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.”

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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.

Drunk in Moscow, Not Idaho

In 1994 after a month long limbo in Penang I traveled from Malaysia to Paris on Aeroflot thanks to money wired by my loving mother to the Citibank in Penang.

The Kuala Lumpur-Karachi-Dubai-Moscow-Paris flight time to Moscow totaled about 24 hours. None of them were comfortable in the flimsy chairs of the Soviet era jetliner. More like lawn chairs and a fog hung over the the celing from AC condensation. After the meal not a single member of the flight crew entered the cabin.

Disembarking at night in Moscow, I discovered that my connecting flight to Charles De Gaulle had been delayed until the following morning. A Norwegian couple with whom I had traveled from Kual Mumpur were in a similar predicament and I said, "It's 10PM. What are we going to do all night?"

"Drink wine." The husband pulled out two bottles of wine purchased at the Dubai duty-free. Their flight had also been cancelled until noon.

"I have two."

"And my wife has two."

We opened the bottles and sat on the floor surrounded by hundreds of stateless travelers trapped in the aeroport. Some looked as if they had been in this limbo for weeks, if not months. We finished the wine and a refugee from Afghanistan sold us a bottle of vodka.

"I here one month. Can no go back Kabul. No go to Paris. My brother live there. Now this my home." His name was Jameer.

The vodka was homemade. The liter lasted longer than the wine. Several other Afghans fleeing the civil war joined Jameer with other bottles. They spoke in dialects. Dari adn Pashto. After two bottles of the gut-burning samogon I spoke in tongues an finally lost consciousness from the overdose of hard spirits and lack of sleep.

I awoke.

A gray dawn.

Moscow.

"Russia.

Not Idaho.

"Your flight is now." The Norwegian husband shook me hard and yanked me to my feet.

"I don't care. I want to stay in the aeroport. Life simple here."

"You have to go." He and his wife escorted me to the plane.

"Bon Voyage." I saluted them at the door of the Airbus.

Stepping on board I rejoined civilization and I stumbled down the aisle to my seat. The expression on the other passengers' face gauged my drunkenness better than a breathalyzer. No one wanted me to sit next to them. I fell into an empty row and buckled up for take-off.

Several hours later a stewardess shook my shoulder.

"We are in Charles de Gaulle Aeroport in Paris."

"Already?" I was the last passenger on the plane.

"We've been on the ground for fifteen minutes."

"Great." I rose to my feet and trudged out into the terminal. The time was 8:30. It was Bastille Day or 'le Quartoze', another day of wine ahead.

In July of 1789 Paris seethed with anger against Louis XVI and the ancien regime of the nobility.

The prison's most infamous guest was the Marquis De Sade, who shouted from the ramparts on July 2, 1789, "They are killing the prisoners here!"

The unrepentant sodomist was transferred 'naked as a worm' to the insane asylum at Charenton, but the fire had been lit and the on July 14 hundreds of workers gathered in the neighboring Faubourg Saint-Antoine seeking to seize the gunpowder within the Bastille.

Mythically recounted in Dickens' THE TALE OF TWO CITIES a tumbril loaded with casks of wine axle an axle on the Rue de la Roquette and wine flow down the gutters to be consumed by impoverished Parisians. The shadow of the dreaded upper-class Bastille prison loomed over the narrow street and someone shouted, "A la Bastille."

The Swiss Guards within the fortress defended the battlements against the mob. Mutinous royal Bourbon troops armed with artillery. The commandant surrendered the prison an freed its seven captives.

When Louis XVI was told the news in Versailles, the king asked an aristocrat, "Is it a revolt?"

His friend replied, "Non, mon Roi. It is a revolution."

Within three years after the Storming of the Bastille Citoyen Louis was sentenced to death and guillotined in Place de la Concorde before thousands of revolutionies.

I emerged from the terminal and sped in a taxi from CDG Aeroport to Paris. Traffic was light into the City of Light. THe exit lanes were cramped with vehicles as they had been for decades carrying Paris to le Grande Vacannes ie 7/14 go 8/14.

Atop Montmatre rose Sacre-Couer.

After the 1870 Commune had been quelled the Catholic Church had erected the Temple of Repression to remind Parisians that the Church ruled the Hearts and Minds of France, not the call to the ramparts by a perverse Comte.

The new Bastille.

My friend Tristam from the Musellmen Fumants waite at his apartment.

I wasn't tired, only hung over. That afternoon we watched the military parade on the Champs-Elysees.

That night we partied with friends.

I drank to Liberte, Egalite, and Fraternitie.

Hundreds sang Le Marseilles.

I cried each time.

It was good to be out of Moscow.

People drink too much there, then again so do I.

A bas le Roi__

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Mars Versus Mount Washington

The atmosphere on Mars is a hundred times thinner than that of Earth.

NASA's Mars Curiosity Rover has measured summer temperatures as high as 70 Fahrenheit or 20 Centigrade at the Red Planet's equator, but as soon as the sun sets, the temperature can plummet to -100 F and -175F is not usual in the winter months at the fourth planet's pole.

Bcck in 2017 the daytime high at Mars' Gale Crater as recorded by NASA's curiosity Rover, was 17.6 degrees F or about the reading on the thermometer outside the window in Fort Lee, NJ .

Mount Washington hit -100 with the wind chill and Old Agiocochook came close to beating the lowest natural temperature of −128.6 °F at the Soviet Vostok Station in Antarctica on July 21, 1983.

There is no way to calculate the wind chill on Mars.

Just life-threatening cold.

Same as on Agiocochook, but people live there.

Weather men, because Mount Washington breeds weather.

A lot of it.

One day we will be on Mars.

Dogs too.

Like there are dogs on Mount Washington.

A Long Walk Into Year 66 - 2017

Last year Chef Dave from 169 cooked a Memorial Day BBQ on his roof deck in Bushwick.

I brought a bottle of Chardonnay.

I ate hamburgers, hot dogs, and drank wine, Jagermeister, and tequila.

Someone gave me a magic mushroom.

It had a red cap.

Another handed me a marijuana gummie.

I did them all and left the soiree at 1pm.

It was the first hour of my 66th birthday.

I saw in my 64th birthday at the Little Neck along the Gowanus.

Paige and Steve were with me.

Fried clams and 'gansetts.

They're in Uganda now.

I do miss them, but Africa was 7000 miles from Bushwick.

High.

I caught a bus up Gates Avenue and got off thinking I was close to Clinton Hill.

I discovered my error on the street.

I was nowhere near Clinton Hill.

I shouted for the bus to stop.

It disappeared into the darkness.

Bushwick burned during the 1977 Blackout.

Crack and a 9mm were royalty in the 1980s.

Then the shit stopped and life returned to Bushwick.

But not tonight.

No one was on the streets.

No cars.

No taxis.

I didn't have enough money in my account for an Uber and calculated that my crash pad was an hour's walk away.

I hadn't included getting off on the mushrooms in my thought process and slammed against a chainlink fence. A dog barked from a nearby yard. I wished the pit bull could have walked me home. I was in need of help.

The streetlights were bright.

Too bright.

Only the trees offered protection from their glare and I stumbled along the sidewalk.

Not knowing where was the where I was was.

I listened to Sly and the Family Stone.

Getting ever higher.

A ghost bike haunted a corner.

Someone had died here.

I prayed for their soul and the phantom remained asleep.

I was so jealous.

My feet went left.

My feet went right.

I had lost control again.

The darkness was all powerful this late at night.

Another chainlink fence saved me from collapsing like the World Trade Towers.

My fingers clung to it.

Concrete consciousness was poured into my spine. My legs regained movement and I resumed my trek.

I checked the bus schedule.

They ran once an hour.

I was fucked and only my feet could unfuck me from sleeping on the street.

Even as much as I wanted to crawl into the bushes.

West.

There was too much light.

I sang along to Blue Cheer and tried to dance.

I swirl into a twirling tornado.

My body faceplanted horizontally into a bush sprouting the leaves of summer.

I was getting off again.

Lights shifting colors. Music orbiting celestial.

"Where am I."

I wished I lived here.

I didn't and continued west without any familiar landmark in sight.

Bushes whispered my name.

"Sleep."

"No." I didn't dare look at the time on my cellphone.

It was playing CHELSEA by the Stiffs INC

I pogoed and almost tumbled into the vegetation for the hundredth time.

My arms stretched out like a highwire artist and I regained my balance.

The Great 66.

My birthday and Route 66.

I had hitchhiked the Mother Road in 1972.

At night it was darker than here.

On a nameless street I took off my glasses.

I didn't need them to see shadows reaching for my soul.

I leaned against a fence.

More leaves touched my face.

I thought they were the same from before.

I was wrong.

But right too.

A flower called my name.

A rose.

A fragrance.

I walked again.

West.

The ebony outline of a church tower.

The world bleeding into a blur.

Then again the rose.

More powerful than before and I sang the Jaynettes SALLY DANCES AROUND THE ROSES.

I knew where I was.

Not far from my bed.

Same as the flowers of a Bushwick night.

Resting in peace.

Like the living asleep for my 66th birthday.

I smiled recollecting my 40th in Bangkok.

With cousin Ty Spaulding.

I had made a fool of myself at a comedy club.

Ty said, "Everyone laughed at your escaping the hook."

I was a million laughs back in the last century.

I turned the key in the lock.

The door opened and I was back in 1992.

It was easy to travel time on mushrooms.

46 years from a hop skip and a jump from now.

And then I tripped on a shadow.

I hit the bed like a vampire reaching the grave just before the dawn.

TKO.

Only I was not home.

Just at the 169 and Chef Dave shook his head.

"Old people."

Just like vampires old people hear voices in their sleep and I heard Chef Dave.

I would show him how old I was tomorrow, because then I would be 66 and one day.

I was much younger than that yesterday.