January Update
Blok M update, January 2005
January is shaping up well. No, not just well – exceedingly well. Numbers are significantly up compared to December, and the street’s humming most nights. The great surprise is that Top Gun is still riding a wave, going from strength to strength. So much so, in fact, that it’s once again the Reveller’s first port of call when he hits the Blok. A combination of dingy lighting, pleasant background music that’s easy on the ear, the justly-famous crappy pool table and the bubbly waitresses hit just the right note for an early evening recovery from the day’s strains and stresses. The staff still need a bit of house-training in the serving of Pernod and Tequila, but they’re getting there.
As always, the girls are the key to success. Top Gun did particularly well out of Sisters’ Week, and there’s now a bunch of particularly attractive and chatty Sweet Young Things milling around the place every night. As he tops up his Pernod one evening, the Reveller fervently hopes that whilst they’ve clearly got that dark feline beauty that sets Indramayu girls apart, they haven’t brought with them the disastrous inertness of their elder siblings. Time, he reflects, will tell.
Whilst eating down the Blok is never going to be one of the world’s great culinary experiences, you can always rely on getting a tasty bite at any time in any of the hostelries. Offerings range from the full three-course monty in Sportsmans to a plate of chips in Top Gun, a delicious Indian spread in My Bar to a plain old burger in D’s Place. (Everest is reported to offer good nosh these days, and Oscars has always had a reasonably good name for food – but the Reveller hasn’t eaten in these places for some time now, and so can’t comment from personal experience.)
The dividing line on the menu is quite clear-cut: nostalgia versus local. Yes, there’s leathery meat pies with anaemic gravy and lumpy mashed potatoes that will instantly transport you back to the good old days of school dinners and Lyons Corner House restaurants, fish and chips that’ll whisk you away to the greasy back-street chippy of your childhood, leaden shepherd’s pie just like mother used to make.
The local dishes are the old stalwarts such as nasi goreng [fried rice], mie goreng [fried noodles] and sop ayam [chicken soup], but you can get other mouthwatering dishes such as the Reveller’s all-time favourite sop buntut [oxtail soup]. The great thing about local food is that it’s light and tasty, perfect for a late-night snack to punctuate the carousing and line the stomach ready for the next onslaught of ale.
Now it’s a sad fact that eating in the bars can be an uncomfortable (and sometimes messy) business. Perched on a stool with no room to tuck your knees under the bar, eating anything other than finger food is just plain awkward – and damn nigh impossible if the bar is busy serving drinks. One reason that Sportsmans rules the roost when it comes to food is that you can sit down at a proper table and enjoy your meal in comfort, yet with all the ambience of the bar.
Top Gun used to have an excellent arrangement – a back bar with a choice of solid wooden tables to seat small groups, and traditional small tables for those who preferred them. They were all, alas, ripped out in the Dark Days of the pub’s decline. D’s Place used to have a couple of tables downstairs and upstairs where you could eat in comfort, but they were sacrificed to make room for a downstairs drinking/dancing area and the upstairs mini-disco platform. One answer to the question of why My Bar (which has an excellent menu and can serve up really delicious snacks and meals) doesn’t attract the dining customer is that the bar is a nightmare to eat at when the place is busy – and the low-slung coffee tables in the off-bar annex are equally disastrous, especially if you’re as tall as the Reveller.
The root of the problem is that some of the bars persist in trying to be all things to all men, ending up instead jacks of all trades and masters of none.
While the best brains in astrophysics search for the elusive answer to the age-old question of the origins of the universe – did it all start with one massive explosion, or is it in a constant state of creation of matter – the Reveller wraps his own gray cells around a similar problem in Blok M.
Chewing the fat in My Bar one evening, he surveys the scene while the place slowly fills up. As one stuck-up little madam struts past with her nose in the air, his mate gives her a nudge and puts on an air of mock mortification at being ignored by her. She sniffs, pouts disdainfully and turns away. He grins broadly. "Yes, there are basically two types of girl", considers his companion; "those that prefer one-night stands and try to screw as much out of you as possible and then pretend you don’t exist, and those that are happy to get the going rate and like a longer term fling."
This sets the Reveller to thinking about the survival value of each type. The first makes an occasional big killing, but the time between performances increases steadily as the word goes round that she’s a gold digger. So she works a carefully planned circuit that includes the Blok M bars, the better class hotels (if she’s got the contacts) and some of the non-bule expat night spots dotted around south Jakarta. She tends to be a loner, doesn’t have many friends because she’s got an inflated opinion of herself and rapidly acquires a reputation for being stuck up. And of course, she has to spend quite a bit of money on transport and drinks before there’s a punter even on the horizon.
The second type tends to be a regular of just two or three bars, usually on the Blok, and splits her time between them. She’s popular with the girls and well known to most of the guys, and enjoys chatting and flirting. Her aim is to get a regular boy friend, but she knows it could be a long haul and that she’ll have to kiss a lot of frogs before she finds one that turns into her prince. So she may not make a killing like her counterpart, but she quietly puts away a tidy sum each month.
The bottom line is that, as in the fable of the tortoise and the hare, slow and steady wins the race. True, one or two girls make frequent big killings and have the kind of income that the rest can only dream about, but they’re the exception that proves the rule. And, sadly, when the fall arrives they come a cropper because they’ve got few (if any) real friends. There’s a saying in the movie business: "Be careful who you tread on on your way up, because you’re sure to meet them on your way down".
Some of the bar owners in south Jakarta are reported to be in need of a change of underwear. The reason? Well, it seems that five of the Blok M bar owners are forming a breakaway Jalan Pelatehan pool league. Now under normal circumstances this announcement would be met with a resounding yawn or deafening silence – who the heck cares, as long as the guys can play pool? But the reason for the soiled knickers is that there’s gold in them there competitions. Sponsorship gold.
The Reveller hears that some of the primary sponsors are putting up very serious money indeed – one figure that’s been bandied about is two hundred million Rupiah from a single company. He also hears whispers that there’s been squabbling among the bar owners, but lips are sealed in a conspiracy of silence that would do the Mafia proud.
Another of the Reveller’s moles reports that the pool league’s committee meetings are increasingly pissing people off because of the inordinate amount of time spent discussing ball-crushingly trivial items. Yet another source tells the Reveller that there are going to be two committees, one for the bar owners and one for the team captains. Now anyone with an enquiring mind might legitimately ask, why separate the owners from the players? Perish the thought, but might they possibly have different agendas?
Another juicy tidbit that the Reveller has picked up is that each of the teams (for the "official" pool league) will consist of five guys (who must be expats) plus two girls (who may be Indonesian). The cringe-making absurdity of this rule is that, if the proposals go ahead in their present form, any team that does not consist of five guys plus two girls will not be qualified to compete – forcing the bars to include Indonesian players in what is, after all, heralded as "the expat pool league".
The Reveller, and many of the other guys who just enjoy a quiet game of pool of an evening for the social pleasure of it, are having a good chuckle as the pool league’s antics degenerate even further into low farce.
Epilogue
As January slides by, Blok M gathers momentum. In its idiosyncratic and completely unpredictable fashion the dear old place triumphs yet again, providing the Reveller and the other regulars with memorable nights of debauchery and dissipation. Life, even in a drenched, polluted and congested Jakarta, can be delightfully sweet at times.
