Death by Hanging

I'm staying at the Borneo Hotel and it's getting on toward ten at night when worlds that fascinate me begin to open their eyes and purr and growl while church-going Christians everywhere put on their sleeping masks and kiss spouses on the cheek and Muslim women on forgotten islands in Indonesia and Malaysia close curtains and shut off lights to undress in total darkness.

I stroll down the hill past a nineteenth-century frontier supermarket and my eyes fall on the Havana Caf?, and I think of furtive and sweaty days and night prowling in the real Havana in 1998 and 1999 and 2000. Stopping at the door, I peer inside and see seven men and one woman clumped like apple buds around the near end of the hook-shaped bar. Which one of the buds is a talking head? I wonder. Always, always, the first question in my mind on entering new terrain in search of foreign and novel thoughts.

I head for the right side and one empty stool between this bald humongous specimen of my species and before I can pull the wood on stilts close, he grabs me by the arm as he stands and sputters and then insists that I sit on the stool he'd been warming. Right off he lets me know his name is Karel, and he's Belgian, and he's been living in Southeast Asia for twenty years, and in Kuching for five months. And you're an Aussie, right?

Wrong, I say. I'm an American.

His two humongous hands come to my throat and encircle my neck and his thumbs lift my chin so I can see the ceiling; and he says, This is what they do in Malaysia and Indonesia when they find a gun in your house. They hang you. End of problem. And out there in the jungle when they find these natives with their homemade guns, they hang them. End of problem. What's wrong with you fucking-excuse my language--Americans? You get everything wrong. Thirty something like that dead people in a school. Your dumb President Bush could change all this right now if he wanted to. Why do you elect someone so dumb?

His hands have left my throat, and I settle into the stool, and Karel calls over the bartender and says, Get this American a drink. Whatever he wants.

That was a novel introduction, I think as I order a Tiger beer and watch Karel fill his caveman glass with a long and lazy triple shot of Chivas Regal, from the Belgian caveman bottle to his left. He dribbles in some coke to make it look respectable.

Bush couldn't get rid of guns in the next six months no matter how hard he tried, I begin. We've got something called the Second Amendment that gives people the right to have guns and kill people, and we've got a very powerful lobby called the National Rifle Association. Millions and millions of dollars in their single-minded lobby accounts. And then there's Congress that can't agree on anything other than the size of airplanes in which to take weekly vacations. It's fucking hopeless, I say.

I tell him about the retired L.A. police officer who lives in Hua Hin, and how we got to talking one day about the best way to solve part of America's gun problem. Take all the prison bad-asses for whom there is no hope of reforming, which includes most of them, and lock them behind high walls and feed them food through slits in the floor and then let the animals kill one another. Give them guns if they don't already have them. The quicker the better. Any other solution, he told me, after showing me the near-paralyzing wound from getting shot in the neck by a thirteen-year-old punk in Watts, now on a twenty-year paper trail vacation in prison while waiting execution for killing three people when he was seventeen, is Dreamland. Criminologists have their heads way up their asses. Who doesn't know this, except dumb Americans.

Karel has just warmed up, and he's got lots on his mind. Like why are Americans so geographically illiterate. Do they know where Morocco is? No. Do they know where Algeria is? No. Do they know where France is? No. Belgium? They've never heard of it! Maybe they do know where Paris and London are if you shove a map in front of their faces and remind them of the hotels they stayed in on their one visit to Europe. Southeast Asia? Never heard of it! Just like Belgium. What's wrong with YOU Americans? Why are you so dumb? So geographically illiterate?

Then: Why are you trying to take over the whole world? And you can't even take care of all your poor people. The whole world is laughing and making fun of you crazy Americans...

I never know where to begin. Or if I should even try to get a conversation going. Maybe talking some percentages, differences among different populations within a quite diverse population. Too academic...fuck the subtleties.

Never know how bad these conversations can be, or where they'll lead. I nearly found myself in a welterweight slug out with a gray-bearded Swiss prick at an outdoor Chinese caf? while I was having breakfast this very morning, when he came on like a late spring avalanche in the Alps, telling me that Americans were one sick fucking bunch of people who's approach to making money and accumulating material wealth is kinky, unlike what you find anywhere else in the world! He knew all this because he lived in a small town in Washington state thirty years ago, for six months.

You're a fairly typical prick European when it comes to knowing all the important things to know about a country of 300 million quite diverse people, I told him, in between sucking noodles and small morsels of beef into my mouth. And then I told him a good deal more that I'm sure he didn't want to hear, including the small fact that he was an arrogant snot who needed a much smaller dick to be half human. And then he got the message, finally, maybe because I'm bigger, or have a bigger mouth. He got up and huffed and puffed about undemocratic America and that I didn't know shit about anything before shuffling toward the cashier, making sure I'd taken the measure of his middle finger.

Well, Karel, start-up owner of a new hotel in Kuching, and about to drop his high-end cell phone onto the floor for the first of four times before our long chat is over, doesn't have a whole lot to say about a Constitutional Amendment and a powerful lobby group he's never heard about, so he switches to Bill Clinton who he admires and gets into what will become a mantra about Ex-Prexy Bill's big cigar up Monica's bum, all front-page news to me, and what's wrong with Americans making so much ado about cigars up an intern's ass and getting your dick sucked in the White House? Nothing at all, I politely interject, thinking a blowjob in the White House must have been the high point of eight years in office for sex-hungry Bill.

Karel rambles on, now about why don't you goddamn stupid fucking Americans-excuse the bad language again--get your priorities straight? Stop wasting two billion dollars a day on a war you can't win and is based on false information when you should be spending the money on all those poor people you've got in America. Why do you never do anything for them?

I get out a few words about black culture and black men fucking and running all the time to sample someone down the block and getting off their lazy asses, but this line dies before it reaches his ears.

Presently, between more triple shots of Chivas in Karel's caveman glass and Tigers in mugs for me, Karel and I are actually starting to like one another, wandering off into half-civil discussions about our most important state-Israel and America's real sick fix; and the best women in the whole of Asia to get hooked up when you need someone to take care of you for the rest of your days-Filipinas hands down, Karel opines; and the pros and cons of Indonesian women, which he knows all about because he managed a Hilton Hotel in Jakarata for several years-great women but there's a language problem sixty percent of the time; and Karel's twelve kids, eight of them official (three by a Filipina, three by the Chinese-Malaysian woman he's been married to for the last seven years, and two more by a wife he didn't identify); and then a long lecture on why I'm a bit of a demented fuckup because I don't own a cell phone and can't stand the goddamn things and wouldn't dream of having one on the road and what IS wrong with me, since those I'm close to at home can't reach me if something goes wrong? Don't you want to know, RIGHT AWAY?

Well, Karl...it's not like that in my world.

Now I'm at a bit of a loss for words staring at this 250 pound Hulk Hogan in front of me who looks like a walking billboard for AT & T or Cingular what will earphones hanging like two deformed warty little tits on his Arnold chest and a couple of other black lines falling to his waist attached to some kind of silver gizmo I've never seen before, and he's once again reassembling four or five different pieces that fell to the floor. His magic lifeline that he just got through talking to his wife on and promised to call in another hour. His magic lifeline with red and green buttons, and blue buttons for dialing and texting that shine like headlights in the night, a piece of twentieth-century magic Karel won't leave alone, except in moments when he wants to make a point with his humongous hands on the neck of an American about how civilized people deal with uncivilized people who insist on sleeping with guns and going fucking berserk in a Virginia university, which then gets the really demented press going doube-fucking berserk.

We agree completely and without qualification on the double-fucking berserk press.

Two hours and several beers coursing through my blood and most of that Chivas bottle now history and inside Karel and his Malaysian friends, and one Scottish friend who also comes in at about 250 and is also shaven bald on top and is the one with the pretty Malaysian girlfriend with looping curls and a killer smile and footwear that some men salivate over let me tell you, I'm starting to get a bit edgy. And it's got absolutely nothing to do with Karel's quite sensible Malaysian-Indonesian solution to one of America's major problems. Or anything at all to do with Karel's fascination with cigars up the asses of White House interns. Or how Europeans feel about America's stupid war. Or Karel's relentless bragging about his hotel managing experiences in Jakarta and Surabaya and Pattaya. Or about our strong disagreements over whether or not Americans have grand imperial visions. Or even over the geographic ignorance and stay-at-home nature of poor poor homebound scared ignorant Americans. No, my getting a bit antsy has to do with the fact that Karel and his Scottish and Malaysian friends are letting their hands get a bit too friendly with my knees and my arms and shoulders, and I have no idea what they've got in mind. And I am so single-mindedly hetero that I don't have the slightest bit of interest in whether these guys are bi or tri or the Malaysian version of a Thai katoey looking for a reverse sex change.

I thank Karel for the drinks and take his hotel card and listen one last time to his words on why I am the foolish and dumb American for not carrying a cell phone that I can hug and love to death as he hugs and loves his to pieces; and then I slowly exit into the warm night and look across the quiet, almost dead road to the inconspicuous lights of the Taipei Nite Club where I just know that another small adventure awaits me. And something tells me it won't be a place where I'll get a pair of male hands locked around my neck.

The author can be contacted at:  korski1@cox.net

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