The Price of Fame

It was around the time that Wulan had our second kid that I got discovered. I was just rooting around the house for days. Wulan and her family explained to me that there were these things called pantangs, forbidden things, like leaving the house or drinking beer or just doing pretty much anything I wanted to do. They start when a baby is born and they end when the wife feels like calling them off. The way I understand it is these pantangs have got nothing to do with Islam; they’re old, prehistoric beliefs that Wulan’s tribe, the Javanese, have always followed. Pretty dodgy, as the Brits say.

Anyway, I’m in the front yard one afternoon, smoking a cheap cheroot and walking around muttering to myself, when I see a guy on the veranda of the house next door. We live in a really nice area of Kota Kasar, where people are not snotty, but pretty much keep to themselves. This guy is staring at me, kind of open-mouthed, like he’s fascinated. I glare back at him and we keep this up for a few minutes before it got on my nerves.

“Why are you eye-fucking me, Jack?” I say to him and he rushes over and apologizes. His English is pretty good and he tells me he’s the brother of the guy who lives next door; he’s visiting for a few days and he’s a TV show producer in Jakarta. We get friendly and I tell him about all the years I sailed on merchant ships and how I ended up in Indonesia.

“Have you ever considered working as an actor?” he asks and before I could think of an answer, Wulan comes out holding the baby. She’s a little wary, like she is with anybody I meet outside of her family, but the guy charms her and they take to each other right away. They switch from Indonesian to Javanese, so I can’t even pick out the little I know in Indo. After a while I clear my throat and they both laugh, a little embarrassed. The guy — Suparman is his name — shakes my hand and leaves.

Wulan was excited. “Do you know who that man is?”

“Yeah, some TV guy visiting next door.”

She shook her head. It turned out that he’s the producer for a whole string of popular shows and also directs and produces movies. She reeled off the names of all the programs and movies he’s done, but it didn’t mean anything to me. I only watch the Western shows on cable.

“He thinks you might be a successful actor.”

I’m fifty-eight and look it. I’ve got a shiny, bald head and a gut that shows forty years of serious beer drinking. Even in my younger years, if I ever got a second look from a woman on the street it was because she thought she might have seen my picture in the post office. In short, I never was the kind of guy that might have given the girls certain thoughts. I tell this to Wulan.

“He’s not looking for pretty boys, he’s looking for a, what do you say, character.”

Life went on, Wulan’s pantang program of not drinking or going out still in force, and I forgot about the TV guy. But he didn’t forget me.

Two months later I’m in Jakarta, staying in a four-star hotel and meeting Suparman every afternoon in the swanky hotel restaurant. I hadn’t committed to do his show, but he’s throwing a lot of money around and I’m having a good time. He sprang for the suite, unlimited room service, and every night he takes me out to really classy places.

Wulan is back home with the kids and Suparman goes to great lengths showing me around the town. I knew Jakarta from my sailing days. That was a different Jakarta — compounds of whores in bamboo shacks who would do pretty much anything a seaman wanted for ten bucks. The city Suparman showed me was something I never imagined. We ate in these glass and marble restaurants surrounded by rich businessmen and big shot politicians. One night he took me to this place called The Stadium. My experience in this country was that there are no strip clubs or go-go joints like in the States, but this place was wild. Mercedes and BMWs parked outside and a gang of tough-looking guys guarding the entrance. Inside were four floors of entertainment. The first floor was a casino, the second a massage spa, the third a high -class cathouse and the fourth floor was a showplace that put anything in Vegas to shame. Beautiful, knockout women dancing in fancy underwear. Around us were tables of rich kids smoking weed. Suparman said they were all the children of generals.

Possession of marijuana gets you three or four years in a hell hole here. “Aren’t these kids afraid of the cops?” I asked Suparman.

He just laughed. “This club is owned by the Jakarta Police. It’s a major investment from their pension fund.”

From time to time Suparman gave the high sign to some of the beauties walking around and they came over to the table, leaning over to talk with us and giving me an eyeful of low-cut cleavage. I knew what his game was, but I wasn’t going to give him something to hold over me. I could wait till I got back to Mama Wulan.

It wasn’t all fun and games. Back at the hotel room Suparman showed me videos of Indonesian TV shows. They seemed pretty lame to me, bad things happening to nice people, families gathered around hospital beds crying their eyes out. You never saw such pissing and moaning. The typical show was about a kid from a poor family, say a little girl who was always good to her mother, the kid gets run over by a bus on her way to the mosque and her mother, father, brothers, sisters, classmates, teachers and friends are crowded around her bawling while she’s in a coma. The doctors and nurses are crying, too. Call me cynical, but I know for a fact that in real life the little girl would never have made it to the hospital. She would have died in her home. You don’t get admitted to hospitals here unless you have money.

Suparman called these shows examples of the Pathos Theme, whatever that means. There was another type of story that was a little more interesting. These were about really bad people: murderers and rapists and backsliders who eat pork. One that sticks in my mind showed a guy who raped his own daughter-in-law. He knocks her up and somehow he’s the only one around when she has the baby in their house. He rips the kid’s head off (I’m serious here) while it’s being born and the daughter-in-law dies. Later on we see the evil bastard throwing furniture around and bullying his wife and son, and then he suddenly stops when he sees a baby’s head go bouncing through the room like a basketball. He’s the only one who can see it and he starts frothing at the mouth and going spastic. He ends up in a booby hatch.

Suparman called this type of thing a Morality Play and said it was similar to medieval English traveling shows.

It all seemed kind of morbid to me and I asked if there were any comedies. He said it was funny I mentioned that because that’s what he had in mind when he first saw me. He showed me several. I missed most of the humor because they talked so fast, but I noticed something they all had in common. There was always a banci, a drag queen, hanging around and making wisecracks. The audiences went nuts whenever one of these showed up. Suparman said they were the Indonesian equivalent of Shakespeare’s Clowns.

I asked him if there were any dyke characters

“No, lesbians are not funny. We see them as being somewhat sinister.”

It was time to shit or get off the pot. I told Suparman I’d give it a try and he sent a car for me the next morning.

Everyone at the studio was really nice to me. I had a dialogue coach who went over my lines. He said the important thing was to tone down my accent just enough so that people could understand me. It wasn’t an easy job for him — it took Wulan a while before she could make out my butchered Indonesian, which is why we usually speak English at home.

The next day we had a rehearsal with the whole cast and I got an idea of what I thought the show was about. I played the part of an old white geezer (surprise!) married to a really stunning young girl. The actress, Evi, was around twenty-five, but they made her up to look even younger. There wasn’t much action. It pretty much centered around a living room, always full of people. What I did mainly was look at people as they were talking and then when the dialogue coach waved at me I read my lines from a chalkboard he held up off stage.

The old white guy never had any of his own pals over, it was all his wife’s friends and family. It wouldn’t be a comedy without a banci and this one was a piece of work. He danced around in a skirt and whenever he shrieked out his lines the studio audience went into convulsions.

I didn’t like this guy much. He would skip over to me and twist my ear, or else smack his hand on top of my head. I knew this was part of the act, but if somebody behaved like that at my house I would have decked him. In the beginning he was even acting that way with me between takes. I caught up with him by the water cooler and grabbed his shoulder and said, ‘jangan kurang ajar lagi’, which means loosely, ‘don’t fuck with me any more’. He got the message; he looked a little scared.

Like I said before, my Indonesian is pretty lousy, so I never really got the gist of the plot. We taped three programs and then I flew back to Kota Kasar.

Wulan was excited and she invited all her family and a lot of the neighbors over to the place to watch the first show. If you’ve ever seen yourself on television you know how eerie it can seem. I saw an old curmudgeon on the screen who didn’t have much charm. I wondered again what Wulan saw in me.

It was a comedy, but except for a few giggles from Wulan’s younger cousins, nobody seemed to find it funny. When it was over Wulan looked sort of pensive and after everyone left she had it out with me.

“Don’t ever go back to that show.”

Then she told me what was really going on. The guy I played was a world class cabron. Three of his wife’s boyfriends were in the living room and making double-meaning wisecracks throughout the show. It seems the whole point was that this old white guy’s wife was having it off with everything in pants and these Jodies had the balls to hang out in his house, eat his food and crack-wise to him, knowing he wouldn’t understand. She told me that even the banci was tapping that ass.

I might have been angrier sometime in my life, but I can’t remember when. I was trembling with rage, so Wulan had to dial that rat Suparman’s cell number.

After I got through screaming at him, there was a long pause.

“I think you misunderstand, Ski. The character you played is a Dutchman. The show is a delicate parody of colonialism. The wife’s excursions provide a catharsis, a release from the tension we still feel today after all those years of European domination.”

Then he told me not to sweat it anymore, the show was cancelled. It seems Evi and the banci were busted at a party where everyone was smoking sabu — crystal meth — and they were looking at some serious prison time.

I can’t say I was heartbroken. For the next couple weeks I drew a lot of snickers wherever I went. A limey oil rig engineer at my favorite expat bar make a nasty remark and only apologized after I threatened to bop him with my beer bottle.

I had other things to worry about. Our maid, a sweet little girl who was only around seventeen, got herself under a dukun’s spell. Now, I’m a pretty rational guy and this business of spells and hoo-doo never made any impression on me. After I caught a Puerto Rican messman cheating at a ship’s poker game he told me he was going put a Santaria curse on me that would make my dick fall off. We were on the San Juan to Buenos Aires run, so there were a lot of Ricans on board. None of them liked the guy, but they were afraid of him. One of them took me aside.

“Ski, be careful, man, this guy is a curandero. Back in Santurce he killed somebody who lived fifty miles away just by getting hold of some of the guy’s hairs.”

Curandero boy ended up getting flown back to San Juan from BA on a medical discharge. I caught him on the dock with nobody around and I imagine his jaw still aches whenever the weather’s going to change. This was back in the days when I was a lot younger. Back then, if you got into a fight and ended up the worse for it, you kept your mouth shut. Young American seamen these days scream like stuck pigs over a broken fingernail and go running to a lawyer.

Anyway, somebody had really done a number on poor little Yesi. I don’t believe in all that magic crap, but maybe she got the word that this creep had put the whammy on her and that was enough to snap her mind. She took a couple days off to visit her mother and we got a phone call from a hospital asking if we could guarantee payment for her treatment. It seems that this shy, little kampung virgin had thrown herself through a living room window to get to the guy who had paid the dukun and she was cut-up pretty bad. She was so ashamed when Ulan and I went to see her.

Here in Kota Kasar the scariest police are the Mobil Brigade. To make a long story short, it cost me about two hundred bucks to have them pay our boy a visit. I rode my scooter past his place the next day and the front yard was full of broken furniture. He was in the same hospital as Yesi, but he was going to stay a lot longer. I felt a twinge about getting other people to handle a job I should have done, but I’m getting a little long in the tooth and you’ve never seen anything faster than a young Indonesian thug with a knife. He’ll think twice before going to a dukun again. I wasn’t mad at the dukun. He was just making a living.

So it was about two months after Suparman and I had our little fracas on the phone when he called me again.

“What could you possibly have to tell me that I want to hear?” I asked him.

“One-hundred-million rupiah. Cash. Up front,” he said, and he definitely had my attention.

This time it was going to be a movie and I wasn’t going to play a pathetic, cabron type guy. This character was a spy, an American CIA agent.

I have to say I was intrigued. I always wondered what my life could have been like if I hadn’t dropped out of high school and gone to work on ships. What if I’d gone to college and made a really important career? I’m not talking about just getting rich — I’m a pretty rich man here in Sumatra. No, I mean, what if I’d been what people call a mover and shaper? A captain of industry or a spy master?

I should have remembered what poor Axel Heyst, the guy from my favorite Conrad novel, what old Axel had to say about that kind of venture. Something about the seeds of corruption being inside any involvement.

I always wondered about that one. Did Conrad mean that we should all just sit quietly in a room and never do anything? I knew some welfare and disability scammers in my old neighborhood who were like that and I didn’t envy them. They were pretty squalid.

Working in a movie is different from TV. The expenses are a lot higher, so there’s real discipline. You fuck up and blow a scene and you really cut into the budget and schedule.

Suparman was directing and he had me do these scenes where I’m sitting at a desk talking on the phone or else giving orders to the staff around me. You should have seen the people they had playing the staff. They were young Western backpackers that Suparman had scrounged up from Jalan Jaksa, the cheap hotel area in Jakarta. This movie was set in the mid-sixties and these kids were supposed to be playing US intelligence officers. Suparman couldn’t get them to cut their hair or shave their beards. Between takes they would gabble to each other about how they weren’t sure about going back to college at the end of their gap year or else they compared notes on where to score the best ecstasy.

Suparman asked me about them, if they were believable.

“Yeah, in a world where Abbie Hoffman and his pals overthrew the US government.”

The Western actors all spoke English in the movie. Later on, subtitles in Indonesian would be added. The plot was about the time in the mid-sixties when Sukarno was thrown out of power and a half-million commies were killed. The backpackers and I were CIA men working in the US embassy while all hell was breaking loose throughout the country. I played some kind of liaison guy who kept checking in with the local military and then forwarding information to Washington. It was all pretty straight-forward stuff — no bancis prancing around and no baby heads bouncing through the room. I actually gave some thought to really devoting myself to a new career. It paid well and this kind of role wouldn’t cause wisecracks.

It was a good thing that Wulan and I went to see the movie right after it came to Kota Kasar, because the government banned it after a week. It caused riots in Jakarta and in one of the demonstrations in front of the US embassy a marine got a busted rib from a rock thrown at him. Sumatra is not political like Java. Aside from my name being shit with the expats here, there wasn’t much real trouble.

The subtitles caused all the ruckus. Here’s an example: at one point I’m talking into the phone and what I said was, “ General, the situation is unclear. Washington needs to know if you have declared martial law”.

What the text in Indonesian that ran at the bottom of the picture said was, “What good are they going to do us after they’re dead? You have to squeeze the answers out of them first. Have you forgotten everything we taught you?”

At another point the guy I play is talking into the phone, talking to Langley. What I actually said was “No, we can’t be sure that the arms shipment from China was involved.” The subtitles read, “after another month the dockworkers and all the other filthy syndicalists will have their union meetings in hell!”

Wulan was whispering the translation of the subtitles to me and as the movie went on her voice was trembling so bad I could hardly hear her. The bit with the American intelligence men was fairly small; most of the movie showed people being shot and chopped up with machetes. It was pretty obvious that the movie blamed all the killings, rapes and torture on evil Americans, as if this country didn’t have a long history of this kind of stuff.

I considered moving my family and me to out of the country, at least until things quieted down, but I shouldn’t have worried. People have short memories. I didn’t have too much trouble with the locals. My problems came from my own kind.

I got a call asking me to come down to the US consulate. The guy who grilled me was a pinch-faced, stick-up-the-ass young Republican. He reminded me of some of the snotty academy officers that I worked for on ships.

“Mr. Kowalski, you have certainly tarnished our image here. We are cultivating Indonesia as an ally on the war on terror and you have done your country’s cause irreparable harm.”

That’s all I needed to hear. “Where were you during Tet, when the gooks were over the wire mowing our guys down while they were crawling out of their racks in their skivies? Where were you, kid?”

Maybe I exaggerated a little. It’s true I was in Saigon during the Tet offensive, but I was sleeping off a two day bender in a cat house because I was too loaded to make it back to the freighter I was signed on. I heard some commotion, but then I went back to sleep and later people told me what happened.

Now I’m getting my taxes audited. Wulan didn’t see it as a big deal since everyone here cheats on their taxes and pays off an official if they get caught. I had to explain to her that the IRS is something that strikes terror into the heart of every American, the way the Mobil Brigade in Indo scares the guy on the street here. When I’m not banging my head against the wall, I have to laugh. Me, a broken-down, retired deck hand, causing fits back in Washington. Politics are hell.