Drink, Play, Fuck: The Other Side of Enlightenment

As anyone who has lurched along the narrow seams of the craggy sidewalks in the quaint Indonesian town of Ubud can attest, Eat, Pray, Love is the commercial spigot that swells the cities coffers. 

While Ubud might be the spiritual and cultural heartbeat of Bali, the ancient outpost landed it’s biggest role on the world stage as the theater of romance for Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2006 bestselling memoir that was followed shortly by a Hollywood feature film. In both versions, the author Ate in Italy, Prayed in India and Banged in Bali. Or so it’s being explained to us by the girl sitting across the table whose name I haven’t the foggiest.

The Jeweler was a local, I don’t know how exactly I knew this, but I was certain of the fact. She wasn’t at our table originally. She had glided into our conversation effortlessly like a long tailed skiff boat onto a soft landing pitch.

“You can even rent the guesthouse she stayed in.” The Jeweler made a gesture with her voice that caused Cornelius and I to both to look in the same direction out the window. When I returned my gaze I realized she’d maintained eye contact with her audience. But not with Cornelius.

To describe the Jeweler as “beautiful” or “exotic” would be too simplistic. She eluded such chop-shop portrayals. She was olive skinned and petite but held a kind of kinetic command of her surroundings that gave her a considerably larger presence than her small size would indicate. Her striking looks were contrasted with a quirky choice in homespun apparel that bestowed an art school DIY sensibility — like a regal Raggedy Ann.

She had large almond eyes that changed colors constantly and captured light like polished silver. Her ancestry was undetectable and accent untraceable. Italian…….. Indian……. Balinese. Somewhere along the line she’d fallen under the spell of enough western influence to punctuate her perfect english with surfer-dude-bro-talk that juxtaposed amusingly with her deadpan delivery.

When speaking she remained sphinxlike, not that she needed much expression given all the language coming from those mirror ball eyes. She picked something out from her small tasseled coinpurse and continued, “It was in Ubud where the main character found the hunky dude played by Javier Bardem in the film”.

“The guy from no country for men?” Interrupted Cornelius. Gutting the words out like a mid-digestive croc.

She turned her head, removing her gaze from mine for the first time, and looked at him with a fey deadpan, “I’m getting there bro. Chill.”

She started rotating what she’d taken from her purse around in her left hand but I didn’t dare divert my eyes.

“Your friends right. In the film he was played by Javier Bardem, from No Country for OLD Men.”

I looked at Cornelius’s’ sweaty forehead and blinky eyes buried in his giant brow. “I wouldn’t entirely qualify him as a friend.” I said, testing the waters, and unsure what all this eye contact meant. “Dude!” said Cornelius, obviously hurt. I didn’t have time for feelings. Except my own. Surely he could see I was locked into something. Everyone could.

Ubud, on first glance, felt a lot like a place in America by the name of Portland. There might actually be more yoga studios, vegan restaurants and sanctimonious tattoos per capita in Ubud than its western counterpart. The biggest difference between the two is that Ubud makes you feel like you are strolling through a giant temple. It also boasts a 14th century public park packed with 700 monkeys smack in the middle of it.

It probably shouldn’t come as a big surprise that an ornate village with a monkey forest and a reputation for romance became a southeast Asian tourist trap. Or that the trap has a spattering of quirky bars. The dives in this corner of the world  tend to be one of two types. The bad ones – run by foreigners who cater to their clientele. And the good ones — who don’t. Mind you, the locals usually cross-stitch a half-assed approximation of what they think foreign patrons want, but they are off. This miscue serves a valuable purpose of repelling the traveling type who isn’t actually interested in travel: they just want a slightly different variation of home. Give them a boutique hotel near a craft brewery that serves farm-to-table food and so long as there is “local art” on the wall, *boom*  call ‘em Jaque Cousteau.

We are at the latter type of dive, the good kind, and it is here Yukon Cornelius and I first squared off a few nights prior. Cornelius had the jawline of a musk ox and the brain density of a shelled pistachio. I informed him of this to his face, braced by too many Bintang, after he kept interrupting my mothers day phone call. The bar had the only working wifi on the block and I was using it to call madre and fabricate an explanation on why a 14 hour time difference had somehow caused me to be a week tardy with my mothers day wishes. Once Yukon stopped interrupting, I was surprised to find him a good listener, and we developed an informal routine of meeting every night at the same bar to compare notes from our daily exploits around town.

But he wasn’t listening well now.

“This place is dead.” Muttered Cornelius, glancing around the bar. His disinterest derived not from the room’s capacity but from jealousy at the fact the Jeweler wasn’t paying him attention. I had no idea why she was focused on me, especially since Cornelius, despite having red hair, was a good looking guy and usually drew girls first. Neither of us knew where this girl arrived from nor why she felt so comfortable joining our conversation, but we were delighted by her presence.

“You’re not gonna meet a chick here, bro.” Said the Jeweler, with a flatter tempo than her storytelling voice. “But you aren’t far.” She relaxed her narrow shoulders and gestured with her head down the street. “Hit the nearest yoga studio. Got a 10 to 1 ratio on the mats.”

Cornelius raised his eyebrows as the idea registered with the velocity of an antique elevator reaching the top floor. He smiled.

“Just have to compete with all the yogi-bro’s and fake guru’s.” She added.

“I’m worried about men.” Said Cal, by way of salutation, slapping her whiskey-filled lowball glass down with one hand and reaching between her slender legs with the other to pull up a stool next to the Jeweler.

“I wouldn’t worry much about him. He stares but he’s harmless.” I said, referring to Cornelius.

“No, not your friend.”  The Jeweler cut me off by narrowing one eye, informing me she caught my humor. “Cal’s got a new book. She’s worried about men in general. More your kind. Not his.”

Cornelius was squinting at the chalkboard of beer specials and didn’t realize he was on the conversational menu.

“My kind.” I repeated. What did she mean by this?

“What do you mean by that?”

“The sensitive type.”

“I’m not sensitive.” I said.
The Jeweler and I had a playful dynamic that felt familiar.

“You ever read ‘Drink, Play, Fuck’?” Cal continued.

“Sounds more fun than Eat, Pray, Love.” Said Cornelius, suddenly engaged now that there was a second girl.

“Yeah, well, that’s what the writer thought. He was a comedy guy and thought he’d do a clever parody about Gilberts’ book, but write it instead about men traveling to Vegas and Thailand.”

“Like, he had some kind of chivalrous fidelity to mock Gilbert’s book because it was popular and some women found it empowering.” added the Jeweler. The duo vibrated to the same tuning fork. It made me miss my friends back home.

“The dude, the writer, I can’t remember his name,” continued Cal,  “said his book was intended to be parody, but while writing, realized parody wasn’t going to work. He found himself breaking away from the joking material and exploring the differences between the way men and women problem solve and communicate.”

“He realized men don’t have any…” The Jeweler waved her free hand around like a fishtail, as if it might waft the right word to her brain,  “social models, or stories.”

“They don’t have good scripts for how they can come together and talk about their shit.” finished Cal, as if it was one word.

She nodded.

“Sounds like you read it too?” I said to the Jeweler, trying to make a side connection. I noticed her foot was getting closer to mine under the table.

“No” She didn’t look at me, glancing instead towards the bar. Her mug was empty, which she raised when she got the bartenders attention, and tilted slightly, exhibiting its state. “We’ve just been talking about it. She’s worried about men,” the Jeweler looked back at me and stopped rotating the object in her other hand. “I’m not.”

“So in this book,” Cal continued. “This dude says that due to this vacuum, men have decided to substitute experiences such as those he writes about in ‘Drink, Play, Fuck’ – sex tours to Thailand or reckless weekends in Vegas – for their lack of connection. Like, in these Vegas trips, men attempt to forget who they are by pretending to be somebody else. Taking on fake names….in order to…… find themselves, I guess?” She looked to her friend, “It’s weird.”

“I don’t know, I don’t get Vegas”. Said the Jeweler.

Both girls both looked at me.

“Never been.” I shrugged.

“Seriously?” Cornelius snorted.

This was the first time the Jeweler seemed to approve of me.

“All major historical changes happen because a generation has too many sons.”  The bartender entered the conversation and handed a beer to the Jeweler.

He had minimalist tattoos, a cool accent and lots of roommates. An instant threat.

“It is the second and third sons who don’t inherit anything that explore the world and start revolutions.”

Every bar has a bad place to sit. This ones was anywhere the bartender was in earshot.

“They are the class of disrupters and destroyers.” He continued, while wiping the drink rings from the table with his towel. “These sons with no birthright decimate civilizations by trying to find their place in it.”

“Meanwhile, the birds” he winked at the girls and grabbed our empties, “have always had better models for dealing with this unease than us brutes. The Chaps’ been having these issues for some time now, hay.”

“Where are you staying tonight, american boy?” Asked the Jewler, using the bartender as distraction. “Not too far,” I started, then hesitated. She took a long pause and her eyes changed colors. They were withdrawing to a place we’d previously known.

“You forgot my name.” She said finally, while pulling both her feet directly in front of her and facing out the window.

Had I met her before? 

The smell of incense entered the bar as Cornelius went outside to smoke. Little hindu gratitude offerings, are constantly lit in the pathways of the city.

“So did you guys get caught swimming at your guesthouse last night or not?” Cal asked the Jewler and I. She leaned in close as if sharing a secret. “We were Druh-huh-hunk.”

Cal sing-songed the word “drunk” and her eyes twinkled at the recollection of our apparent state. I could feel the Jeweler’s big eyes boring into me. Neither of us answered.

“Are you still staying at the Kunang-Kunang? ‘Place so nice they named it twice’?” Cal snickered.

Sweat formed at my brow.

‘Time traveling’. That’s what my friend Wara calls it. Or more colloquially “blacking out”.

If there was a captain of time traveling: call me Ahab. 

I’d spent anywhere from 2-6 months of my life surfing those dark, choppy seas. I blamed it on some combination of age, medications, and the Koreans, but who knows exactly what’s caused the condition to befall me. It remains an under-discussed medical marvel that we can inhabit ourselves fully for hours on end while no one, including us, knows our brain is powered down. Some sort protection mechanism invented by the cells who shuttle information along the brainstem – who all hold hands and yell “cannonball!’ while lurching off a bridge in protest of our consumption – leaving our bodies to giddy-up around town like a headless horseman.

Once realizing the tenuousness of my predicament I reverted to my training. Settle down………. go through the checklist:

• Probe for context clues on how I’d met these girls. Cal was apparently with us. Could Cal help? 
• What about my phone?  I scribble all kinds of crazy shit in my notes to remind me of things I learn or names I instantly forget. It can work like the movie Memento where I can reverse engineer previous encounters from random factoids I shorthanded the night before. 
• Contacts. Were there new ones? If I could get away for a minute I could check my phone.

Problem was, the Jeweler was sharp as a stiletto blade and had been looking straight through me since she sat down. The spy in my body would surely recant under any more pressure.

“Your empty, Cal” I changed the subject, “another whiskey?”

“Yep. You know my brand.” She added unhelpfully as I escaped the interrogation chair and headed to the bar. 

I grabbed the ridge to steady myself. The bartender came over. “I’ll grab another…… What’s she drinking again?” I asked. “Same as last night, mate.” God, was there no help in this world? “Good, right,” I nodded at the bartender with a forced smile and used my periphery to watch for what he grabbed. So we were here last night? I searched my contacts at the bar for “recent”. There was one: “ Jeweler”. Fuck. That wouldn’t help. Had we texted?

Yes! A clue!

“goodnight american boy”. 3:04 AM. That was it. Jesus.

The message hadn’t uploaded until I’d returned to decent wifi.

He poured some Bulleit bourbon in a glass and added a splash of soda. That’s right. That’s right. That’s ringing a bell. Sort of.  He put it down in front of me and leaned over. “They’re hot, hay.” He smiled, looking at our table. “And smart.” He added, surprised.

I returned to the table to see Cornelius and Cal chumming it up. I spotted something on my seat next to the Jeweler’s empty chair. Cal noticed me picking it up and I gave her a quizzical look. “She said she forgot something.”  I handed Cal her bourbon and opened my notes app.

As I walked home through the monkey forest that night fiddling with the piece of jewelry that was left on my chair, I was struck by how social the little simians were. Always in groups. Unlike most men, they were willing to admit they needed this connection.