Friday 14th March
Woe, woe and thrice woe!
Aficionados of Private Eye - that great, and quintessentially English, satirical rag - will instantly recognize this spoof newspaper headline. And sadly, even allowing for the hyperbole, it applies to this Friday night in Top Gun.
It’s the tail end of a miserable and prolonged rainy season here in Jakarta, and Friday is a typical day - vicious little squalls punctuated by drenching downpours, and a louring sky that deadens the senses. Hardly an auspicious outlook for a trip down the Blok, but what the hell - so off I go, my little car pitching and yawing like a demented racing yacht as it plunges into and jars out of the myriad pot holes, ruts and gullies that years of benign neglect have reduced our streets to.
As all Blok M regulars can bear witness, Jalan Falatehan is a shining example of Jakartan road construction at its very best - a monument to the skills and dedication of the highways department, a beacon to inspire future generations of road builders. Those of a less poetic disposition, however, might be more inclined to describe it as a right bloody disgrace. After all the fine talk from our illustrious Bar Overlords about repaving the street and turning it into a pedestrian precinct with secure parking for all and a proper taxi rank, those fine gentlemen can’t even get their act together and just fill in the holes effectively.
After a slow-motion slalom down the street, carefully avoiding the kamikaze ojeks and bajays tearing towards me as they blithely ignore the one-way traffic system, I find a slot directly outside Top Gun - and with the navigational assistance of two official and one vigilante parking wallahs, ease myself onto the pavement ramp.
Settling down in an empty Top Gun (it is only eight thirty), I order my usual ale and sop buntut and get in a game before the Pool Nazis march in. There’s some nicely tuneful music being played, and the barmaids are busily humming and tapping to it as they bustle about getting things ready for the night ahead.
As I survey the bar I can’t help but notice how tatty and shabby it looks without a busy crowd of guys and girls in it. The carpet around the pool table could have been used as a sump mat in an oil-change shop, and the plasti-wood flooring looks as though it’s got a nasty leprous skin-disease, blotched and pocked as it is with white scuff-marks and dents around the bar and the tables.
The bar edge itself is scuffed and chipped, and some of the mirrors are bloomed and dim. Old notices and bar promotions live on, curled and brittle with age. Yellow and curling tabs of Sellotape, leftovers from ancient announcements long-since ripped down, flutter in the chilly downdraught from the ceiling AC unit.
Casting around for a keyword to describe the overall effect, I come up with ‘weathered’. Actually, I quite like the weathering, which is so at odds with the smooth, sleek and glossy finish that the place had when it reopened. It’s not like a patina, which suggests a lustre on something rather precious, but the aging of a ruin that’s been exposed to the elements for a few years. All the bars are the same in this respect, with their mismatched bits of carpeting, holes and remnants of fittings on the walls where a sign or a shelf has been ripped down, and ambitious mirrored display units that are now dusty repositories for a few sad (and empty) bottles of semi-exotic liqueurs.
The paradigm is sad, and universal. The vision and ambition that drove the creation of the new wave of bars has faded, and along with it the will (and the money) to repair and renovate. For the truth is that Blok M has always been a cheap and cheerful place, and the old bars - Top Gun, Oscar, Pentagon and Lintas Melawai - were plain, unpretentious, and superbly functional watering holes. Low upkeep and maintenance costs enabled the owners to turn a fair profit while keeping prices significantly lower than more upmarket hostelries.
As I polish off my sop buntut, push away my empty dish and take a postprandial swig of beer, one of the older girls I’ve known for many years greets me and we have a pleasant chat about how things are going. “Look, there are a lot of new girls!” she says, with naive and misplaced enthusiasm. “Well, it depends what you mean by new” is my diplomatic reply. Looking around, I observe that many of them are indeed unfamiliar faces - but they’re all way past their best (if ever they had one). Dour, dumpy and depressing is my summing up of these would-be sirens. “Now tell me, how many of them look happy and are smiling?” I ask. She surveys the scene, and just shakes her head.
Now as it happens, I know exactly why our cheerful Sweet Young Things aren’t here tonight. More than forty of them are at present hawking their fannies in Singapore, and an unknown number propping up the Balinese economy. They’ve been driven hence by sheer desperation.
Let’s look at a case study. This particular Indramayu Sweet Young Thing hasn’t scored for two straight weeks in Blok M, and is frantic for money to pay the rent - so she does a three-week stint in Singapore, where she pulls in the equivalent of 14 million rupes. 12 of this is handed over to her ‘agent’, a Chinese gentleman from Jakarta who supplies air tickets, handles immigration, and provides dosshouse lodging with basic fodder. She arrives back in Jakarta with just two million in her purse. This will barely cover the rent and the purchase of a few urgently-needed domestic items - but it’s better than un bel niente.
So Blok M’s loss is Singapore’s gain. In my opinion, the problems facing the Sweet Young Things are largely of their own making. Most of them have hiked their prices and reduced the quality and quantity of their services unremittingly over the last year or so, and treat the bars with what may best be described as a crassly commercial attitude towards the guys. I used to enjoy the flirtation and the party atmosphere of the bars, but it’s in precious short supply these days.
It’s perhaps very telling that the Blok M Forum Off the Blok is rapidly becoming one of the busiest topics. Guys who’d never have dreamt of straying far from the Blok are now casting their nets further afield. If they want a girl, there are better pickings in any one of a dozen other places; if they want a social chat and a quiet drink with their mates, there are plenty of places without the raucous din that we suffer in Blok M; if they want good music, there are many places that offer professional-quality bands, not the talentless amateur-night wannabes hired by the Blok M owners.
The Blok M management has been measured, and it has been found wanting.
The rumours have been flying thick and fast over the last month or so regarding the fate of D’s Place. Like a cat with the proverbial nine lives, it’s been slated to close several times since late last year, getting an eleventh-hour reprieve each time. One rumour - reported to be pukka gen from somebody supposedly in the loop - had My Bar closing down and the D’s ownership consortium snapping up the lease and establishing D’s in its old premises. Another rumour said that they’d not only be exhuming that ghastly institution, the VIP Lounge, but providing discrete cubbyholes for Quick Naughties on a “nudge-nudge” basis.
Now far-fetched though this rumour may appear, it does in fact contain a germ of historical truth. The provision of rooms for hire was in fact mooted twice over the last couple of years by one of the owners, but came to nothing - the word on the street was that the shadowy gentlemen at the top of the Blok M food chain didn’t want their investment jeopardized by one of the bars in effect becoming a brothel. Too tempting a target for the plods and the religious nutters, and it would besmirch their own reputations as well. Even a watered-down proposal to provide massage facilities is reported to have been given a most unequivocal thumbs-down.
The ‘official’ line is now that My Bar will not be closing down, and that the D’s mob has earmarked a property adjacent to My Bar as the home for their new sideshow. There’s also a rumour that the nearby street stalls expect to do a roaring trade in earplugs and aspirins.
With the Brothers back in force, perhaps the street should be renamed Jalan Felapatten.
My evening, pleasant enough though it has been, leaves a rather sour after-taste as I drive home through the dingy south Jakarta drizzle. Measured against the best of the Friday nights to be had on the Blok, this one just did not compare. But hope springs eternal, and it ain’t over until the fat lady sings - and tonight, in Top Gun, there were those aplenty.