Bunny from Bugis Street, Singapore.
None of those girls are around anymore, thus neither am I.
Friday, August 21, 2026
MACAM KUMBANG by Peter Nolan Smith
In 1990 I got off the train from Surabaya a little past dawn and headed over to the port of Jakarta to catch the noon ferry to Sumatra. The inter-island ship was a big liner and I was looking forward to a cruise through the Java Sea into the Indian Ocean.
As I neared the dock, a man of indeterminable race approached with a smile. His greeting was in Hebrew to which I responded in Yiddish thanks to my reading the books of Isaac B. Singer.
"Sholem Aleykhem." I readjusted the bag on my shoulder. I was traveling light, but also carried a small electric word processor.
"Are you Jewish?" asked the portly man in his thirties.
"No, but I'm the shabbos goy." I had spent the previous year on 47th Street schlepping diamonds between the Ashkenazi and the Hasidim. My commish from the sale of a 5-carat FSI1 diamond bought a round-the-world ticket from Pan Express Travel. Mostly by planes. The Bali to Singapore had been by sea and land. My next destination was the West Coast of Sumatra.
"Then you're the closest thing to a Jew in this city." Jakarta was 99% Muslim and this was Ramadan. Not a single food stall was on the pier.
"I like pastrami and don't mix dairy with meat." The Javanese weren't too friendly to Christians and the imams reserved a special vitriol for non-believers like myself. "Some of my best friends are Jewish."
"And I'll be your newest." David Mussery introduced himself as a Syrian Jew running a nightclub called the Pink Panther. "Where are you going?"
"Padang, Sumatra by ferry."
"Have you bought your ticket yet?"
"No."
"I'll send my servant over to the ticket office, while you visit my club. Drinks are free for a Landsmann. It's a fun place. Girls and sailors."
"What about Ramadan?"
"There is no religion inside the Pink Panther, where even Gods fear to enter "
"Sounds irresistable." I liked bars like his. "But I don't want to miss the ferry. There isn't another for three days."
"No worries." He checked his Rolex watch. Business at his bar was either good or the watch was a fake. "I'll get you on the boat."
"Okay, I'll check it out."
"Great, you won't regret it." David grabbed my bag and motioned to follow him down a muddy street.
Jalan Macam Kumbang.
"Macam Kumbang means Panther in Bahasa Indonesian. Are you a journalist?" He pointed to my typewriter.
"No, I'm writing a novel about pornography in LA." I noticed that the sailors on the sidewalk were drinking tuak, a cheap sweet palm wine in violation of Ramadan prohibition of eating or drinksbg anything between dawn and dusk. Their eyes were glazed from the morning's drinking session.
"Shouldn't you be writing that in LA?" It was a logical question.
"Probably, but I wanted to see the world."
"Well, you've come to the right place." David held open the pink door to his bar. "This is the crossroads of the world."
It was barely 8am, but his rundown establishment was filled with sailors from Malaysia, the Philippines, Indian, Africa, and Europe and the seadogs were drinking with an assortment of Indonesian women ranging in age from young to very old. The music crackling from the jukebox speakers was loud garage Indonesian rock.
"Dara Puspita doing TANKA AKU. Those girls were big in the 60s."
Several girls danced to the song. Their partners were doing the Twist. Most everyone rank a Bintang Beer, although several Bugis sailors chugged brown liquor from small glasses.
"Palm Whiskey. 40 degree in strength," David explained in a hushed voice. "My customers think it's whiskey."
"After a few I guess they don't care what it is." I sat at the bar and a wrinkled woman chewing betel poured David and me a 'whiskey'. Glancing at its effect on the sailors, I hesitated clinking glasses with my host.
"I know what you're thinking." David laughed aloud. "You meet a strange man in Jakarta and you're thinking I'll slip you a sleeping pill and get robbed."
"The thought crossed my mind." My version had me shanghaied to Sulawesi on a sea pirate prahu.
"I've been running the Pink Panther since 1974. It had been my uncle's place back then. He left it to me. I was the only one who didn't leave for Israel. I went once and came right back. Here I'm me. Back there I was another Jew among millions."
"And you have no trouble with the Muslims." Drinking and dancing were not condoned by strict Islamists.
"As long as I don't throw it in their face, everyone loves the Pink Panther. It's someplace you can come and not be yourself." He raised his glass. "It's good for you."
"Sie gesund." I toasted him and downed my glass. It wasn't bad and I ordered two more. David signaled for a waiter and ordered him to get a second-class ticket to Padang. I handed the man 40,000 rupiah. It was more than a month's wages on Java.
The jukebox switched to the same band performing A GO GO.
I started moving to the music. I like this place. It was rough on the edges and even rougher in the corners. A scary-looking tranny asked me to dance. David waved away the banci.
"Some things are always tref." He snapped his finger and a beautiful young girl emerged from the dance floor. She could have been Miss Teen Indonesia 1990. "Her name is Sandy. She's from Madura. They have a special way about them with men."
In the dim light Sandy looked about 16. She put an arm around my waist and stroked my thigh.
"Sorry, she doesn't speak any English. She's new to the scene." He smiled upon seeing my expression. "Don't look so surprised. Eveything goes at the Pink Panther. So where are you from?"
I didn't tell him Boston, but said New York and added, "I work selling diamonds for an old friend. Manny lets me work six months of the year and the rest I write."
"Diamonds? Maybe I should have slipped you something." David lifted his hands. "Just kidding."
A Javanese version of LOUIE LOUIE dropped onto the jukebox record player. Sandy pulled me onto the dance floor. She was a good dancer and loved a singer called Adnan Othman. When I came back to the bar, David handed me a 2nd class ticket. "My man says no one is in your cabin, so it will be like 1st class."
"Terima kasih."
"So you speak ein bissel Bahasa?"
"Enough to keep from starving." I signaled to the bartender. "Tiga bintang."
"Make it two beers. Sandy doesn't drink. She's a good Muslim girl. Still a virgin too."
"Are there any virgins in here?"
"Just Sandy. She's a friend's daughter. She makes her money from tips. Nothing else. But you can always think about it. That's free."
I spent the next two hours dancing and drinking with David. We discussed Palestine.
"They'll never be peace there, until Israel accepts that it stole the land."
"They'll never do that."
"They'll never say it, but they will know the truth."
"Thinking it is not as good as saying it." I knew, because I really wanted to kiss Sandy.
"Thinking it is the first step, but we're thousands of miles from Jerusalem. Here's to Peace on Earth."
I bought the bar a round. It cost me $20US. We drank to Meraka or Freedom.
"I love this place, because it has everyone from everywhere. We are all human. If only everyone knew that, the world would be a better place for everyone."
I drank to that and several more of his comments.
A little before noon he tapped his watch.
"Time to go, unless you want to stay." He offered me a job with very little pay. "A sheygutz like you could make a fortune."
"Money and I are distant cousins." I was counting on getting rich in my next life.
"I could teach you the ways of my tribe." David was lonely. I had lived in Hamburg during the winter of 1982. Everyone was a German, but me. I also knew loneliness, but I had a ticket for a ferry.
David accompanied to the port with Sandy. They bid me Selamat Jalaan with their hearts. Sandy cried on cue. I tipped her $20. David asked me to call him, if I passed through town again and the following year I swung by the Pink Panther.
Nothing had changed in the bar.
He was a good Jew, I was a good sheygutz, and Sandy was more indah than ever.
Both are a state of mind.
ps several years ago I receunted this tale to John Cowell, an English photographer, and he exclaimed, "I drank there. A right wicked place. I thought I might have imagined it."
" Same for me."
Bugis Street Selama-Lamanya
The Bugis people were great voyagers from Sulawesi. They sailed small crafts from Padang Padang to many ports of the Far East ranging from Burma to Northern Australia. Many practiced piracy and as Thomas Forrest wrote in A Voyage from Calcutta to the Mergui Archipelago, “The Buginese are a high-spirited people: they will not bear ill-usage…They are fond of adventures, emigration, and capable of undertaking the most dangerous enterprises.”
Most westerners are unfamiliar with the Bugis and especially their complex five gender society.
Men and women are joined by ‘bissu’ which combined all five genders, ‘calabai’ a false woman, and ‘calalai’ a masculine female.
Thriving Bugis communities existed throughout the Orient, although few as famous as Singapore’s Bugis Street on which calabai transgenderettes gathered in the 1950s to sexually entertain randy sailors and curious travelers, passing time in the Straits city. According to legend the easy way to discern which working girls were female and which were trannies was that the calabai were beautiful and the female hookers were ugly.
Singapore banned wanton behavior in the 1980s to transformed the tawdry area into another worthless shopping mall.
I got there in 1990 and stayed at a cheap Chinese hotel on Bugis Street.
The trannies were few.
The sidewalks were clean.
The Long Bar at Raffles was undergoing renovations.
I left the next day for Penang.
Each time I returned to the Pearl of the Orient I stayed only long enough to catch the train.
Singapore has nothing to offer anyone looking for a walk on the wild side.
It’s the most boring big city in the Orient, but not in the 60s.
It swung with the best of them.
Bugis Street selama-lamanya.
Forever.
Singapore To Bangkok By Train
I met a girl named Vee. She worked a bar. We pretended to be boyfriend and girlfriend.
After a week I was almost sad to leave the island
The night train pulled out of Suranthani a little before sunset.
The 2nd Class sleeper was clean.
The food in the dining car offered a special menu for Thais. We drank Mekong whiskey with soda water and ice. The windows were open to the wind.
I slept in the upper berth.
The cleaning crew woke the passengers before dawn.
Bangkok was less an hour away.
I held off on breakfast and watched the scenery change from rice fields to factories to city..
Steel tracks split, as the train neared the station.
The engine lurched to a halt.
I checked my seat.
Everything was in my bag or on my person.
I tipped the cleaner fifty baht.
The price of a big beer.
Hua Lamphong wasn't busy.
Almost everyone was Thai.
This was not the West.
None of the trip had been and I would expect anything else.
It felt good to be in the Orient.
It was the other side of the world.
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