Dewy Eyed Virgins

Pak Udin collected people the way some folks collect stamps or porcelain figures and he liked to show his friends his latest finds.

The night I met Kowalsky, he was sitting on Pak Udin’s veranda apart from the others and he looked a little uncomfortable. He was ecstatic to meet someone from the States and my hand got quite a wringing before he let it go.

“Jeez, it’s great to hear English again, and from an American too!”

I looked at Pak Udin, who smiled broadly at me.

“Yes, Mr. David, I met Mr. ‘Kwalsee’ at the market earlier today. He was having a bit of trouble making himself understood.”

“You got that right, pal,” my countryman said. “I couldn’t get the girl there to fry me up some rice. I might’a starved if it wasn’t for Udin there.”

“What kind of work do you do here, Mr. Kowalsky?” I asked.

“Call me Ski. I don’t work here, I live here.”

The expatriates in Northern Sumatra are pretty easy to sum up. Most are engineers, working for German or Australian companies. A few Europeans own small furniture factories and there are some young Canadians and Brits who teach English to children from rich Chinese families.

Kowalsky didn’t fit any of these categories. He was a pudgy man in his middle fifties, and he had a meat and potatoes American working class accent. I got his story while the other men were gathered around a chessboard.

“I’m a Philly boy. Born and raised there, on the waterfront. You wouldn’t know the neighborhood now, the white families are all gone and the place has gone to shit.

“I dropped out of school when I turned sixteen and joined the NMU. That’s the merchant marine union. Let me tell you, ships back then was hell. Three to a room, and it was usually a psycho, a drunk and me, a kid who didn’t know nothin’. I learned to keep a piece of lead pipe under my pillow to fend off the fags that wanted to crawl into the rack with me.

“You wouldn’t believe some of the things I seen. I was walking back to the stern on a boom ship once and I see two guys heave another guy over the side, hundreds of miles from land. The poor bastard is splashing around and screaming in the water, and one of the guys that tossed him throws a heavy steel turnbuckle after him. ‘Float on this, you cocksucker!’ he yells.

“Nobody liked the guy they chucked over, so I kept my mouth shut.”

Kowalski went on and on without any rhyme or reason and he got more excited as he spoke. I was puzzled until it occurred to me that he hadn’t really talked with anyone for weeks, maybe months. He certainly didn’t speak any Indonesian.

Here was a fish out of water.

Trying not to be too nosy, I probed a little and learned he’d been on a ship that called on the nearby port of Bau.

“It was a long trip and I was really fed up. The Bos’n was an asshole — a company boy. The Mate was giving me a ration of shit ’cause I wasn’t working overtime. Christ, I’m fifty-seven, I ain’t no spring chicken. So we’re running though the Straits and the shaft cracks. We get towed into Bau and the port engineer says it’ll be ten days before we can leave. I spend some time walking around. Usually I stay on board in port and save money, but this time I’m fed up and want to get away from that tub.

“You ever been in Bau, buddy? Beautiful, huh? It’s like some kind of dream, something out of an old movie, an old Bogart movie. Palm trees and pretty brown girls.”

I had never heard the port of Bau described this way. Most expats use the word ‘shithole’. It was a broken-down little town with open sewers and leprous beggars. As far as the ‘pretty girls’ that a seaman might meet, the whores that worked the place were on the bottom rung of their profession.

“I get a little oriented and I find a massage parlor. Mama-san shows the girls to me and I pick out the one that looks friendliest.

“Let me tell you, kid, you don’t want to choose the most beautiful one, that’s a trick I learned long ago. You get one of the homelier ones that gives you the best smile. She’ll do everything you want and then cook you dinner. You don’t want no delicate little thing. Big butt, big heart I always say, and don’t go looking for no youngster. After a working girl has done a few hundred guys, she’s a seasoned veteran and she can appreciate somebody like me. Whores and seamen got an understanding. They both know they’re never going to get rich.

“Don’t get me wrong. I ain’t no commie. I’m a socialist. A day’s work for a day’s pay.”

What might have sounded commonplace in a blue-collar beer joint in the States was so grotesque on the marble veranda of my patrician Indonesian friend. Kowalsky insisted that I come out to his place in Bau soon, and I promised to see him the next day.

Bau is a seedy town with a fetor that carries well past its borders. There’s a thriving black market with Chinese porcelain, pornographic videodisks, and untaxed liquor, all smuggled in from the nearby docks. There are pool halls everywhere, filled with unemployed young toughs who are supposed to be experts at breaking limbs and skulls for a few dollars.

As I trudged closer to the address Kowalsky had given me the surroundings grew worse. The buildings — godowns from the Dutch era — were gutted hulks with rarely an unshattered window. They gave way to tiny huts. The mud lanes stank of sewage. I felt like the riverboat captain in search of Kurtz; the surroundings got wilder and nastier as I neared my goal.

A bucketful of slops barely missed me. The hag who threw it looked closely at me and cackled.

“Look, Fat Whitey has a friend who’s come to visit!” she screamed to her neighbors. They emerged from their huts and stared suspiciously at me. A young woman with a bad case of ringworm thrust her baby in my face. The child screamed with terror and everyone laughed.

“If you don’t listen to your mother, this giant bule will come back and suck your blood.”

The child’s wails became hysterical. Behind the mother lounged a sloe-eyed young man with something in his hand. It was a Sumatran kris, a wicked, double-edged knife. He gestured with the point at a house a few doors down.

“That’s Fat Whitey’s place. Tell him to stop bothering the women around here.”

I’ve been in a lot of poor kampungs in Indonesia, but I never felt this kind of menace. This was preman territory, a petty gangster neighborhood.

“Eat! I want to eat! I’m hungry, goddamn it!” Kowalsky was lying on a couch yelling at two slattern women. They sat on the floor watching television and ignored him. I waved at Kowalsky from the open doorway.

“Oh, there you are, buddy. Thanks for coming. Step on into the Ponderosa here. These are my wives, Kak and Adik.” The two women grunted at me.

At this point, I felt a little unhinged. Kak and Adik mean older girl and younger girl in bahasa Indonesia. Didn’t this man know the names of his wives?

“I’m trying to tell them to get me something to eat, but they act like they don’t know what I’m talking about.”

I cleared my throat. “Pak Kowalsky is rather hungry and begs to trouble you to prepare some food for him.”

The women gaped at me. “Well, why doesn’t he say so instead of making those pig noises all day?” the older one said.

“Pak Kowalsky is not yet fluent in your language.”

I balanced myself on a rickety chair and accepted a cigarette from Kowalsky.

“So you’ve become a Muslim, right Ski?”

He looked at me suspiciously. “Why do you say that, kid?”

“Uh, well, you know, having more than one wife, uh, polygamy. The Muslims here are permitted up to four wives and the other religions only allow one, like in our country.”

Kowalsky made a lip fart. “All religion is bullshit. Karl Marx said that, but don’t get me wrong — I ain’t no commie. I’m a socialist. Look, I blew into this place and I liked what I saw. When I was on the ship in the port here, one of the longshoremen who spoke pretty good English told me he had two wives and he was thinking about getting another one. It sounded pretty good to me. When I got divorced from my old lady back in Philly she took me for everything, even though she had a boyfriend. Some Jody that hopped into our bed before my ship even cleared the channel.”

Then this strange man began a savage denunciation of American women. I’ve met a lot of bitter, misogynistic expats. You find them in whore bars in Thailand and the Philippines. No, they don’t hate women; it’s just American women they can’t stand. After a few more drinks, they tell you what they think of Jews and black people.

Kowalsky didn’t seem like them. I got the feeling this was a simple, honest man who had been terribly wounded by a woman and was running around half-cocked trying to make another life for himself.

“This place ain’t much, but the rent is only fifteen bucks a month. The union was pissed that I deserted the ship, but I’ve got forty-one years in. They had to give me my pension. It’s only eight hundred a month, but,” Kowalsky looked slyly from left to right, then lowered his head confidentially.

“I still got three-hundred-thousand that bitch didn’t manage to get her hands on. Inheritance from my folks and my poor dead brother.”-

Kowalsky had managed to startle me ever since I met him, but now I was stunned. Three-hundred-thousand dollars! With my pathetic little exchange student stipend of ten dollars a day, I lived better than Kowalski.

I made a quick calculation. Invested conservatively, Kowalsky’s nest egg would yield more than the official salary of an Indonesian general.

“Um, Ski, you know you could actually do quite well with a sum like that here. A really nice house in a good area of Kota Kasar runs around thirty thousand now.”

He cut me off with a brusque gesture. “The hell with that. I ain’t no bourgeois parasite. I’ve seen those neighborhoods. I belong here with my girls, right, Adik?” He slapped the buttocks of the younger woman, and she snarled.

“Listen, Older Brother, tell this man that he has to be less free with those hands of his. He talks that pig language with girls in the neighborhood and he puts his white hands on their bodies. They don’t know what he’s saying and he scares them.

“Older Sister and I aren’t happy here. We’re going back to the massage parlor soon.”

“What’s she yapping about now?”

“Uh, Ski, she says that maybe you should be a little more careful with the women around here. This area’s a little rough and the men are pretty jealous.”

“Bullshit. They’re working people like me. We got an understanding. All my life I saw who was calling the shots. Corrupt union officials, corrupt politicians. These people might not understand what I’m saying, but they know I’m one of them.”

My head was reeling when I left Bau. This was an ordinary man who had left everything familiar behind to make a new life. But it was a perverted version of the pilgrim’s progress — he had landed in a foul place. He chose to live in an obscure, squalid warren tucked away in a beautiful, fascinating country. Many years before Kowalsky’s ancestors came to America seeking a better life. Kowalsky rejected America for a hallucinatory vision of free sex and underclass solidarity. In a certain way I admired him. He had the courage to turn his back on everything he knew and strike out for an unknown destiny. But he must have been terribly lonely.

I ran into him a couple weeks later at a large department store in Kota Kasar. He was talking with a pretty young salesgirl who couldn’t have been over twenty. You see them all over Indonesia: beautiful young women, many of them college graduates, who can only find work as shop girls in large, Chinese-owned businesses. Their wages are abysmal — maybe two dollars a day.

This girl was particularly striking. Tall, with a heart-shaped face and thick, straight hair down to her hips. Her eyes flashed angrily as she listened to Kowalsky. There was a small crowd of girls gathered around them and they seemed agitated also.

“Hey buddy, good to see you again. Look, I don’t know if I’m getting through to Ulan here. Tell her I think she’s really sweet and I’d like her to move in with me. “

The girl’s nostrils were flaring.

“Little Sister, I can see you are upset. Can you tell me what the problem is?” I asked.

She spoke with such vehemence that I stepped back.

“Your friend is a pig who lacks all signs of culture! I understand enough English to discern his evil motives. I am the daughter of an air force man who made the haj to Mecca. He is dead now and cannot defend me, but my brothers will free this pig’s guts from his fat belly when they hear of his impertinence.”

I threw my arm around Kowalsky’s shoulder and walked him away from the angry women.

“Hey, what’s up? I really like her. What did she say?”

“Ski, I’ve got to explain some things to you. Most women here are virgins until they marry. You can fool around with business girls that hang out at the bars and discos. Once you get a little better with the language you might be able to make discreet dates with some of the divorced women. But the young girls from respectable families are strictly off-limits.”

The pudgy face stared at me with astonishment.

“You just described Philly in the fifties. Are you outta your mind?” His eyes narrowed. “Oh, I get it. You want some of that for yourself. Well, nothin’ doin’, buddy. I seen her first.”

After convincing him that I had no ulterior motives, we went for a beer at one of the bars in Nibung Raya.

“Kak and Adik took off. They were dragging the TV out the door when I showed up. I let them take it. Fuck them, there’s plenty more where they came from. “

“Maybe you ought to give the Philippines or Thailand a try,” I suggested. “There’s an expat scene in both those countries that’s pretty wide open.”

“Believe me, kid, there’s nothing about those countries you can tell me. I’ve been running the Far East for years. No, there’s something about this place that gets in your blood. You ever read Victory?

“Don’t look so shocked. Even an old lowlife like me reads an occasional book. I read that one about five times. There’s something about the idea of the guy out there by himself depending on nobody that really got to me.”

We were in a dark, cavernous place that was nearly empty. Much later at night it would be filled with whores and roughnecks. A young tough had been watching us from the bar. He swaggered over to our table and planted himself a foot away.

“You buy me drink,” he stated flatly.

I dug my wallet out. The man had a deep slash scar across his face.

Kowalsky put his hand on my shoulder.

“Now how are the oppressed masses gonna find any kind of solidarity with shitty attitudes like that?”

Even if he had understood English, the young preman couldn’t answer the question — he was rolling on the floor gasping for breath. Kowalsky had jammed the neck of his beer bottle into the man’s belly. I couldn’t believe my eyes; the old seaman had struck like a coiled snake.

“A cupcake like that would last about five minutes in my old neighborhood.”

Of course, you know how the story ends. The Ugly American makes too many enemies as he runs roughshod over a delicate foreign culture and he’s found one day in a muddy back alley, his throat slashed from ear to ear. His wallet is gone, the authorities have no way to identify him, and he ends up in a Potters Field buried with beggars and lepers.

That was my guess — and when I saw Kowalski a couple months later at Pak Udin’s house I was astonished. In a corner of the veranda, chatting and laughing with Pak Udin’s daughters, was Ulan, the girl who’d threatened to have Kowalski eviscerated.

He had finally won her over, but she made a hard bargain. She was to be his only wife. The old atheist had to promise to embrace Islam and he had to learn Indonesian. In time he adjusted rather well. He had a few hundred words of the language that he could spit out in his harsh Philly accent, so he was in no danger of starving in his own house. Before they married Ulan gave him a Muslim name.

“Ali Habibi.” He looked at me suspiciously, as if daring me to laugh. He was seated on a rented dais, next to his robed and bejeweled wife at their wedding party. He was dressed like a sultan for this holy day, complete with a kris knife secured by a silk sash.

“Well, what’s wrong with that, Ski?” I asked.

“Christ, in my old neighborhood we used to beat the shit out of the Protestant and Jew kids. I can’t imagine what we would’a done with a Muslim.”

Ski’s Story

There are no secrets on ships.

If a guy has a kink, say he likes boys or pays somebody to beat him up, well, it comes out one way or the other. It’s a thin line you walk. You work with a guy, you eat with him at the same table three times a day for months, on the old ships three of you slept in the same room, and you run into each other ashore. You might not like the guy, or maybe you downright despise him, but you get along by keeping a certain distance, by talking about neutral subjects or else not talking at all. But everyone gives himself away somehow.

I’ll never forget the first ship I was on, it was full of old-timers, guys in their fifties and sixties, and the first meal I ate in the mess hall there was dead silence. Nobody talked. The quiet made me nervous. I looked around and everyone at those long, crowded tables was sunk in his own world, chewing and staring off into space. They liked it that way. Instead of asking somebody to pass the salt or pepper they leaned over and grabbed it to keep from talking.

As the years went by, I got that way too. You get on a ship with a lot of young guys, rock and rollers who are always gabbing, young black guys and Ricans shouting at each other from three feet away, and you miss the peacefulness of those ships with the old farts who said maybe five words a day.

Anyway, I figured I left all that behind when I married Ulan and settled down in Indonesia. God knows I got the better end of the deal. She’s thirty-five years younger than me and a real knock -out. We live in a palace, a huge place with a dozen rooms, a fishpond in front and two live-in maids.

Maids! Jesus Christ, my mother was a maid for a rich Jew family and now I’ve got two maids!

Of course it ain’t all turkey and dressing. Ulan is always after me to buy us a house instead of renting, but at a hundred bucks a month rent I can’t see the point of buying. Her family never gives up trying to make a good Muslim out of me and sometimes I get tired of that. It’s nobodies’ damned business if I want to go off for a beer.

Things were going pretty well, but after awhile I felt kind of strange. A man needs something to do. Maybe some guys can watch TV all day or bury their heads in books, but that wasn’t for me.

I look at it this way: you take one of Pharaoh’s slaves and free him and give him a nice house and a beautiful woman and everything he wants as far as food, drink and leisure time, and if he doesn’t find a way to kill himself with booze or whatever kind of overindulgence, he’s gonna feel this weird craving for the old stone quarry. He’ll think about his pals and some of the tough jobs they got done and the respect he got as a good worker. He’s already got what he dreamed of all his life, but then he wonders how he’s gonna fill in the hours until he finally shits the bed.

That’s the whole problem, isn’t it? What to do with the time you got left outside of working, sleeping and eating? I like to read sometimes, and not just the action stuff like Tom Clancy or weird stuff like Steven King. I found a Henry James novel on a ship and even though it was like hearing some long-winded fruit tell a shaggy dog story, I felt I knew what the man was trying to get across. These were smart, educated people in his book who really had no idea of how to act, of what to do next. They had all the social advantages and they were still awkward, with no more idea of what to do with themselves than a ginmill barfly.

I found myself taking little trips out to Bau to look at the ships and sometimes I got a funny feeling in my throat. I had a beautiful wife, now pregnant, a standard of living that was beyond my dreams, and I was staring at these old boom ships and bulkers, straining to get a whiff of diesel oil.

I told Ulan we needed more money — which was a lie — and I was going to catch a ship for a while. She’d be OK. The house was always full of her family and as her belly grew bigger, she seemed to take less notice of what was going on around her.

We’ve got a union hall in the Philippines, so I flew out there and registered. A couple nights out drinking with the port agent, an old friend of mine, and a few hundred bucks thrown in the right direction got me reinstated as an active union member.

I took a gas tanker shuttling between Japan and Borneo. The Bos’n was an old friend, Jack Pritchard, a guy I’ve known since I was an Ordinary Seaman and he was the AB who broke me in.

“It ain’t the same out here anymore, Ski,” he tells me. “Look at the deck gang I got working for me now. They’re yuppies, college boys who don’t know a marlinspike from a dildo. They start chattering about their computers and I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. Seamen with computers!”

I knew what he meant. Lately you see a lot of young guys who don’t seem to belong on ships. They’re soft kids from bourgeois backgrounds who have probably never been in a fistfight in their lives. They’ve got their own language: commodities, gigabytes, raves — I can’t understand a word of it. The white kids listen to that rap music crap and try to talk like black pimps. They’re hopeless.

Our loading port was on the east coast of Borneo, the Indonesian side. We pulled in every two weeks, so I flew Ulan out there from Sumatra twice a month. She was upset about the cost, but I managed to convince her we can afford it and then she relaxed and enjoyed herself. I always booked a nice suite in the best hotel there for us. At first she came by herself, but then she started bringing one of the maids with her, and later one of her sisters too. That was OK — I had to go back to the ship to stand watches while we were there and she hated to be alone. Besides, the town was pretty raunchy, with a lot of cathouses and bars. She was afraid to walk around by herself. The local Dyaks scared her too, with their wild tattoos.

I invited Jack to eat with us at one of those restaurants where they bring you twenty dishes and after Jack saw Sri, my wife’s sister, he managed to invite himself along every time we were in port. Sri was eighteen and was majoring in Political Science in the college I was putting her through. You’d think that somebody studying that subject would be a little bit wise to the world, but this girl was the original dewy-eyed virgin. She wore one of those jilbab rigs over her hair and once when we walked by two cats screwing in the street she covered her face with her hands and muttered something in Arabic, the way really religious people here do.

At this point Ulan was huge and nothing outside the baby really concerned her. I could tell that Jack was doing some serious sniffing around my wife’s sister and it bothered me. Jack was sixty-eight years old and had never been married. He was a hardcore whoremonger — I remember making the Delta Line South America run with him in the sixties when he would take five or six of those little putas in a hotel room. He wanted everybody to think he was some kind of superman, but I spoke a little whorehouse Spanish back then and I remember what one of the girls in Lima said about her night with old Jack. She was bitching because she’d been used in a way muy raro and she didn’t think she’d gotten enough money to cover what she’d been through. It was an education for me. I had no idea that people did that kind of stuff to each other. I read a biography of Hitler later where he seemed to go for the same kink.

Ulan got near her time and couldn’t travel anymore. She stayed home and I called her from port. There’s a seaman’s saying that goes: ‘a sailor has to be home to lay the keel, but he doesn’t have to be there for the launching.’ What that means is with this godforsaken life we lead on ships, the chances are you aren’t going to be around when your child is born. There’s a lot of really stupid sayings like that. ‘No money, no honey’ means no pussy if you’re broke. If you’re going through really bad weather there’s always a guy who’ll say, ‘well, somebody didn’t pay his whore,’ meaning that a girl cheated out of her money called a shit storm down on the ship.

So Ulan and her sister aren’t coming out anymore and Jack starts getting weird. He tells me to sleep in and write the overtime down. I don’t think much about it, one old-timer to another throwing me a few bucks under the table. The other guys in the deck gang get wind of it and they’re pissed — they have to go out and chip and paint while I’m laying in my rack making seventeen bucks an hour. To quell the bullshit I tell Jack to stop giving me the free hours and he acts like his feelings are hurt.

He finds easy jobs for me and tells me that he’s worried about my bad back. Anyone who’s been on ships for a few years has got a bad back, so now I’m getting a little wary.

Finally he comes out with it. “By the way, how is Sri doing?”

The ship was a couple days out of Japan. Jack and I were on the fantail splicing an eye on a mooring line. There were some gulls overhead waiting for the cook to throw over the galley scraps. It was a beautiful summer day with the sea that dark blue color that only gets lighter as you get further south.

“She’s looking after my wife and praying five times a day, Jack. Why are you asking me?”

“Oh, no reason. I thought she was a very sensible girl.”

Sri was eighteen. Jack was sixty-eight. Sri blushed whenever we ate durian, that stinky fruit that opens up to reveal the perfect replica of a pussy in the core. I got a bad feeling, but we lived a thousand miles away from Borneo, on Sumatra, and Jack had no way of getting to her.

A couple months later I’m on the porch of our house with Ulan and the baby. The little boy is at the stage where he’s grabbing things with his shaky little hands. Ulan and I don’t care about going out anywhere; we just sit around and listen to the kid gurgle. I’m fifty-eight and a father for the first time. I keep running the arithmetic through my head — not too many years after the boy doesn’t need anyone to wipe his ass for him, I might need that kind of help.

A cab pulls up and don’t ask me how, but I’ve got a funny feeling. Out steps Jack, wearing his loud going-ashore clothes: lime green pants and a pink shirt. He’s got an overnight bag on his shoulder and he’s showing those old yellow teeth in a big grin.

Ulan runs inside to get the place ready for him.

“You’re a long way from Boston, Jack.” He starts in on how he went to see an old buddy in Singapore and since he was in the neighborhood, more or less, just a quick flight across the Straits, he thought he’d drop in. How he got my address I have no idea and I wasn’t going to ask.

Just then Sri comes back from school on the motor scooter I bought her. She salams Jack by bowing a little and putting his hand on her forehead and calls him opa, grandpa.

Jack’s looking down at her like she’s a juicy, little lamb chop on a china plate.

Later Jack and I are sitting on the porch drinking beer. It’s that time of night right after the last call to prayer from the mosques, when everything is quiet and the bats are wheeling around, giving off soft little shrieks.

Jack starts hemming and hawing about how he’s finally ready to settle down with a good woman and make a home. I got right to the point.

“I ain’t putting my wife’s sister through college to be no NMU whore, Jack.”

Of course he starts sputtering about being a serious man with honorable intentions. The thought went through my head that if I brained him with my beer bottle I could square it up with the cops here for not all that much money.

The wedding was a month later. Ulan saw it as another step up for the family and this is a place where little sister does what big sister tells her, especially when both the parents are dead. That’s some wife I have. She was looking ahead to the next generation and the one after it. Anything I had to say about the matter she countered with, “well, he is your friend, isn’t he?”

They did it traditional style, both of them dressed like sultan and princess. I went through the same drill with Ulan a year before. Jack put some money out and they had a Javanese orchestra as well as a rock band for the kids.

The main part of the ceremony is when the guests approach the newlyweds seated on their thrones and sprinkle flower buds over their open hands. There must have been five hundred people there. Nobody seemed upset at the fifty-year difference in ages.

Ulan and I posed for some pictures with the newlyweds (poor Sri, she had an expression on her face just short of terror) and then we went through the flower bud bit. I smiled at Sri, and then when I tossed the buds on Jack’s hands I leaned over and whispered in his ear, still smiling.

“Listen, asshole, if I hear about any faces getting pissed on, I’ll hire a local boy to put a shit-smeared knife in your liver.”

The photographer snapped a shot at that moment and I still have the picture. Two baldheaded, old white guys grinning at each other.

Jack and Sri live right down the road from us. We get together every weekend.

I can’t stand it. I go halfway around the world to get away from the shit that was driving me crazy back home and it follows me here.

My old man was right. After a few shots of Four Roses, when he was halfway in the bag and before he started yelling at my mother, he used to say one thing over and over.

“They’ll never leave you alone, boy. The cocksuckers will never leave you alone.”