4
Lost Among Expats: The Shiftless, Debauched, Tedious, and Necessary Existence of Americans Abroad
Not counting letters home—which friends later told me read more like suicide notes—I didn’t commit a single word to paper during the two years I lived in Japan. Nevertheless, it was the Land of the Rising Yen and Falling Dollar that turned me into a travel writer. The gradual accumulation of experience helped, but my career development was more sudden and based largely on the advice of a slightly graying expatriate named Robert Glasser (not to be confused with the aforementioned Shanghai Bob) with whom I spent a year in yet another obscure Japanese settlement, a featureless speck of planned suburb in Okayama Prefecture called Kojima.
Prone to peppering cocktail-hour conversation with original Wildean nuggets such as “Experience has taught me that I should have fewer experiences,” and “Never let a woman see you in your socks and underwear—she’ll never respect you again,” Glasser was a figure who it was difficult to believe existed outside the pages of a Victorian novel. A disposition toward formal appearance, or at least the lost art of manners, made him an outsider within Asia’s foreigner community—most expats, as David Sedaris has noted, tend to show up in foreign countries dressed like they’ve come to mow the lawn.
Glasser’s venerable style did, however, endear him to the socially rigid Japanese, despite the fact that in all his years there he’d managed to master only one phrase in their language. And not a piece of classic haiku, but a line from Christopher Marlowe’s 1604 The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. He’d had a line of it translated even before arriving in Japan to use on romance-starved local women: “Thou art fairer than the evening air, clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.” In bars, on trains, over candlelit dinners, in noisy sushi shops, it didn’t matter—Glasser’s antique eloquence never failed to capture hearts.
I never used the line myself but, then, neither do I wear evening jackets nor smoke pipes in the drawing room. There can be only one Glasser, in this century at least. Among those who know him, opinion remains divided as to who would play him in the movie, Jeremy Irons or Ian McKellan; though Glasser himself wouldn’t hesitate to cast the Lawrence of Arabia–era Peter O’Toole.
Becoming a writer, Glasser told me, is one of the easiest things in the world. Like divorcing a wife in Islam or going home from Oz, all one had to do was utter the magic words.
“The only requirement is simply saying that you’re a writer and then believing it,” he said. “All writers struggle, very few manage to get published, and almost none are actually any good. It’s the ‘believing’ part that’s the trick.”
It wasn’t so much that Glasser understood the vagaries of the publishing racket as that he understood the lie behind every large enterprise. As a young man compelled to serve at the whim of the U.S. government in 1968, he’d long ago become acquainted with institutionalized deception in its many guises.
“One day you’re a theater arts major bounding across a stage at U.C. Berkeley, meeting girls named ‘Puppy,’ and auditioning for shampoo commercials,” he explained to me one evening over a Yahweh, a cocktail he’d invented with ice-cold hundred-proof vodka and a drop of green Chartreuse floating on top. “A month later you’re enduring appalling treatment at a boot camp in Fort Lewis, Washington. A few weeks after that you’re a foot soldier on night patrol outside the wire at Quang Tri. Believe me when I tell you no man was ever less qualified to carry a rifle.”
Despite my fondness for Glasser, as well as my appreciation for his deeply justified cynicism, his strategy for attaining a literary career seemed absurd. Besides, I wasn’t interested in becoming a writer. At the time my only mission in life was to see that all 128 million citizens of Japan were armed for the twenty-first century with a remedial fluency in conversational English.
After Gifu, I’d promised myself no more ESL teaching, but, like Michael Jordan watching the Houston Rockets cruise to two NBA titles while he rotted away in minor-league baseball, I believed I had some unfinished business to take care of in the Eastern Conference. I arrived in Kojima eager to put my year of Asia experience to good use. Having a clearer idea about how the future unfolds for itinerant ESL instructors, Glasser’s mission was to change my mind. He started with the Rope Challenge.
The Rope Challenge was born in the dark hours of a summer morning in an extremely ordinary Japanese garden, a humble square block crammed amid the acres of asphalt and concrete that made Kojima the unofficial parking lot of southern Japan. Alone in the park that night were Glasser and the previously mentioned charming bastard and Old Asia Hand extraordinaire Shanghai Bob, a man fate had tossed from an idyllic but impoverished posting in Thailand into the more lucrative, commercial armpit of Japan. Powerful entities as individuals, in tandem Glasser and Shanghai Bob created a dynamic not unlike plutonium and fission. Or, at the very least, Dylan and electricity.
Disarmingly simple on the surface, the Rope Challenge worked like this: the pond in the center of Kojima’s public garden ran about thirty yards across. On either side stood a wooden platform, about eight feet high, accessed by a set of stairs. Atop each of these platforms was a facsimile of an old, rustic well—the pond and well, as in all Japanese gardens, expressing life and its inevitable renewal. Mounted to each well was a pulley system that connected two lengths of rope, which ran to the platform across the pond at a height of about eight (bottom rope) and fifteen (top rope) feet above the water. Attached to the top rope, an old wooden bucket, usually left suspended midway across the water, could be wheeled to either platform. Presumably, the whole setup served as a comfort to meditating locals not led astray by the surrounding traffic, empty sake bottles, passed-out salarymen, and other detritus of the mid-minor Japanese bedroom community.
Bringing their problem-finding Western natures to this delicate rendering of Japan’s spiritual past, and no doubt emboldened by five or six hours of blowing their paychecks in Kojima’s dreary handful of bars, Shanghai Bob and Glasser established the rules of the Rope Challenge by assessing what appeared to be, even in their slurry condition, a reasonably ordinary athletic feat. Balancing between the two ropes—hands on top, feet on bottom—they would see which of them could transport himself fastest across the pond in the step-by-step, hand-over-hand fashion most often associated with black jumpsuits and fatal commando raids.
The crossing looked simple. I’m sure renegade expats stumbling upon it today think the same thing. The problem was the two ropes were actually one rope, strung across the pond in a big loop through hinged gears at either end. Intended to support merely the small, decorative bucket, the design made the rope dangerously prone to swaying, buckling, and flipping once mounted by two-hundred-pound English instructors.
Like Moby Dick or a layover at JFK Airport, you didn’t fully appreciate the difficulty of completing the Rope Challenge until you were too far in to turn back. In retrospect, the ingredients—unstable rope, pond below, besotted gaijin on suicide mission—forecast a predictable enough outcome. The hapless clown attempting the crossing was usually flipped upside down about halfway across and shot ass over tea kettle into the water for an agony-of-defeat-style splashdown.
By the time I arrived in Kojima, Glasser and Shanghai Bob had already failed the challenge ten or fifteen times between them. It was late and I was seeing double on my maiden voyage—the Rope Challenge having become a Kojima last-stop-of-the-night tradition—and I spilled into the drink ten feet from the starting line. I came up choking on the rank water. Above, the lines across the pond taunted me like a puzzle.
I became obsessed with the Rope Challenge. I pondered its lightning unpredictability during school hours. Ran mental game film while riding trains. Reached back to high school geometry to consider such variables as velocity and weight distribution. Why, for instance, had Shanghai Bob tumbled headfirst into the pond just fifteen feet from the platform, while Glasser’s point of impact, only five feet farther down the line, had been at his right hip? My arrival elevated the Rope Challenge from exhibition sport to sanctioned competition. Shanghai Bob and Glasser’s primal fires were stoked. A race was on to see which of us would be the first to cross the void.
Living in a foreign country invites the kind of suffering that leads to activities that seem bizarre anywhere else, such as grown men measuring their self-esteem via activities like the Rope Challenge. The threat of complete mental collapse is always an invisible companion abroad, and these sorts of addled endeavors often contain the key to sanity.
When I said “Japan” was my first job out of college, I meant it. I wasn’t just teaching at Giri High School. I was enduring an alien place where I had no history, a severely limited present, and negligible future. That sort of thing sounds appealing in the freedom’s-just-another-word-for-nothing-left-to-lose kind of way, but it’s a monumental trial living in a country where you have no idea what’s going on 99 percent of the time. With the Internet, Skype phones, and other technologies that allow the homesick expat to keep minute-by-minute track of everything from Uncle Paul’s triple bypass (with photos and video) to back seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the invaluable isolation of the expat experience has been diminished. But it’s still no picnic to be unknown, illiterate, and surrounded by a race of people who will never understand the massive implications of this week’s Cornhuskers v. Sooners game or your feverish need to get the results as soon as possible.
Living in the shadows of crumbled Western empires, expats are social misfits who nevertheless bear the responsibility of being a nation’s first line of ambassadors overseas. It’s a tricky job made harder by the fact that relatively few are willing to do it. I still find it amazing that only 20 percent of Americans own passports, that only a fraction of those will spend any significant time overseas, and how little the other 80 percent appreciate how the majority of the world operates.
But that’s the rank and file for you. They’re entitled to be as ignorant as they like. Travel writers, on the other hand, have an obligation to know something more about the places they volunteer to describe. Regrettably, few of them take this obligation seriously enough to actually endure the difficulty of extended periods overseas.
As I’m writing this, a travel book called Fried Eggs with Chopsticks has just been published. It’s difficult to believe that a book bearing such a title—describing one writer’s trip to China—could have been imagined by someone with even rudimentary insight into Asia. The triumph of globalization pretty much a given, it’s no longer relevant to be amused by those funny little wooden sticks the Asians use at dinnertime. If you aren’t finished considering them a point of conversation after your second or third trip to the Chinese restaurant back home, much less after a trip across one of the world’s great civilizations, you might think twice before taking on the job of interpreting the country for the masses.
Cross-cultural pollution was already old hat back in 1989 when Pico Iyer published the highly respected Video Night in Kathmandu. That was two decades ago. It’s no longer news—as legions of writers continue to breathlessly report—that kids in Belarus wear T-shirts bearing Beyoncé’s likeness, that yuppies in Hong Kong make a fetish of designer balsamic vinegar, that Argentine theaters stage Brad Pitt Appreciation nights. And that half the population of the world doesn’t use forks. Not even for fried eggs.
Even so, shopworn observations like these are trotted out every year and perpetuated by publishers who wish us to believe in a paradigm of travel established more than a century ago. Their bidding is done by an army of doltish travel writers whose inability to seize upon anything beyond the obvious and trite is based on either a profound inexperience abroad or by the kind of tittering acceptance that turns everything foreign, no matter how mundane or evil, into a “charming,” “authentic,” or “hilarious” cultural experience. If a school were ever set up to teach travel writing, a year of menial work overseas would be the first required course. If nothing else, living among foreigners shows you that every society produces dreck. Nothing beats the dilettante out of a soul quite like the discovery that you can still be miserable living in an exotic and beautiful place.
No white man should ever wear a sarong, not even in private. No one familiar with Western fashion needs to be told this. And by introducing him in a silken wrap of fiery orange and fluorescent saffron, I don’t want to give the impression that Shanghai Bob actually pulled off the look. Nevertheless, on occasion, leaning against the rail of his apartment terrace, gin rickey in hand, Japanese sun at just the right late-afternoon angle, his lower half encased in a colorful sheet of fabric acquired in some steamy Malay marketplace, Shanghai Bob came as close to appearing born to the sarong as it’s possible for a native of Indiana to be.
You don’t set out to become an Old Asia Hand, and you don’t earn the title simply by making stops in the villages, towns, and sprawling shit holes of Thailand, China, Indonesia, and Japan and hitting almost every other Asian nation along the way. You get it by learning how to parlay your White Man status for gain, when to play the respectful sycophant with regional chieftains and when to bullyrag the locals when they push you too far, as they inevitably will. Honing the ability to drink a Mongolian sheepherder under the table also helps. At six two with dirty-blond hair, blue eyes, the eternal look of a man in his midthirties, and that Midwestern affability somehow interpreted as trustworthy by every ethnic group in the world (no general in history was more underestimated than Kansas-bred Eisenhower), Shanghai Bob strides through Asia as an alien force of nature.
For one year in Kojima, Japan, I lived two doors down from Shanghai Bob. Glasser’s apartment was between ours. I battled alongside them both on an ESL warship known as Mt. Hood Community College (endearingly misspelled by our 180 inept students as “Mt. Hoot,” “Mt. Hod,” or “Mt. Food”), a satellite campus of an American school that folded in Japan after three torturous years. Shanghai Bob and Glasser had arrived at the brand-new school a few weeks ahead of me, sniffed each other out, and decided over copious amounts of brandy that, like San Francisco and the San Andreas Fault, they could piece together a tenuous coexistence. Because I spoke passable Japanese and he did not, Shanghai Bob hated me right away.
Knowing the language vastly improves an incorrigible rake’s chances with the local talent, and Shanghai Bob immediately assumed that my youth and semifluency gave me a leg up on the slim pickings he’d already scouted out in town. He needn’t have worried. In addition to heartland likability and rugged Scotch-Irish looks, Shanghai Bob had a glorious international-bachelor résumé under his belt that left him adept at establishing an electric rapport with women, verbal skills or no. Once he got his sea legs in Kojima, and my girlfriend, Joyce, arrived from the States, we became pals.
We bonded first over our mutual dissatisfaction with the incompetent American teachers and insufferable gaijin who surrounded us in Kojima. Excepting the few genuinely noble souls who mistakenly wander into every profession, ESL teaching attracts reliably large numbers of dullards, laggards, nitwits, dipshits, dimwits, losers, castoffs, drifters, the verifiably insane, and, most of all, the previously unemployed. Of all these, Mt. Hoot had its share.
Mt. Food’s band of expat misfits battled all year. Faculty-room alliances and grudges quickly developed. I fell in with a small group—Shanghai Bob and myself—that raged at the inadequacy of pretty much everyone on staff at one point or another. Glasser was the only one who kept his head during the various school-year dramas, refusing to be pulled into any of several clandestine plots and advising us that the school’s infuriatingly sedentary director—nicknamed the Armadillo for his armored, corporate demeanor—was the best type of boss of all because he ignored us.
“There’s no point in complaining so much that you ruin a situation as easy as this one,” said Glasser, reflecting a wizened apathy I didn’t yet appreciate.
To quote John Fowles again, “Like all young men I saw myself as a catalyst, as a solver of situations,” and I never managed to settle into school life. Many of us abandoned ship at the close of the final semester, and the school folded two years later amid unconfirmed speculation that our Japanese investors were actually Yakuza mafia looking for a novel money-laundering front. Not the most enjoyable year, certainly no postcard views of golden temples and cherry blossoms, but at least an experience that leaves you with better things to talk about than the goddamn chopsticks.
After the isolation of Gifu, Mt. Hod was a dose of reality. I’d grown so accustomed to blaming Japan for all my troubles, it hadn’t occurred to me that the foreigners there could actually be worse than the locals. And that I might be one of them. I suspect now that the Japanese in Kojima hated all of us, and with good reason. We were a self-centered, high-horse, crybaby lot who came in expecting the sweet deal American teachers get back home and never once thought about adjusting our expectations.
And, yes, poor unappreciated teachers, I did say sweet deal. American public school teachers have the world’s best PR operation going. Whining every chance they get about how demanding their jobs are, how many “extra hours” they put in, how little they make, how much of their own money they have to spend just to do their jobs, how noble they are working this job that nobody ever asked them to do—welcome to the fucking world.
That’s something else you figure out living overseas. You think you’ve got it tough? You don’t got it tough. American teachers would crumble if they ever had to work the real hours of a cabbie, doctor, bartender, fisherman, truck driver, small-business owner, hotel clerk, mechanic, architect, janitor, musician, surveyor, accountant, or the million other jobs that don’t observe weekends, much less every city, county, state, and federal holiday on the docket, almost three months’ paid vacation a year, and pension programs funded out of the public trough. How is it we all go through school painfully aware that half our teachers are lazy or incompetent or pathological control freaks, then turn around and let them convince us what a bunch of saints they are as soon as we become taxpayers?
Like most institutionalized instruction, teaching English in a foreign country is “easy” because by and large the requirements and expectations are so low, but it’s also “hard” because it’s nearly impossible to remain interested in the task. It’s like trying to stay intellectually engaged for an entire afternoon with someone else’s six-year-old. Then going home to a dingy apartment and wondering what the hell you’re doing wasting your life in a country where no one will ever really know you. Then popping a beer at four even though you promised yourself that today you were going to wait until four thirty.
Glasser and Shanghai Bob were good to have around because they’d usually start drinking by three thirty, which took a little of the sting out of my descent into a primary form of recreation that traced its roots to a distillery somewhere outside London.
From Glasser, Shanghai Bob and I learned that, like sex, every generation believes it has discovered the martini. And that the old proverb about martinis being like a woman’s breast—one is not enough, three is too many—makes sense only after multiple attempts to disprove it. We didn’t swill martinis in Japan like the Bombay company was going out of business because we believed that doing so made us debonair—I knew I wasn’t, Glasser knew he was, Shanghai Bob knew he didn’t need to be. We drank them because they kept the dismal reality of Mt. Foot at bay for a few sacred hours each evening.
One of the best meals I ever had was spent facedown on the bathroom floor of our favorite Indian restaurant, an oasis called the Mughal in Okayama City, a thirty-minute train ride from Kojima. As was tradition on Friday nights, the three of us staggered postmartinis into the Mughal, made a showy consultation of the wine list, and ordered approximately half the items on the menu. Glasser and Shanghai Bob then proceeded to linger over their meals, and make short work of mine, plus two bottles of wine, before knocking gently on the door of the bathroom where I’d been passed out since just before the arrival of the samosas. As I’d taken care to lock the door behind me, no one in the restaurant had been able to get into the restroom for the hour or so it took Glasser and Shanghai Bob to eat, and the staff was beyond the point of agitation.
“Carlos.” I heard Glasser’s muffled call through the door like an invitation to an exclusive party. “The night’s been a smashing success, but it’s time to go home.”
During our less explosive drinking sessions, Shanghai Bob and I pulled out of Robert most of the essentials of the Glasser Story, including bits about his time in Vietnam. On several occasions, Glasser had hinted that his knowledge of classic poetry had saved his life there, and we were anxious for the details. Some years later I asked Glasser to recount it and encouraged him to commit the rest of his experiences to paper. I told him he’d make a mint selling it, and I’d make a tidy profit as his agent. Here in its entirety is his response to my letter:
Carlos,
As for the Vietnam story, it goes roughly like this. My third day in country at Quang Tri Combat Base, about ten miles south of the DMZ, I was called into a large tent with twenty or so other replacements and told that since a company in the battalion I was to be sent to as a clerk had been more or less wiped out in an ambush, I would be posted there as infantry. And yes, since I had no infantry training and little indication that I might be a natural for that sort of thing, it was pretty much a death or dismemberment sentence.
I came out of the tent and noticed a second lieutenant staring at my helmet, on which I’d written “Dulce Et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori, Wilfred Owen, 1918.” Owen was a WWI British poet; the title is from Horace (“It is good and sweet to die for your country”); and the poem (read it, if you haven’t) is probably the most savage anti-war statement ever penned.
Lieutenant: That Latin, son? (He was about twenty-five and I was twenty-three but all enlisted men are called “son” by officers exercising combat noblesse oblige.)
Me: Yessir. Horace, sir.
Lieutenant: What’s it mean?
Me: It’s good and sweet to die for your country, sir.
Lieutenant (deeply moved): We need more men like you.
Me: Yessir. Thank you, sir.
Lieutenant: Can you type?
Me: Yessir. Ohhhhhh yessir! My MOS is clerk typist, sir.
Lieutenant: We’re looking for someone at Headquarter’s company. Come with me.
Me: Yessir, thank you, sir.
And so I escaped certain death to spend the rest of my tour typing for a revolving cast of lunatic officers. True story, but it does sound a little too neat, doesn’t it? Too patly ironic, too hooray for the college kid who fooled the lifer lieutenant.
Still, while I vouch for it, I confess I no longer really know what happened and what didn’t happen to me in Vietnam. The mind, unbidden, rewrites things, creates new images, makes new connections, draws new morals. War stories are mostly frauds, and mostly unintentionally so. Half my nights in Vietnam I was stoned and what I saw and what I dreamed and what I hallucinated are so intermingled that forty years later I’m damned if I can untangle it all. And some things I remember which seemed completely normal at the time—rolling out of my cot twice a night to hide in an underground crypt during mortar attacks—have startled me years later. Did they happen? Yes, I think so. But I see them as in a dream and as happening to someone else entirely.
And anger, Carlos. Anger distorts reality as much as drugs. And I was Angry most of the time I was in the army and for two years after I got out. You know Fussell’s Wartime? A very good book, but not, like his The Great War and Modern Memory, a great book. I think he never got over his anger—at the Army, at the U.S., at himself for his real and imagined failures, and for the things he was made to do.
So, there’ll be no Vietnam memoir for me. But if you’re curious, buy me a drink sometime and I’ll paste a few pieces together for you. Robert P.S. The second lieutenant (and this I do recall) was more or less nuts. He used to tie up foot-long centipedes with rubber bands, chop them in bits, pour lighter fluid on them, and set them on fire. On his desktop.
Like starving men on a lifeboat eyeing the weaker members of the party, the expat comes unattached from his social moorings faster than he’d care to imagine. Burning centipedes on desktops is only the start of it.
I found this out the hard way on an obscure island in Indonesia called Bintan where, some years after our Japan adventures, Shanghai Bob had landed a job at a posh Singaporean-owned resort training the local staff on the finer points of catering to wealthy Chinese tourists. I’d brought along gifts from the outside world, a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and a Dwight Yoakam CD. Decent champagne and country music are tough to come by in Indonesia, and Shanghai Bob was particularly touched by the gesture, especially since the CD was signed. I’d recently spent four hours interviewing Yoakam in his suite at the Four Seasons in Austin—he was there filming a movie and still strikes me as the brightest and loneliest celebrity I’ve ever encountered—and I knew Bob was a fan.
I’d arrived in Indonesia during the upheaval of the late ’90s, when killings in East Timor, scattered student demonstrations, the ousting of President Suharto, rumors of another coup in Jakarta, and random Muslim, Hindu, and/or Christian beatings and burnings in the rural provinces threatened to spread chaos across the rest of the country. In Bintan, tensions between the criminally underpaid local labor force, the criminally overpaid expat administrative corps, and the just plain criminal owners of the island’s money-churning resorts had recently led to loud public protests and rock throwing. A good number of the expat community had been sufficiently spooked by the “Kill Whitey” graffiti to quit their jobs, pull up stakes, and move on before the bloodshed arrived.
After debriefing me on the general unrest over martinis inside his apartment, Shanghai Bob led me on a two-mile bicycle ride down a dirt jungle path to a small outdoor café that he told me served the best roast chicken in Southeast Asia. No small claim. It was pitch dark; the place was lit by a single anemic string of Christmas lights. Palm fronds sagged against the crippling humidity. Thousands of equatorial insects buzzed around our heads. Three tough-looking boys were listening to tinny Indonesian pop music and leaning on the outdoor bamboo bar, a moldy relic likely taken from some long-gone expat’s bungalow.
A resentful-looking character cut like an ex–Thai boxing champ—crazy, opaque eyes, bulging shoulder muscles—sauntered across the dirt courtyard and served us two beers about ten minutes after we ordered them.
“How about a change of music?” Bob suggested to the guy after he’d set the beers down. I had no idea what Shanghai Bob was getting at until, to my horror, I saw him reach into the side pocket of his khaki trousers and produce the autographed Dwight Yoakam CD I’d given him an hour earlier. For a moment, our waiter/fighter looked mildly interested.
“Wat dis?” he said, turning over the CD case in his hand like a grenade.
“Music,” Shanghai Bob offered with enthusiasm. “Real music. Put it on.”
Waiter/fighter looked at the slouching dude on the cover with the big cowboy hat pulled over his face. He pretended to read some of the song titles, then instantly lost interest and dropped the CD on the table so hard that the jewel box cracked a little.
“No moozik,” he said defiantly, tipping his head toward the boys at the bar huddled around a banged-up portable Sanyo CD player. “Only radio.”
“That’s cool, no problem,” I piped up, sensing an acute need for amity. But Shanghai Bob was craning his neck around, and I knew his famous standards-of-customer-service lecture was clawing its way up his throat.
“Look, we’re the only ones here,” Shanghai Bob told waiter/fighter, the clear implication being that this gave us dominion over the CD player. “Let’s hear some decent fucking music for a change. My friend here brought this CD all the way from the States. Special occasion. Play it.”
So now it was my request. Waiter/fighter curled his lip and once again nodded toward the bar, though this time without taking his eyes off Shanghai Bob. “Dey listen Indonesia moozik,” he said.
“Horse shit!” Shanghai Bob replied. “Those kids are here every night, and they don’t spend a goddamn thing. I’m in this place three nights a week eating your overcooked chicken, and I pay actual money.” He jingled some of it in his pocket to drive the point home.
The boys at the bar now began looking over their shoulders at us. Waiter/fighter’s eyes narrowed. It’s showdowns like these that end with machetes unsheathed, flashes of steel in the moonlight, and someone’s head rolling across the dirt with its eyes shocked wide open, mouth formed into a black O of horror for all eternity. This was how they handled problems just up the coast in Aceh—I knew because I’d seen the footage on CNN International in my hotel room earlier in the day.
Waiter/fighter assumed a red-zone stance in front of Shanghai Bob. I couldn’t just abandon my boy here, but I needed to discreetly let this smoldering weapon of Indonesian pride know that if violence was inevitable, he and the guys at the bar might want to consider taking out their aggression on Shanghai Bob first, then see how they felt before committing to any more ass kicking. When waiter/fighter shifted his gaze to me, I seized the opportunity to flash him a complicated shrug, a multilayered gesture meant to somehow defuse the situation without causing loss of face to anyone. They end up being the butt of a lot of pussy jokes, but it’s not easy being Switzerland.
“It’d be one thing if their fucking music here wasn’t so bad,” Shanghai Bob muttered, further attempting to enlist me on his side. He turned back to waiter/fighter. “C’mon, man, one song.”
Waiter/fighter picked up the CD with his right hand and drummed it between the thumb and forefinger of his left. I looked up at him like a kitten in a store window. And then, in one of those undocumented small miracles that save countless tourist lives each year, he reconsidered.
“OK,” he said, forcing the barest pretense of a smile. “For you. One song.”
You could have inflated the Hindenburg with the breath I let out. Of course, I’d forgotten whom I was sitting next to.
“Two songs,” Shanghai Bob fired back as the guy walked away. “Tracks two and six.”
On the back of that Dwight Yoakam CD, it says that “A Thousand Miles from Nowhere” clocks in at four minutes, twenty-seven seconds, and “Ain’t That Lonely Yet” goes just three minutes, seventeen seconds. But listen to a forlorn hillbilly wailing out his despair on back-to-back tracks in a black jungle night while four sets of Muslim eyes and three centuries’ worth of racial hostility bore into the back of your skull, and you’ll swear that seven minutes and forty-four seconds runs closer to three or four hours. It’s nights like these that make you wonder how Shanghai Bob got through his tour of Peace Corps duty alive. One thing I will say for him, though—and maybe those guys on Bintan say it, too, when they’re telling the story about the crazy farangs ready to die for the sake of some shitty music—Shanghai Bob did leave a helluva nice tip.
For several months during the middle of the school year, Glasser, Shanghai Bob, and I forgot about the Rope Challenge. Or, at least, let it sit dormant. Winter is bitter in Japan, and the prospect of an icy bath seemed less hilarious in January than it had in September.
Then one spring morning as I lay in bed in that half-asleep state, the secret of the Rope Challenge revealed itself to me. It was all about the bucket. The little decorative prop that had been sitting in front of us the whole time appeared in my head and began speaking to me.
“How is it that none of you have seen such a simple solution to such a simple riddle?” the bucket asked me. Then it proceeded to explain how to beat the challenge. I bolted upright in bed.
“I’ve solved the Rope Challenge,” I said, popping my eyes open and speaking to the wall.
I waited all day to make the announcement in the conservatory, the tiny spare room in Glasser’s apartment where we convened every evening for after-school drinks.
“Tonight,” I said. “The Rope Challenge. I know how to do it.” Glasser looked intrigued. Shanghai Bob was incredulous.
“Bullshit,” Shanghai Bob said. “It’s been tried every way. It can’t be done.”
“That’s what they said about the four-minute mile,” Glasser harrumphed into his martini glass.
“He’s got about as much chance running a four-minute mile as he does making it across that pond,” Shanghai Bob said.
“I’ve got ten thousand yen says you’re wrong.” My expression was granite. Shanghai Bob had no choice but to accept the bet. Glasser came to his aid by ponying up half the amount.
My strategy was based on the realization that the mistake we’d been making had been to adjust the amount of pressure with the hands on the top rope and the balls of the feet on the bottom to accommodate the unpredictable sway of the ropes. The bucket gave the secret away. If as the central visual element of the Rope Challenge the bucket was a mere decoration, wasn’t it possible that other parts of the apparatus were decorative, as well? That one of the ropes—in this case, the bottom one—was never meant to support any weight at all? That it existed simply to look good and maybe, like spots on a moth, to baffle potential predators? By ignoring the bottom rope, by allowing my feet to merely glide on top of it while supporting my entire weight with my hands on the overhead rope, I could simply cross the pond as though I were working my way down a set of monkey bars on a school playground.
As we had dozens of times before, the three of us loaded up with beer and stumbled into the Japanese garden shortly after midnight. I stood on the platform at the eastern end of the pond, Glasser and Shanghai Bob on either side of me. Bob brandished a Suntory malt; Glasser puffed on an English cigarette.
“You’ll never make it,” Shanghai Bob said.
“Good luck,” Glasser said, patting me on the shoulder like a brigadier at the Somme.
I extended a bomber pilot’s thumbs-up, reached a few feet in front of me for the rope, and swung out over the water. From there it was just as I’d envisioned. Allowing my feet to skim the bottom rope, I used only my arms to carry me halfway across the pond in less than thirty seconds, easily record time. Glasser and Shanghai Bob’s cheers faded as I slipped around the dangling bucket and dug deep to concentrate on the final assault. A sliver of doubt raced through my mind as the muscles in my forearm tightened on the uphill climb to the opposite platform, but I’d endured worse during all those Presidential Physical Fitness Awards I’d narrowly missed in junior high. You want to kill a kid’s self-esteem, throw some fucking compulsory pull-ups at him and deny him a medal, three years running.
My confidence growing, I knocked out the second half of the crossing almost as quickly as the first. I hit the platform on the other side with a triumphant stamping of feet, spread my arms like Jesus on the cross, then wheeled around to accept my conqueror’s salute. But the platform on the other side was empty. Glasser and Shanghai Bob had vanished.
The garden was suddenly small and silent. A devastating loneliness swept over me like an eclipse. I stared out at the bucket, still swinging on the rope above the middle of the pond. “I’m sorry,” I said to the bucket, but it gave me nothing in return.
There’s a seduction to the expat life, the promise of a world filled with Rope Challenges, close calls with Indonesian rebels, midnight conversations about Vietnam with men who’ve been there, and a miraculous sense of lone-wolf independence that somehow exists alongside a uniquely intense bond among comrades. The insider’s knowledge of a strange place elevates the man abroad above the hoi polloi of his home country, and particularly above the tourist, whose appearance in his adopted country always comes as an unwelcome shock. The romantic attachment to place, even a difficult place, is almost impossible to break.
All expat life is limbo. Lurking behind every discussion, the Return Home, whether it’s one or two or ten years away, provides the fundamental tension to every moment you live abroad. Then, one day, you commit to going back to the States, and you either succeed there or you don’t. And if you don’t, you leave once again, to roll the dice on some other place that requires of you only a passport and the gambler’s faith in long odds.
The Rope Challenge, like so many other elements of the overseas experience, kept the real world at bay. Once it was conquered, the spell was broken. As for Glasser and Shanghai Bob, in spite of their own sporadic efforts to repatriate, they were in Asia to stay—they live there to this day—and I knew I’d always envy them for it. But I also knew I’d see them again, that life for all of us after the Rope Challenge was beaten had begun to feel weird, and that the thing to do when the going gets weird, in the words of Hunter S. Thompson, is to turn pro.