazy vignette. After discharging my human cargo in the nether depths of Buncit I drive off to kisses, waves, and yells of thanks from the darlings.
Of the many navigation hazards in Jalan Pelatehan – cracked and buckled pavements, brick-strewn gutters, pot holes in the road, piles of rubbish being the static ones – none can beat the rats. One night I stagger out of Pentagon somewhat the worse for wear, stretch my arms, breath in the night air, and prepare to move on down to Oscars. As I step out onto the pavement something squelches under my foot, and an unholy shriek – like something out of a Hammer horror film – pierces the air. An enormous, vicious-looking rat scuttles from under my foot, glares malevolently at me with its beady little eyes, then shakily dives for cover into its lair beneath a dislocated paving stone.
One seriously gloomy and overcast night, while I’m happily pouring Bintangs down my parched gullet in Top Gun, Nature is doing much the same thing outside to Jalan Pelatehan. Deciding to head for the dark enticing depths of Pentagon just across the road, I blithely ignore the warnings of the gang near the door that it’s raining outside, and step out into a nightmare. The street is completely flooded, and all manner of evil things are bobbing and swirling in the murky waters. The scene is an unholy collage of a Canaletto painting and a set from Blade Runner.
A group of girls are standing forlornly tight up against the wall, trapped between the Devil of Top Gun and the Deep Blue Sea of Jalan Pelatehan. In a chivalrous – but totally misguided – fit of gallantry, I take my shoes and socks off, roll up my trouser legs, and sweeping up one of the girls carry her across the road to Pentagon. It occurs to me somewhere mid-stream that I must look like some ghastly reincarnation of Charon ferrying the souls of the dead across the River Styx. Three girls later, we are all snugly ensconced in Pentagon, revelling the night away.
When I first knew my girlfriend she wore wigs in a stunning variety of exotic styles, all of them long hair jobs. One evening I’m propping up the bar in Top Gun when a stunningly beautiful girl walks up to me, smiling invitingly. I look behind me, thinking she’s greeting someone else, but no – it’s for me. She looks strangely familiar, but I can’t put a name to the face. Then one of the girls at the bar, in a stage-whisper, elbows me and tells me it’s my girlfriend – and sure enough it is, but minus a wig and sporting her own short hair. After that fiasco, the dear thing grows her hair long and gives up wearing wigs.
I finish a despairingly mediocre game of pool in Top Gun and return to my coterie at the table for liquid sustenance. A tequila is waiting for me, so I sprinkle the salt on my hand and sling back the golden nectar. Licking the salt, it suddenly hits me that something is not quite right as a stinging, burning sensation wallops my palate and my tongue feels as though it’s been inserted into an electric toaster. My eyes streaming with tears and my nasal cavity feeling as though it’s just been sand-blasted, it dawns on me that the dozy buggers have mistakenly given me the pepper pot instead of the salt cellar.
Feeling a bit depressed and not my usual cheerful self one evening in D’s Place, I decide – perhaps a little ill-advisedly – to drink my way out of the doldrums. Now this is about as irresponsible as a government trying to buy its way out of a recession by stimulating domestic demand and turning on the credit taps.
After a healthy skinful of beer I switch to red wine, but the stuff comes out of a crowd-pleaser sized flagon on which there is a lurid label with a hyperbolic blurb that inspires confidence in neither the origins nor the quality of the contents. The wine tastes like liquid sandpaper that’s been soaked in vinegar, and the bouquet reminds me of one of the milder proprietary paint-strippers. Being a stingy sod I don’t want to waste an expensive glass of wine, so I decide to fortify it with a dose of Scotch whisky. This is not, perhaps, in retrospect a terribly wise thing to have done.
Again, economy wins over prudence as I order a glass of beer, drink the top third, then slop in the wine/whisky mix. After drinking this witches’ brew I feel a little queasy, and go home in a mild stupor. The next morning is best not mentioned.
Before it was killed off by a lethal mix of greed and stupidity, Pentagon was a favourite haunt of the late-night reveller. On my first memorable visit there I head – as one does – straight for the toilets, to recycle the beer from Top Gun. An amazing sight meets my eyes – one of the urinals has been ripped out with Herculean force, leaving fragments of cement, plaster and bits of eviscerated piping dangling loosely from the wall.
Goodness only knows what demonic impulse led to this frenzied lobotomy of the toilet. And why has it been left in such a state? Perhaps as a memento mori for sozzled revellers, some metaphysical statement about life, the universe and everything.
It’s one of those indelible memories, the evening of Soeharto’s downfall and resignation. A thundery, showery night succeeds a heavy and overcast day, and Top Gun is packed with revellers celebrating the momentous events of the day. I sit at the bar downing my eighth – or is my ninth, or tenth – beer, when my handphone rings. After what feels like an eternity of aphasic muttering to a distant echoing voice, it finally dawns on me that I’m talking to a radio producer in London, from the ‘Radio Five Live’ channel. The chap wants to interview me about the day’s events, and peoples’ reactions to it all. Well, I tell him, you’ve got the right guy in the right place at the right time. I ask him to hold on, as the place is getting thunderously loud, and I stagger out of the bar.
Sitting in my car outside Top Gun with the rain pounding on the roof, I proceed to talk – live – to heaven knows how many million avid listeners throughout England. Being more than a little uninhibited after so much ale, goodness knows what I said – to this day I have no memory whatsoever of the content of my ten-minute oration. As an employee of a governmental organisation, I am of course bound by all sorts of caveats and limitations on what I’m supposed to say – and not say – to the media, and I almost certainly rewrite the rule book that night.
But like all good stories, this one has a happy ending. My seniors in London are apparently very happy with the performance, and I receive warm congratulations for saying things of which I still don’t have the slightest recollection.
In the aftermath of the bike incident my thoughts take a philosophical turn. As a student I used to sit through interminable, boring lectures asking myself of what earthly relevance, what real-world application, is all this philosophy stuff? Well, after living in Jakarta for a few years, and frequenting Blok M as often as I do, a lot of it now seems to make sense.
One night I’m sitting in the corner next to the disco floor, and from my angle the girls are in silhouette against the wall mirrors with the light pulsing behind them like some demonic bonfire. The mirrors throw back kaleidoscopic images of the lights and the girls, making a Dantean vision of vibrant shapes, colours and shadows.
Hypnotized by the pulsing vibrancy of the scene, it reminds me of a passage in Plato’s Republic in which he invokes the image of people casting flickering shadows on the wall of a cave, from a fire that’s burning brightly in the entrance. Plato uses this image to remind his audience that we can never see things as they really are, we only see the ephemeral shadows on the cave wall – which we have to interpret as best we can.
This morose Nordic philosopher had more hang-ups than a psychiatric ward, but he made shrewd and penetrating observations about life and religion that go under the general banner of existentialism. One of his tenets is that we are personally responsible for our actions, and that we define ourselves by the accumulation of the decisions that we make. In particular, he talks about a ‘leap into faith’, the essential jump from the known to the unknown in accepting religious belief.
It strikes me as I sit in the empty upstairs bar in D’s Place, in that hallowed hour between eight and nine, that taking one of the girls is an existential decision. We have to believe that she’ll be as charming in a romantic embrace as she is sitting next to us in the bar, that she’ll come up to our expectations, and will make for a pleasantly memorable experience.
One night I sit watching the disco and ask myself what kind of chimera it is that I’m observing. As a group the girls seem to take on a different dimension, to acquire the amoeba-like quality of a single organism.
Berkeley, bless his cotton socks, provides an answer – he expounds the belief that everything exists in the mind, and that a physical ‘thing’ is merely a recurrent group of sense qualities.
‘Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains’ wrote this revolutionary French philosopher whose thinking lies at the very root of modern views on society, and the importance we attach to each individual – no matter how humble – in the social structure.
Thinking about the girls and their humble origins, many from impoverished kampongs and the poorer quarters of this country’s great cities, I reflect with admiration on their gritty determination to haul themselves out of the poverty trap and make new and better lives – in Rousseau’s terms, to rewrite their social contract.
