This is going to be a story about an evening I spent at the Bamboo Bar in the Oriental Hotel commemorating my fiftieth birthday. It was sort of a surprise party. I had invited several of my Bangkok friends to join me. None of them showed up. I was really surprised.
First of all, it’s my birthday. That is to say, it is the anniversary of my birthday—the fiftieth anniversary, to be exact. I am fifty years old today—half a century. Many people claim that that is a rather significant milestone, but in terms of longevity it doesn’t really amount to much these days. Your typical ne’er-do-well can smoke two packs of cigarettes and drink half a bottle of Scotch a day and still fairly well stagger by the fifty-year marker. I mean, it’s not like we’re wearing loincloths trying to eke out a livelihood in a Borneo jungle full of venomous snakes, wild beasts, and angry Dayaks. Given the advances of medical science, if a person doesn’t live to be fifty years old today, it’s more than likely a case of some freakish incident. Of course, I’m referring to those people who have access to and can afford the services of these medical advances. Nevertheless, the way things are going, it is conceivable that in twenty years or so the three leading causes of death will be accidents, homicide, and suicide.
All of these causes reflect a certain degree of fatigue. Accidents are usually a result of carelessness often prompted by fatigue. As for homicide and suicide . . . well, someone has either grown menacingly tired of us or we’ve simply grown weary of ourselves. In my case, I’ve been living alone for much of my adult life, and by most standards of reference am unemployed. There really aren’t any people who have had occasion to become especially annoyed with me, and for the most part I enjoy my own company. I honestly think that enjoying one’s own company is a key factor in achieving longevity. Many people who know me are amazed how I manage to do this, but I suspect that some of those people are just jealous and enjoy insulting me. God only knows why! Then again, speaking of accidents, I don’t suppose it is one that I end up spending most of my time alone.
Sometimes people sabotage their own health; induce their own illness, simply to get attention. Now, these are really sick people. I guess they enjoy feeling sorry for themselves. Make public spectacles of themselves wallowing in their own miserable, stinking puddles of emotional puke, self-pity, and spiritual nausea. What a joy they are to be around.
While in the process of transcribing the events of this special evening I was once again banging my head against a wall for lack of a plot to base the story upon. This head-banging activity is not the least bit pleasurable although, as somebody said, it does feel good when you stop. People’s lives generally consist of a series of digressions—not plots. You are born, you digress, and you die. Maybe then you’re born again. Who knows? Maybe you’re just laid to rest in a plot.
But plots are a contrivance that our artistic natures create in order to superimpose a meaningful structure upon our lives. They have no basis in fact whatsoever—they are sheer fiction.
Perhaps an animal’s existence has a plot. I don’t pretend to know one way or the other about that. What I do know, what I suspect anyway is that a human being who determines to plot out his own life either dies too soon to appreciate the folly of such an ambition or lives long enough to suffer the tragic and disappointing consequences of it.
My life so far, seems to have been a random journey without any sense of destination. This has long been a cause of great anxiety for me. At times I would try to console myself with the thought that I was, perhaps, what is referred to as a ‘late bloomer.’ Of late, however, I am beginning to suspect that I shall end up rather bloomless and bloom-free, so to speak. There is solace to be had, however, in the fact that nearly everybody I’ve ever met suffers from the same sort of anxiety with regard to the capricious nature of their lives. It’s stressful enough dealing with this situation on my own. If I was stressed and thought most other people were not stressed then I’d be even more stressed, but knowing that nearly everybody is stressed and, perhaps, most of them being more stressed than me makes me feel less stressed and I like that—if you get my drift.
It would be utterly unbearable if I thought other people weren’t as equally frustrated with the whole ordeal as I am. I mean, it would be like finding out that death and taxes actually don’t apply to everyone. Well okay, as we all know, some people don’t pay taxes but that’s because they are either so damn poor and disconnected that no government gives a hoot about them, or they are so damn rich they can afford clever lawyers to exempt them.
Nevertheless, no lawyer is clever enough to exempt anyone from eventual death. It would be the ultimate slap in the face to realize that some people are going to live healthy lives forever and ever while the rest of us must die. Those people would be an absolute pain in the ass to deal with. They could be as annoying as they wanted to be, and when it became evident that your tolerance was exhausted they’d merely smirk and say, “Hey, if you don’t like it, shoot me . . . ha, ha.”
No . . . I say, thank God for death. It’s the great equalizer.
For most of my life I was under the false assumption that the vast assortment of experiences and knowledge I have been accumulating not only served to distinguish me in a favorable light compared to my peers, but would eventually earn me a certain ultimate position of place beyond them. This sort of thinking, of course, is utter silliness. We’re all going to end up dead and forgotten regardless of our accomplishments—except for Elvis, that is. Still, I keep pushing the damn rock up the hill.
Each one of us is born with a finite allotment of breaths, heartbeats, and tears. The allotment varies from person to person. That is our fate. How ably we manage to conserve them has a great deal to do with determining our destiny.
Of course, as I consider the way I’ve lived my life, that’s pretty much how I’ve always felt. Problem is, it hasn’t found me yet. Then again, maybe that’s not so bad. After all, it seems to me that what’s important in life is not what happens to you; what’s important is what happens within you.
Destiny has a habit of finding us all, one way or another, sooner or later. Last month, for example, I was up in Vientiane, the capital of Laos. I’d never been there before. On my first evening in town, I was at a riverside restaurant sitting in a plastic chair beside a plastic table. Wish I could say that I was sitting in a bamboo chair beside a bamboo table, but that would be a lie. Plastic has, for better or worse, supplanted so many of the artifacts and so much of the charm once associated with this part of the world that so enamored some of us from another part of the world. The legs of the table and chair were positioned snugly within the sandy shore of the mighty Mekong. I was drinking a lukewarm bottle of Beer Lao when I happened to strike up a conversation with a Kiwi fellow who had recently celebrated his own fiftieth birthday.
Vientiane is situated on the northern bank where the revered waterway flows tranquilly from west to east before turning the bend at the Thai town of Nong Khai to resume its southerly cruise towards . . . towards . . . well, look at a map for Christsakes . . . Cambodia, Vietnam, the South China Sea. Must I explain everything?
Legions of poor bedraggled children—their tender flesh encrusted with soil and sweat, scantily clad in filthy rags, offset with bellies bloated by malnutrition—beg for pennies from Beer Lao-sodden tourists such as myself who, more often than not, casually wave them away. Afterwards, we return to our pampered and affluent environs with soulful anecdotes hoping to impress family and friends with a phony pathos.
Actually, that is a rather harsh indictment—harsh and, in many cases, unfair. A true sense of pathos does not belong exclusively to the poor and destitute of this world . . . no more than malnourished souls belong to the materially pampered and affluent. Suffering and joy are everywhere. These are not commodities that can be bought and sold. Peace of mind doesn’t sit on a shelf in a market place with a price tag around its neck. You can’t buy it—you have to earn it. In truth, there is nothing really worth having in this world that can be bought or sold. Of course, I speak as one of the pampered and affluent for whom food, shelter, and clothing have always been affordable.
A polio crippled young man named Noi spends his evenings slithering through the sand—a beggar. He says he has no family, no home. He drags his withered limbs across the terraced restaurants begging for coins with nothing to offer but a beautiful smile and sparkling brown eyes. Just by way of keeping a bit of conversation going, I asked him what he wanted out of life. He said, “Vegetables and rice.”
Oh well, I better stop with this line of narrative before I move myself to tears. Let’s get back to the Kiwi. . . .
“My name’s Joe, but people call me J for short,” he declared.
“J-A-Y?” I asked.
“No, just J, he said. “J-A-Y wouldn’t exactly be short for my name, would it?”
“No, I guess not. J-A-Y would be the same length as J-O-E.”
“I don’t spell my name J-O-E. I spell it J-O . . . Jo.”
“I see.”
Funny that it was easier to get the beggar to explain what he wanted out of life than it was to get this guy to explain what the hell his name was.
“So, if people called me J-A-Y that would, in fact, be long for my name, right?”
“Right,” I conceded. “But J and J-A-Y sound the same, don’t they?”
“Not exactly. J sounds short and sharp. Sort of like me.”
“J-A-Y sounds longer to you?”
“Oh, for sure.”
Like I said, this Kiwi, J, had recently celebrated his fiftieth birthday—a year and a half earlier, to be precise—but I think by the time a person reaches fifty, anything that happened within three or four years is considered recent history. I asked him if turning fifty was an especially significant occasion for him, and he said, “Yes. It was the first time in my life when I finally developed a passion for something.”
As a prologue to this momentous event, J explained that he had had a rather lonely and lackluster childhood. His father died when he was a very young boy. (When J was a very young boy, that is.) He had no brothers.
“I lived with my mother, two older sisters, and an aunt,” he said. “That’s like being surrounded with too much treble and not enough bass, if you know what I mean.”
I did.
“It took me five years to get through high school,” he continued. “I wasn’t a very good student, but then I had a business and otherwise I mostly played rugby.”
“What kind of business you have?” I asked.
“I mowed lawns.”
“Ah, a landscaping business.”
“”Nope,” he said. “I just mowed lawns. Cut a lot of grass . . . that was all. After high school I had many different jobs. None I much cared for, but I saved a fair bit of money. I bought a big old bus, fixed it up real luxurious like and started a party bus business. Took people around the town for a night. They loved it. The business grew; I bought more buses and branched out doing cross-country trips. This went on for 18 years. Had some fun at it mind you, but basically it was just a job. Sold the business for quite a bit of money and went fishing for a few years. When that got boring I decided to take a vacation to Thailand. Sort of took a fancy to Northern Thailand and been here nearly four years now.”
“And on your fiftieth birthday you fell in love with a sweet little Thai woman . . . is that it?”
“No . . . an elephant.”
“Oh, a sweet, large Thai woman,” I said.
“No, I fell in love, so to speak, with an elephant.”
“An elephant elephant?”
“A sweet Thai elephant, yes.”
“Large animal with a long nose?”
“Right.”
“Four footed mammal, thick hide, eats a lot?”
“That’s the one,” he said.
“What and how much were you drinking that night, J?”
“Ha! Now, now . . . it wasn’t like that. I’d just developed a bit of a fascination with elephants when I came to Thailand. They’re such majestic creatures. So powerful and yet, so gentle. I read about them, visited the sites around here where they’re trained and worked. I got to know some of their handlers, the mahouts. The more I learned about them the more fascinated I became. Do you realize, for instance, how much healthy adult elephants eat per day?”
“Well, judging from their size, my guess would be that they eat, approximately, one hell of a lot.”
“Two to three hundred kilos of jungle foliage a day. Plus a hundred liters of water.”
“Wow. Hard to imagine there’s enough time in a day to consume all that.”
“Your typical elephant spends about twenty hours a day feeding,”
“Really. How’s he kill the rest of his time?”
“Chasing cow elephants and sleeping.”
“What happens when he catches a cow elephant?”
“Then they have sex, but that only lasts about twenty seconds. The chase takes a lot longer. Male elephants are not especially skilled at foreplay.”
“Not much for oral sex, huh?”
“Oh no . . . fellatio and cunnilingus are not part of an elephant’s bag of tricks.”
“And after this twenty-second orgy of lust I suppose they’re back munching away at the forest again.”
“Yeah, pretty much so. But, of course, they do rest once in a while.”
“So let me get this straight,” I said. “Your average, run-of-the-mill elephant’s daily routine consists of eating the jungle for twenty hours, having sex for twenty seconds, and taking a short nap every so often. Is that about right?”
“That pretty much sums up their day, right. I mean, let’s be honest, they don’t lead a particularly enviable existence. Being born an elephant probably isn’t at the top of one’s list for a future reincarnation.”
“No, I shouldn’t think so. Still, they seem to be essentially peaceful creatures, so I suppose that’s got to count for something.”
“That’s very true . Elephants are extremely peaceful creatures. They don’t prey on any other animals and, in fact, their only serious predator is Man.”
“Wouldn’t you know it? God blasted humans! Anyway, I suppose it’s fair to say that unless you’re a vegetable you wouldn’t have much to fear from elephants.”
“Well, you wouldn’t want to be a banana or a stick of sugarcane, either.”
“Oh, right.”
“And cow elephants will attack if their young are threatened.”
“I’ve always made it a rule in my life never to threaten young elephants.”
“Good policy.”
I told J that I was approaching the fiftieth commemoration of my birthday and, without hesitation, he offered to buy me another big bottle of Beer Lao. Feigning a mock hesitation at accepting the offer, I made a mental note that this might be an effective ploy to cadge free drinks on future occasions. While gazing pleasantly upon a sampan fisherman plying his trade in the middle of the Mekong—which meant he was technically right on the border of Thailand and Laos—I accepted the offer. Mind you, I did so graciously, which is important to do. When the beer arrived, I proceeded to query my Kiwi benefactor further about his ‘passion.’ Quid pro quo, as the Romans used to say.
“So, elephants, as you said, have become your passion.”
“Yes. You like this beer?” he asked.
“Beer Lao?”
“Yes.”
“Sure. It could be colder but, otherwise, I like it.”
You bet . . . a free bottle of lukewarm Beer Lao served up at a plastic table on a sandy bank of the Mekong beat the hell out of a bottle of Dom Perignon in a sterling silver ice bucket at Maxim’s Bar in Paris that I couldn’t afford. “Say a Prayer for Me Tonight,” as the song goes.
“What is it about elephants that most concerns you?” I asked.
“Their teeth.”
“Their teeth?”
“Yes. I’ve been working in consultation with several dentists—two here in Thailand and a particular friend of mine back in New Zealand. Thailand is quite well known for the high quality of its dental profession you know.”
“I didn’t know that, actually. I do, however, know that the country has perhaps the finest micro-surgeons in the world with regard to a specific type of operation. Namely, the re-attachment of severed penises.”
“Well now,” said J, “I did not know that.”
“Oh yes. If for no other reason than that they get plenty of practice around here.”
“Do they, indeed?”
“It’s a fairly common practice for a Thai woman to cut off her husband’s penis if he drunkenly abuses her too often, or she finds out he’s fooling around with other women.”
“It’s a fairly common practice for Thai men to drink too much and whore around with other women.”
“Exactly. As I suppose it is for men of all nationalities. Here, unfortunately, they run the risk of having their pride and joy fed to the chickens.”
“How do you mean?”
“It’s called ‘feeding the chickens.’ The woman will get up early while her husband’s still unconscious from a night of drunken debauchery, grab a kitchen knife, slice off his penis, and toss it into the backyard where the chickens are. I lived for five years on Koh Samui surrounded by these busybody, prick-pecking, flightless birds. Believe me, chickens will eat just about anything.”
“That’s interesting. I should hope that it will never become useful information but, the more I live here the more I realize that Thais have a bit of a violent streak in their nature.”
“Oh, more than just a bit, I’d say.”
“Certainly more than the tourist brochures indicate.”
“Considerably more than that, yes.”
“And yet, the elephant, which is one of the country’s national symbols—like the bald eagle is to America—is such a gentle, non-violent creature. It is their patron saint of animals, so to speak. Elephants are often abused here, of course, but at the same time, they’re highly revered.”
“Thailand is nothing if not a country of rampant and curious contradictions. I’m loath to say that they’re part of her charm, but they certainly have a great deal to do with the exotic mystique.”
“It’s a pity that aside from revering the elephant, which I honestly believe they do for all the right reasons, they don’t also learn more from its example.”
“As you have?”
“I’ve been trying,” he said.
“So tell me how it is that you came to be concerned with their teeth. It never occurred to me that elephants, you know . . .”
“Have a need for dental care?”
“Yes. That’s what never occurred to me,” I said.
“Well, it’s like this. An elephant grows six sets of teeth during the course of its life. Every ten years or so, one set of teeth falls out and another set grows in.”
“Okay.”
“But when the sixth set falls out, that’s it—no more teeth. An elephant without teeth can’t eat. Consequently, most elephants die of starvation around the age of seventy.”
“Not a pleasant way to die.”
“No. So, what I’ve been working on is a way to supply elephants with dentures. With a properly designed and workable set of dentures, elephants could live for another twenty to thirty years.”
J continued to talk further for 15 minutes or so about elephants, and I continued to listen. It wasn’t so much the subject that interested me, as it was the man’s passion for it. I would never have thought that listening about the plight of these creatures would hold my genuine attention for as long as it did. There is, no doubt, a certain contagious buoyancy with regard to any subject that one man with a passion for can arouse in another man. I don’t think it makes much difference what that subject may be. What occurred to me was what a thrill it has always been to be in the company of people who have been in the company of a passion for something or someone other than merely transient and tawdry desires. The world is crawling with passionless souls. I, at times, think myself to be one of them. It was heartening for me to realize that J didn’t find his until he was fifty.
Hope springs eternal.
Prelude to 'At the Bamboo Bar'
