An Essay/A Memoir
by Douglas Brannon
Topics Discussed: Infinite Jest, attempts to repeat history, traveling with aging relatives and children, opium.
When it comes to literature I never follow the pack light rule. I wanted to read Infinite Jest on the other side of the globe and I made all sorts of justifications for it before leaving. After all, the book can serve so many uses beyond the obvious one, and it contains about as many words as a single paper back book possibly could without falling part. It can be used also as a yoga block, a step stool, it can be put under the behind of a little kid to get them up to the supper table, it intimidates other readers by the pool, it can stop a bullet, and if its pages are torn out and then in half, they could be used to fold over a thousand origami cranes, which according to Chinese proverb will make any wish the paper folder chooses to make come true. A couple hours into the flight from San Francisco to Tokyo I noticed that I hadn’t yet put the seat back.
My family and I rung in 2014 in Bangkok, arriving just a few moments before midnight on December 31st, I believe we were at baggage claim when the calendar refreshed, there wasn’t any countdown or anything. My partner Gea and I, believe it or not, showed up in Thailand ten years previous to the second nearly; although our anniversary trip was happening under slightly different circumstances. We brought our nine year old son, Zizi--it shouldn’t take a mathematician to realize that he is nearly Thai enough for duel citizenship--and were being met by my more or less mother-in-law, Baba who lives in Hilo, Hi and her very well traveled, experienced, and incredibly tall for an old guy friend Lee.
In 2004 we cabbed it right to the Khao San Road. The street was a well known hub for shoestring travelers in the section of Bangkok known as the Banglamphu. After settling up with the driver, the first person I saw looked like one of my gray haired east coast uncles cruising up the walk with a transvestite bombshell. She looked like a skyscraper with massive boobs, her/his high heels were easily six inches, and the gray haired guy looked like he just got out of a golf cart and he was half hurrying because he was jacked up and he was also half enjoying the walk because in Bangkok no one gives a hoot which must also feel nice (if you happen to possess one of those not so easily flaunted, dirty, but still powerful, and not to be denied urges). Gea and I booked a simple white room with a toilet and a bed for two American dollars, shed some weight and then ate street food, drank many beers and caroused around the neighborhood until dawn. Spent the whole next day recovering in the two dollar room.
This year we had accommodations pre-arranged at an aging but respectable hotel with a rooftop pool and an included breakfast buffet. It was a nice place to begin. There were a lot of families there like ours. Thirty something with kids but not babies, kind of dipping their toe into Thailand rather than entering via the dive platform. The hotel had a modest spa and we all got Thai massages. The masseuse was on me like a spider. Thai massages are like yoga classes that you can sleep through. There’s a whole bunch of moving around involved, you’re just not responsible for making any of it happen.
Our rendezvous with Baba and Lee wasn’t supposed to happen until our second morning in Bangkok, and we were always a little skeptical about them showing up. They made their travel plans hastily at the last minute, and hadn’t been responding to emails for a couple of days. Baba--her real name is actually Denise, but since Zizi was born pretty much everyone calls her by the Serbian for grandmother--and Lee had a not so new relationship going. They met in Hawaii, at a weekly gathering in front of Hilo City Hall to protest--they protest basically everything but mostly--the fact that the United States armed forces does a lot of weapons testing on the island, about which they reveal next to nothing, and the people who live there are obviously worried about it. As they should be. I have driven several times over the dreaded Saddle Road that is the shortest distance between Hilo and Kona and it is easy to see why the locals drive the long way around, as opposed to the short way over the mountain. Some quonset huts are occasionally visible in the distance behind a wall of thick gauge black chain link topped with a tornado of barbed wire. There are aspects that have vegetation up there and aspects that do not. Last time I drifted past I remember feeling like x-ray eyes would have seen nuclear warheads cocked just under the phony earth’s crust.
Baba’s been on Hawaii for five years or so. She wound up there at our suggestion and without getting too deep into it I will just say that the island arc chain known as Hawaii is situated over a remote hot spot in the floor beneath the South Pacific and is the most isolated habitable location on the planet making it a fantastic place to suggest for your mother-in-law to move to. For a while she lived in a short school bus parked on an acre of land that we have in the jungle between Hilo and Pahoa. It’s a nice enough parcel but in the school bus it had to be a little intense. The vegetation throbs down there because of all the rain and the heat can sometimes be sweltering. She has since moved up to Lee’s condo in Hilo.
Lee was a seasoned traveler, but he hasn’t been getting around too well of late. Seventy-two years old, with Parkinson’s Disease. Six foot four inches tall. In need of a cane, and on medications which make him a bit slow to react and that disorient him in crowds. Lee had by far the best third world travel resumé out of our crew. In the 1970’s he travelled overland from India to Pakistan, through Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Turkey. He has a tendency to make the people around him more patient. I realize that seventy-two means different things to different people, and that it is possible to remain light footed and independent past a hundred years. That isn’t the case with Lee. He told me recently that he understands that he absolutely needs help from people, and that he is fine with that and that he is most appreciative and willing to accept the help. So Baba takes care of him mostly. He has a hard time buttoning his shirts and such because he often gets the shakes. They are a good match and seem to get along well. Baba can be extremely helpful and has no money. Lee needs a hand and has a little bit of money and a small apartment with an ocean view.
Gea and I aren’t exactly into scuba diving. But it was a big part of our first trip to Thailand, and how we met originally in Honduras, which is a fun place for a guy from Philadelphia to meet a girl from Ohio. I was on my way to Costa Rica with my medium-sized brown mutt and an ’89 Ford Bronco--the big one with the rear seat popped out so it was like a cavern back there. For the most part it was just the dog and I, stopping at surf breaks and putting the Spanish together, but I had a lot of co-pilots along the way. I wanted to get certified to scuba dive and I had heard of this little island off the Caribbean coast of Honduras that was supposed to have world class reefs, inexpensive dive schools and a pulsing traveler’s scene. I had to leave the Bronco in a secured lot and ferry out to the island with the dog. It’s being polite calling Utila an island. What I remember is mainly a swamp with just enough stable ground to anchor a few piers to. It was beautifully set, but the place itself was gross. The local scene plus the diver traffic created a significant enough population to produce some real waste. Whatever sewer system there was, if any, must have been low-tech, and the stench of the sewage was viscous when the winds weren’t kind. There was nowhere to walk to. There were exactly two things to do; dive and drink. After a few days I had completed my open water certification course and decided that it was a good time to let loose a bit. If I made a fool of myself I could always jump on the ferry the next morning, head south and not think about it again. The joy of solo traveling. I wound up smiling for a lot of cheesy photographs, saw two eastern Canada girls work as hard as I’ve ever seen anybody work on on a dance floor, and eventually wound up on the second floor deck of my guest house doing shots of tequila and explaining to an Argentinian fire juggler named Guillermo that in a couple of days I was going to be driving south into Nicaragua and then on to Costa Rica and that it was just me and my dog in my rig, having no idea that during this rambling drunk conversation that was grinding along in two broken languages, two southbound girls with backpacks were eavesdropping from the patio just beneath our feet. The next day was one of those where it was way too hot to be hung over in the room and way too bright to be hung over outside. I Couldn’t read or play Sudoku. I was just drinking water near the dog and using my mind to try and make the sun go down faster. I must admit that I was stunned to be suddenly approached by two pretty girls and invited to dinner.
“Almost nothing important happens to you because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer” (Wallace 291).
Baba and Lee were supposed to meet us at the old Bangkok airport, known as the Don Muang, on January 2nd for a short flight down to the southern island region. They should’ve been in Thailand for two days already, but there wasn’t any word from them on the email, and their Facebook pages were idle. As the flight boarded we were moderately stressed. They could have conceivably gotten themselves stuck anywhere in Asia. Lee could have fallen. They might have overpacked and been too slow to make their connections. Telling Baba not to bring much could still have resulted in her traveling with four hairdryers, in case the first three broke.
On January 2nd or 3rd, 2004 Gea and I flew to Ventianne, the capitol of Laos. Catching flights out of Bangkok to other destinations in Thailand or to neighboring Asian countries wasn’t a hassle like it could be in the United States. Back then you could just show up and board a plane to somewhere for a reasonable sum. Laos issued tourist visas at the airport, we got stamped in, and I swapped a hundred dollar bill at the exchange booth for the local currency known as the Kip. The cashier returned a stack of folding money that for the first time in my life made me feel naked without a leather briefcase and a handcuff attaching its handle to my wrist. This is not a joke. I seriously had to give away my beloved red hoodie from the Surf Shop in Ocean City to accommodate the cash.
Both Gea and I had a hankering to try some of the opium that was grown in the Golden Triangle region that encompasses pieces of Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar; up the Mekong River a ways from where “Apocalypse Now” took place. Closest city to it in Laos was called Luang Phabang. We rented a cozy room there, visited Buddhist temples, and did a little shopping. Gea hung back one day reading Ralph Metzner while I ventured out for the day with a tour guide; a spry older man with a polite disposition who sang his English, Mr. Noo. On our way back from trekking out to one of the remote villages where I was casually offered a girl of about eleven named Ms. Pa to be my wife, we stopped by a bazaar. On one of the stairwells at the busy vendor’s market I bought couple of grams of opium from a woman that I was pretty sure intended to scam me. The sticky black tar she had wrapped in a scrap of newspaper could have been anything really. Later we tried to smoke it out of a pipe like it was weed, which just didn’t work and so I figured I got robbed of fifteen bucks and it was no big deal; but I didn’t toss it.
From Luang Phabang there were a variety of ways to back across the border, the most exciting of which was to take the river. Boats traveled against the current of the gloomy Mekong from Laos to the northeastern town of Chiang Rai in Thailand, but it wasn’t close. Slow boats took two days but the speedboat could make the trip in eight hours. We purchased tickets aboard the speedboat from a vendor for very little money, four or five inches of stacked Kip at the most, and agreed to be back there with all of our gear at eight the following morning. We were on time and the boat was not and I recall chatting up some Japanese college kids who were traveling as well, and wishing there was somewhere to get coffee. The Japanese left on the slow boat, leaving only Gea and myself at the dock with two girls--who I knew were from Switzerland because of the flags on their packs--that were keeping mainly to themselves. Suddenly someone materialized from the jungle with threadbare life preservers and four full face helmets, the kind normally worn by folks who do backflips on motorcycles. He said that the speedboat would soon be coming so we started making final adjustments to our gear, stowing books and using the toilet, etc., when I happened upon the newspaper with the market opium buried underneath a pile of Kip in my pocket. I asked Gea what she thought we ought to do with it seeing as it was probably not a good idea to carry drugs, especially bunk drugs that aren’t even worth it, across the border from Laos to Thailand, and we discussed our various options which were to either toss it or eat it. We opted for the latter, Gea took a nibble and I had the rest, and it wasn’t bunk.
The flat-bottomed boat then arrived narrow as a canoe, not six meters long, with low side walls and a throaty outboard motor that pushed it right across the surface like a dart when the propeller was trimmed up. The four of us passengers had to lie in a single file line with our backs supported by our own gear and were instructed not to lean too far to starboard or to port and to not fidget too much even though our ass cheeks were planted in splintery wood, there was chop on the surface of the river, and the trip was eight hours long. It makes sense to me that a person who didn’t just eat a glob of opium would find the speedboat trip up the Mekong distasteful. I can appreciate that it would be hard to stay immersed in the beauty of the jungle, the remoteness of where we were, and the allure of the creatures that slithered deep down in the water with the whine of the engine running wide open, the utter discomfort of the pose and the face of the driver which was always one of concern. I couldn’t feel a thing in my body. I was the boat, I was the water and I was the jungle. Gea was also but a little less so because of the modesty of her bite. I could have kept going on that boat, straight to the headwaters on the Tibetan Plateau. What was harder for me was getting off. There was a steep hill from the pier to immigration on the Thailand side of the river and my feet failed me instantly upon contacting the ground. I was landsick, vomiting into the current until I was completely hollowed out. Some people helped to carry my pack, Gea and others kept my balance and took most of my weight going up the hill. I was in good enough shape by the time we all got up there to walk through the guard shack and get my papers stamped. I was exhausted but didn’t sleep at all that night because of this terrifying itch all over my body, like being swarmed with bedbugs. I was a mess but Gea really helped me out and kept laughing about it.
Lee stumbled up during the final boarding call looking zombified, and with a decent story. Baba was trailing fifty meters behind. When they first got to the airport in Hilo, Lee discovered that he was without his wallet and passport--kind of important shit when you’re traveling--so a friend needed to deliver the goods to them before they could go through security. Sounds like it was close, but they missed the plane and their connection from Honolulu to Japan. Apparently there was some hope of catching up with their scheduled connection to Bangkok but those hopes were dashed when some hundred year flood shut down the airport in Honolulu for an entire day. Couple thousand bucks and two full days of travel got them finally to Thailand, in the middle of the night. Lee had taken a fall on an escalator in the Tokyo airport and had a bruising pattern consistent with attacks by rabid chihuahua packs. They had only gotten a couple of hours of rest before needing to come and meet us, and somehow they were unable to procure a tuk tuk or a cab from their hotel and had to split up onto the backs of separate motorcycles for a white knuckler to the Don Muang Airport. Baba sauntered up in her tie-dyed tank top and Einstein hair looking like a witch on vacation shouting ‘We made it!’
Part of what makes this universe work is the fact that all chemical reactions (that we know of) accelerate with increases in temperature. And it is for precisely this reason that travelers not acclimated to tropical climes are susceptible to a whole gang of acute disorders including: bacterial infections, parasites, lesions on the skin, sun and heat stroke, food poisoning, Montezuma’s Revenge...Zizi woke up in the middle of the night sick and we needed to get him some help. I called the front desk of our resort requesting a doctor and the night clerk said he would be there right away. I was incredibly impressed with the efficiency of access to medical care in the region until he showed up minutes later, sweating, and offering me a voltage adapter. When he saw the sick kid he understood and got us to the International Hospital pretty quickly. It took an IV drip, two Zofran, and about six hours to stabilize the kid. His white blood cell count was high, signaling an infection of some kind and he had to be treated with antibiotics and observed for most of the following day. So we missed our last night at the Q Signature Resort and crashed at the hospital instead. The hospital occupied a building formerly known as the La Flora Hotel. There were four buildings connected by open air corridors and arranged around a well kept swimming pool. The gardens were tended, wi-fi was free and so was cable TV. We had a spacious room and bathroom to ourselves, and the doctors and nurses were all friendly and efficient. By the time we were dismissed/checked out of the La Flora we were on the hook for a full night’s stay, twelve hours of IV drip, five days worth of antibiotics and anti-nausea medication, an emergency room trip, three or four doctor visits, two stool samples and one blood sample; the bill was right around five hundred American dollars. Which is absolutely fair. I am afraid to think what an American hospital would tag a visitor for if the same thing occurred at home. North of five grand?
At the southern tip of the island of Koh Samui, Baba and Lee booked a simple guest house on the beach, while Gea, Zizi and myself stayed a few kilometers away, also on the beach, at a yoga retreat and detoxification resort called Samahita. Gea had lined up a three day detox program for her and I, and the plan was for Zizi to linger around the pool and eat from the buffet. It was a wonderfully clean and healthy place to spend some time even if a few parts of the detox program were pretty extreme, and occasionally uncomfortable. I include the following description of a typical day as a member of the detox program and intend it to be a plug/warning w/r/t the experience: It is necessary to be out of bed by six o’clock at the latest because the rituals that have to be undertaken before leaving the room are time consuming. First order of business is to down a mug of water that has been sitting out all night while fenugreek seeds sprout in a small mound at the mug’s bottom. There are four pills to be swallowed around the same time and can be taken with the fenugreek water or after: a Vitamin C pill, two probiotic capsules for building up the beneficial gut flora, and some ayurvedic herbs that contain at least turmeric and I am not sure what else. Next up is the nettie pot, always a fun time and a great thing to do when you are stuffy, or every day. For those who aren’t familiar, a nettie pot looks like a miniature tea kettle that gets filled with warm salt water. The spout is then inserted into a nostril and the water runs into the nostril, over the septum, and out the other nostril. The process is then repeated from the other side. It takes some getting used to but once you get the hang of it it becomes a very simple and basic health practice. After the nettie pot comes the fun one, a self-administered enema. Everything about how this gets accomplished was news to me a few weeks ago, if you do these all the time you may just want to skip ahead a few sentences. The enema solution gets loaded into a plastic bag that looks just like the bag that the Potassium IV drips or saline solutions or whatever flow out of. It has a tube that runs out of it that is cinched off with a plastic clip. The bag gets hung from a towel rod in the shower stall, loaded up with two liters of room temperature coffee, and the recipient of the enema lies on the ground on their left side. Because of the shape of the large intestine it is critical to be on the left side of the body so there’s a natural flow into the descending colon, across the transverse colon, and into the ascending colon. Before insertion it is important to bleed the air out of the system so that there is no risk of a reverse fart. The rectum is then lubricated and the tube is to be inserted three or four centimeters. If everything checks out at this point and Houston gives the go the clip can be released and the two liters of coffee will gravity feed into the lower digestive tract. The urge to go potty is severe at first but with careful breath control and prayer the feeling crests and then recedes like a wave. When the bag is empty, the tube is removed and the best idea is to lie on the back and massage the abdominal wall, starting low on the left, moving up toward the ribs, across and down the other side. Instructions are to stay like this for ten minutes and unfortunately there are no instructions regarding what to think about during these ten minutes. When the buzzer goes off it is time to go to the toilet and eliminate; it seems unnecessary to elaborate further. Silliness aside, the idea is to reconstitute stuck material and to clean the body out. People have euphoric experiences during the detox, but it’s largely because they have a lot of toxins to cough up. Most civilized people take a shower after their enemas. Cleaned up and cleaned out it is not time for breakfast but yoga. Half an hour of pranayama breathing practice is followed by an hour and a half of asanas (which are yoga poses) led by one of the resort’s top notch instructors, and conducted in a beachfront shala that gets a fresh ocean breeze and is protected from the sun by a roof of thatched palm. By this time it is 9:30 and people are typically hungry enough to eat the beach sand, which isn’t necessary because the buffet gets brought out and is replete with food that is perfectly ripe and organic, there are always delicious soups and curries, fresh baked bread and tropical fruit juices that don’t have added sugar, mueseli and thick homemade yogurt. The trouble is that the buffet isn’t available to the cleansers. The cleansers are supposed to be eating only high alkaline, low salt mush. Don’t get me wrong, it was still pretty decent food. It’s just that a plate of sliced papaya, a bowl of kitchiri and a psyllium husk shake is hard to rally for when the buffet looks so creative and healthy. There is some time to relax and read in the afternoon but the detoxers normally have several body treatments to make it to. They have an infrared sauna that is closet sized and they like to put you in there for thirty minutes and crank up the heat. It’s such a small space that the body heat coming off of the cleanser tends to make the room keep getting hotter and hotter and there isn’t enough room to lay down on the floor and beg for mercy like there is in lot of saunas. Of course you can bail early, if you want to like stay toxic. The more pleasant body treatments can be selected from a menu and they are all administered in rooms that are extremely soothing and clean by top flight technicians. They offer Thai massage and Swedish, aromatherapy, face and head massages, foot massages, facials and pedicures, draining of the lymphatic system, etc. I tried most of them and they were all wonderful. The toughie is the colonic. You would think the daily enema would be sufficient, but part of the core of this detox therapy is a colonic treatment that is thorough and uses the latest available colon cleansing technology. It’s not dissimilar to the enema experience other than it takes place on a gurney rather than the shower floor, and instead of it being a gravity flow in and gravity take out situation, the tube is attached to the motor of a BMW 325i which is operated by the estranged amigo of Bart Simpson, one Mr. Seymour Butts. The colonic experience was previewed for me by one of the other cleansers, a stocky Euro named Arnüd. Arnüd had undertaken his detoxification mission alone and of his own accord and looked like he needed it. Seems like he dropped five kilos in just the short time that we were there. He was a financial advisor for a chain of DIY stores based in his native France, and expanding across Russia. It sounded like a stressful gig, especially when explained in the context of trying to survive the winter in an the Russian city of Yakutsk where it gets so bitter cold that the process of walking to the corner store for a loaf of bread caries the risk of becoming cryogenically frozen on the sidewalk until April or May. The water in Russia, according to Arnüd, is worse than in Mexico. He told me that it is only possible to drink purchased mineral water and that the shower stall requires two separate filters just to be considered safe enough for rinsing the skin. Scary. Arnüd really dug his colonic experience. He laid a soundbite on me in that endearing accent that only native French speakers seem to be able to apply to English, ‘First it feels like you absolutely must go poop, but after that, you feel so light.’ Gentle yoga is from five until six. After yoga there are more herbs to take which the staff of the detox center will deliver to you wherever you are along with a fresh coconut. The cleansers enjoy a bland mung bean soup for dinner and tell themselves they aren’t even interested in the buffet. I am compelled to insert here the fact that Gea and I completely surrendered to the buffet by the end of the cleanse. It just didn’t make any sense that we were starving ourselves in front of the healthiest spread we had ever come across. We don’t drink alcohol or coffee, eat meat or smoke tobacco. We didn’t have too much in us worth detoxing and persevering with the kitchiri and the mung bean soup seemed ridiculous. Plus getting into the buffet line seemed to facilitate a relationship with some of the other guests who weren’t on any detox program, my favorite of which was a permanent resident of the Samahita community, a guy named Big Wave Dave who broke his neck on a giant day at Macaha back in ’81, and he was still hurting from it, which meant he still had a reason to keep telling the story. He gave me a book that someone had given to him because he was dyslexic and couldn’t read it. ‘Wasn’t my fault’ he said, ‘fuckers built the high school right next to a damn right point break.’ He also gave me a t-shirt from Carlsbad Pipeline that had either shrunk on him or he had outgrown. After dinner there was more opportunity for massages and usually a yoga nidra class (which is a guided relaxation undertaken lying down). Back at the room it was more herbs and probiotics, don’t forget to soak tomorrow’s fenugreek seeds, and meditate for ten minutes while staring at a candle before tucking into the nest of crispy white sheets.
During the time we spent chilling at Samahita I knocked out a few hundred pages of Infinite Jest. The two conflicting scenes seeming to me brutally incongruous. Infinite Jest, among other things, is about addiction, and about people who are struggling to recover from their addictions. It’s painful, boring and ugly. Everything I didn’t see when I looked around the pool. I have no intention of lamenting what is obviously a charmed existence, I just have a lot of respect for Wallace for not turning his gaze away from the suffering around him. He was a smart man and he was fucked up. I have made the mistake before of trying to analyze his death through the lens of his fiction, and I realize now that that can’t be done. It just breaks my heart that a person who was clearly capable of such extraordinary levels of empathetic capacity couldn’t will himself to keep going. When I close my eyes and picture him dead it is easier for me to see him nailed up to a cross than it is dangling from an electrical cord-no doubt perfectly tied with a fisherman’s knot to the rafters of his California garage-by a two page note and a neatly stacked draft of The Pale King.
Diving in Thailand is just as cheap as Honduras, and the whole scene is much prettier. When Gea and I first traveled down to the Bay of Bengal and Koh Phi Phi, we figured we should at least try to drop down under the surface for a couple of tanks. Trouble was that both of us had neglected to mail in our paperwork to PADI(1) after the course that both of us did in Honduras, so we weren’t proven certified, which meant we couldn’t just dive without taking another beginning diver’s course. I remember being a bit annoyed with myself for the clerical oversight. To be honest, at that point of my life, paperwork was not my thing so I am not surprised that I blew off mailing the packet in. For some reason Gea and I split up for an afternoon. I must have been trying to talk a dive shop into taking us out while she was looking for a place for us to shack up on the island. I didn’t have any luck, until I met back up with Gea who had news of a random and incredible sort. The dude who was our dive master on Utila was a scrawny Brit with a sunken chest named Leo. He wore his hair like Eddy Munster, had big silver hoops in each ear, never stopped smoking cigarettes when above water and generally conducted himself like his shit didn’t stink. When you are diving it is important not to touch the coral in an effort to preserve the fragile ecosystems. One of Leo’s pat lines that he fed to the aspiring divers that he took responsibility for training was You are more important to me than the coral, pause, but barely. Leo took his job seriously and I don’t mean to imply that I didn’t like him much. Let’s just say I thought he was more pleasant underwater. Somehow Gea encountered this dude on Koh Phi Phi, exactly twelve time zones away from the last place we saw him. He was still with his spacey American girlfriend Twyla, and it was his bloody birthday. We had some drinks with them and he vouched for our experience so that we could dive. Weird luck. We wound up diving pretty close to the region where another famous Leo, one Mr. Dicaprio, starred in a moderately controversial, shot on location adventure film called “The Beach.” The controversy was mostly attached to the ecological damage the production inflicted on the areas that it inhabited and I can neither confirm nor deny the allegations other than to say it was still a gorgeous venue and the massive tsunami caused by an earthquake in the ocean floor beneath the Bay of Bengal cleansed it thoroughly eleven months later.
Lee is a wonderful storyteller. Not only that, he has an endless supply. He retired about ten years ago from a career in the film business. He was a cinematographer, a producer, and a director of mainly shorter length stuff and commercials. He seems to know all of those Chevy Chase era celebrities. Lee did a lot of work on the I Love NY campaign from the 1980’s, hung around the set of Sesame Street(2), and worked for a while as one of the producers on The Muppet Show. He either has a tremendous pool of material to work with or a razor sharp memory because Lee tells me stories all the time and he almost never repeats one. Over breakfast at the Banyan House one morning he related the details of a back stage moment alongside Jim Henson. Lee must have been hoarse and coughing into his fist. Afterwards he apologized to Jim and blamed a frog in his throat. As if on cue Jim slid his arm into Kermit’s body and replied in character ‘Anyone I know?’ That really got him laughing. Since Lee’s mind free associates he is prone from going from one story to talking about a wholly unrelated matter in seamless fashion. Somehow from the Kermit thing he got to talking about synthetic wolf urine, which apparently gardeners that he knew in upstate New York would distribute at the perimeters of their properties so that mammals that were wolf prey would naturally steer clear of the crops. The thing Lee liked about the synthetic wolf urine was that it was called Not Tonight Deer. He has a great sense of humor, and we tend to get one another’s jokes. I could sit in a hammock and listen to him all day. Lee saw Jimi get choppered into Woodstock, and Zappa take a dump on stage.
After Koh Samui we traveled north to the not as big as Bangkok but still monstrous Asian city of nearly ten million people, Chiang Mai. Baba and Lee took a plane straight to it while Gea, Zizi and myself took the scenic route which included a couple buses(3) and cabs, a lengthy ferry boat ride, a short flight back into Bangkok, and then an overnight train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. On our first trip to Thailand we had a great time on the overnight train, although neither of us can recall from where or to where we rode it. It must have been northbound out of Phuket after we went scuba diving. We both recall getting plastered with a British couple in the dining car. I remember crying over a situation regarding the British woman’s daughter but the woman’s name and most of the pertinent details are lost to me. By that point of the trip Gea and I had covered a ton of ground, we had met a ton of people and consumed a ton of beer and we were perhaps running out of steam. We used the narrowness of the train corridors to brace ourselves on the way back to our private sleeper car where we were too weary and passed out, but not for long. Something happened to the train, like it broke, and we wound up having to sit outside for hours in the middle of nowhere, waiting to be transferred to a bus.We nursed hangovers while watching the sun come up above the jungle. When I write it down it sounds like torture but for some reason I remember it so fondly. I may just be one of those people who loves trains. Zizi got a kick out of the train ride. We didn’t get a private car this time because they were sold out, but the seats in the second class cabin turned into bunk beds that had curtains and the mood in the car overall was festive. There were nine or ten ladies set up next to us, all Thai, they looked liked sisters or relatives, and they were off together on what seemed like a fun trip. They had a lot of shopping bags full of cheap cookies and bean-filled puffy buns that they kept trying to push on us. The food from the dining car was a little scary, coming off a little more Chinese than Thai, but the beds were comfortable and during the night I flipped the middle page of Infinite Jest.
Chiang Mai provides an almost annoying amount of tourist activities, especially during the peak travel months of the year. Gea and Zizi like to spend time with exotic animals when we travel, and while this is not as much my thing, it is something that I am happy to exist on the periphery of, and that I find incredibly compelling in its totality. The five of us took two separate day trips, one to the Tiger Kingdom and one to an elephant preserve. The two experiences were delivered by organizations that co-exist in a region with highly conflicted philosophies (consumption vs. preservation) and neither of these businesses would ever be allowed to function in a place like the United States which is completely saturated with lawyers. The Tiger Kingdom provides the opportunity to spend intimate time with Bengal tigers of all ages. At nine years old Zizi was only permitted to go into the enclosure with the smallest batch. There were four tiger cubs in the cement enclosure, all of them about three months old. They were cute, as kittens tend to be, and they were playful and seemed indifferent to being taunted constantly by people to play and roll around and have their pictures taken. I stayed on the other side of the chain link watching and snapping shots when I could. I can’t deny feeling like those babies should have been friskier. After, Zizi, Gea, Baba and Lee came out of the baby cage, Gea and I took a fifteen minute turn in the enclosure with the grown ups. At any given time the Tiger Kingdom allowed six or seven tourists and two handlers to be in a cage with three full grown Bengal tigers who were for some reason okay with being pet and hugged and photographed incessantly. Here is what I knew about Bengal Tigers before I showed up at the kingdom: they tend to be about the size of two men when they are grown, normally orange and black striped with white underbellies and big scruffy heads, Their ears perk, they have four strong paws with sharp claws, they have fangs, they kill stuff and then eat it raw...basically vicious killers. These cats fit the profile but had very little spunk. It was ill advised to approach them from the front and there was a moment when one of the cats approached the photographer and the man showed a look of true fear. One of the other handlers had to holler and distract the big tiger with a bamboo pole dressed with banana leaves that was apparently an irresistible tiger toy. Something was clearly rotten in Denmark. Occasionally one got spunky but those tigers slept through an insane amount of being poked and prodded. I couldn’t buy that they were just well fed and used to human contact. Even in midday the cats’ level of lethargy and apathy was unnatural.(4) That being said, the fifteen minutes we spent in there was intense. Those tigers could have easily killed anyone in that enclosure in one swift bite or scratch and they would have probably been justified in doing so. An odd detail about the Tiger Kingdom is that there are literally no facts or data offered up about the tigers. No latin names, eating and exercise regimens, no specifics on how they are propagated or what happens to what must be truckloads of tigers that are either too old or for some reason ineligible to remain in service at the kingdom. Anyone who has ever been around cats knows that getting them to mate in heat doesn’t take a whole lot of finesse. The kingdom always has a population of cubs for kids to hang out with. So where are all of them? It is an obvious speculation and at the tiger kingdom I occasionally overheard a group conversing in a language that I could understand arrive at the logical conclusion that the extra tigers are sold off to the world’s network of zoos where there is more than enough desire to adopt them and sufficient funding to take care for them. Hogwash. Some light research reveals that zoos are also over producing Bengal tigers on their own. The tigers aren’t endangered because they have been hunted near to extinction, they are endangered because all of their native habitats have been obliterated by people. There is no wild left to release them into. I haven’t any firm proof of what happens to most of the tigers born at the Tiger Kingdom, but if you made me guess, I would say that they are probably parted out. The hides are probably tailored into jackets for wealthy Russians, the whiskers and testicles probably end up in soup bowls in China, and the guts probably get extruded into tennis racquet strings, some of which may go on to win Wimbledon.
Elephants are another big creature that is simultaneously revered and exploited in Asia. In the not too distant past many Thai elephants were forced into the service of logging companies. These days a supposed moratorium on logging has got many elephants looking for new work, and where else is there to go better than into the tourist business. Of course I am being facetious about elephants looking for work. I am pretty sure that most elephants would prefer to eat grass, bath, hang out and take big dumps all day. Fortunately, the elephant preserve that we selected to visit simply rescues elephants that were injured or incompatible with their previous situations. They do not schlep tourists on their backs or do tricks on command. Information on Asian and African elephants is very accessible, and so are opportunities for big-hearted people who want to do something to aid the suffering pachyderm community. The elephants at the preserve were all Asian elephants,
Elephus maximus, slightly smaller than their African cousins,
Laxodanta africana. Female Asian elephants do not have tusks and many of the males never develop them either, which is the result of breeding out the tendency and probably offers the species some protection from poachers. They were exceptionally smart animals, about thirty five in total living at the three hundred acre preserve. Most roamed free. An ornery teenager named Junior had to be chained in four directions because of his tendency to get into fights with the other males. Giant mounds marked the grave sites of fallen elephants and one of the handlers told me that they not only attend the funerals of the other members of their herds but return daily to pay respect. They sweat from the areas just above the cuticle. They had teeth the size and weight of Russian kettlebells, and their bone free trunks containing 150,000 individual muscles were powered by fifteen to twenty kilo hearts. Older ones had caved in temples which is a good way to gauge an elephant’s age. The place was started by a Thai woman named Lek who crusades for animal welfare. In addition to the elephants, the preserve hosted a herd of seventy water buffalo and four hundred dogs, all of whom were displaced after a terrible flood that damaged a neighboring region in 2011. It was an odd mix. Dogs and elephants everywhere. The pooches wearing red collars were known biters and we were warned not to pet those. Most of the dogs were available for adoption. All of them were mutts. Many of them alert and well-proportioned. Anyone interested in learning more about Lek’s operation, or contributing to the challenges that she faces keeping her massive responsibilities in watermelons and bananas should visit
www.saveelephants.org.
It was the busiest time of the year in Chiang Mai and it was easy to tell by the stench. The city’s drainage system had to be functioning at or just beyond its capacity. And I am sad to report that things with Gea and myself were the pits. Probably a bi-product of being endlessly distracted but it didn’t much matter. For reasons outside the scope of this narrative, we simply weren’t getting along. The luster of our previous trip to Thailand had clearly faded. I think that we were still enjoying our time there, we just weren’t really enjoying it together. Zizi’s getting sick had added some tension, and the two of us have occasionally conflicting philosophies and methodologies, especially during emergencies. Sometimes things get amplified at unpredictable times. Traveling and vacationing are not the same thing.
Ten years ago I had a leather jacket custom made at a tailor in Bangkok. Water buffalo hide, lined with silk; a very good quality jacket. It still fits just right, and I’d vowed that if I ever made it back to Thailand, that I would get myself a suit made. I finally got around to it on what would have been my dad’s seventieth birthday, if he were still alive. He was himself a haberdasher, and because of him I will always have a tender spot for guys who wear tape measures draped around their necks and have blunt rectangles of marking chalk in their pockets. I wasn’t sure where to go so I called the number of a shop with a respectable looking brochure in the hotel lobby, and they were glad to send a tuk tuk to collect me right away. The tailor’s shop wound up being a small place situated near a few of the bigger luxury hotels in town, The Empress and Shangi La. It was run by a guy named Sunny who had moved to Thailand from India about ten years previous. We hit it off. I got to telling him stories about my dad and he told me about his baby boy and his plans to blow up his tailoring empire on the internet. We flipped through catalogues and talked men’s fashion. I settled on a leisure suit in gray cashmere with some thin, salmon-colored, vertical stripes. Two shirts, one in a contrasting earthy coral tone and the other pure black. I also fell for a corduroy sport coat, a three button with a tab collar on the right side. I had to go back for a couple of fittings and the suit wound up just about perfectly. As far as the sport coat was concerned, Sunny’s team didn’t quite nail the look of the model in the designer’s catalogue. It’s a fine line, what looks good and what does not. For me, it was the experience of it all that I was after. I grew up in and around the men’s clothing business; trimming storefronts, cleaning fitting room mirrors, collecting the alterations from the back room by the press and hustling them up to the register. I like the ambiance of men’s clothing stores and still find myself in them all the time, only as a shopper. I have weaknesses for cowboy boots, Diesel jeans, finely tailored coats, and Gore-Tex.
In Infinite Jest there is a lot of content from meetings that are mostly directed at people who are suffering from substance abuse, and who have chemical dependency issues that are ruining their lives, and they are trying to find ways to survive themselves and for a lot of them Alcoholics Anonymous and similarly structured organizations work. The curious point is why the heck does it work, and that question is well addressed in the text despite the answer remaining a mystery. Wallace calls the AA old timers Crocs because they have been there forever and the Crocs have all these epithets that are alternately corny and true. Ask a Croc how AA works and they’ll respond that It works just fine. An interesting fact about AA is that it is an organization that it is one hundred percent impossible to get kicked out of. In fact the more fucked up a person is, the more they engage another of their mantras, Keep Coming Back. It is understood that addiction to attending meetings and support groups in an effort to get over an addiction to a substance is simply swapping one addiction for another. For most of the audience at AA it’s about surviving another day, substance free. I am in no position to judge the situation at all. I have smoked marijuana more or less all day every day for twenty straight years. I’m not fried, in fact I feel anti-fried, as interested in everything as I could imagine being. What frightens me is whether or not I could remain interested without it, or if I could even concentrate at all. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t stop without help. Hal Incandanza, who is DFW thinly disguised in the anti-novel, is grappling with the same question at seventeen years old.(5) Hal is a resident at an academy that trains high level tennis players both physically and academically. I never made it personally to the level of tournament tennis that the youngsters in IJ flirt with, but I did have a first hand experience as a competitor in tournament tennis as a teenager. I had a difficult time controlling my emotions on the court, particularly my temper. Tennis is an immensely complex game that is affected by a large (sometimes very large depending on the weather) but still finite number of variables and the only person in a position to compute them is the one person holding the racquet. Of course the environment within the mind of the player factors largely in the equation which is why it is said that at a certain level the differences amongst athletes is strictly mental. In front of a gallery in particular it is possible for an emotional youth to inflict an excruciating amount of pressure on themselves. As a parent I sometimes secretly wish that my son gets himself into something with a slightly lower potential for long term damage, like American football. As far as AA is concerned, it’s nice to know that people are out there doing what they can to help. “Just about everybody in the White Flag Group tries so hard to be so disgustingly humble, kind, helpful, tactful, cheerful, nonjudgmental, tidy, energetic, sanguine, modest, generous, fair, orderly, patient, tolerant, attentive, truthful. It isn’t like the group makes them do it. It’s more like that the only people who end up able to hang for serious time in AA are the ones who willingly try to be these things. This is why, to the cynical newcomer or fresh Ennet House resident, serious AAs look like these weird combination of Gandhi and Mr. Rogers with tattoos and enlarged livers and no teeth who used to beat wives and diddle daughters and now rhapsodize about their bowel movements. It’s all optional; do it or die” (Wallace 357).
Lee, of course had all sorts of pertinent questions for me w/r/t my suit buying mission. He was curious to know if I had chosen a single breasted or a double breasted coat, wether the pants had cuffs, how many pleats if there were any pleats, the width of the lapels, and about the look of the shoulder pads. His inquiries betrayed a knowledge of the men’s garment business so I asked how he came to be so well informed. Lee went on to tell a chain of stories about living in the garment district in New York City. It is a place my dad use to take an annual trip up to from Philadelphia to make purchases and I don’t recall ever making the trip personally. Lee told me about all the stores that sold only one thing, like only buttons, or only zippers, only cufflinks, etc. My dad used to tell similar stories. Lee told me about coming into possession of thirty one unique wedding gowns and selling them one by one out of his apartment. I told him my suit was single-breasted, with shoulder pads that made me look slightly tougher but not ridiculous, the lapels were of modest width, and that the pants were without pleats or cuffs. Lee followed a tangent, and his stories about living in the garment district ended with him and a woman he had just met smoking Afghani hash on one of those ubiquitous Manhattan fire escapes.
Gea and I lucked out and had a good day together before leaving Chiang Mai. We signed up for a cooking class that wound up being a big hit. Zizi and Baba cooked also (Lee spent the afternoon relaxing on a couch). Besides the four of us there was a German couple who attended University and were extending a trip that they had initially undertaken to be at a friend’s New Year’s Day wedding in Bangkok, and two eastern Canadiens who were on the lamb from a bitter cold winter at home. It was hard to tell if they were a couple or not, she was a school teacher and heading home shortly thereafter while we he was continuing on to Australia for several months, supported by his suspiciously lucrative one truck, one employee window cleaning service in Toronto. A very cute Thai woman named Miw hosted the class. She spoke excellent English and had a sharp wit. We met her first at the local market to shop for produce. Miw made a dramatic entrance wearing her magenta apron and white helmet with opaque visor while operating a disproportionately big motorcycle. An Asian market with a tour guide is a revelation, the possibilities begin to open up. Particularly with respect to flavorful roots that can be tough to come by, like Thai ginseng and galangal. The class was held under a shade canopy in the backyard of her little bungalow. There were cutting stations for up to ten people, and everyone got their own gas burner and wok. Gea and I made a green papaya salad which was freakishly spicy and delicious. Green papaya salad always seems spicier to me than any other food, Miw said it’s because the peppers are fresh, not cooked. She claimed green papaya salad to be the ultimate hangover food, and one of those rare dishes containing all five flavors; sweet from palm sugar, spicy from the chili, sour from the lime, salty from the fish sauce, and bitter from the lime rind. Zizi joined the spring roll team and made himself a deep-fried snack. For our entree, Gea and I made massaman curry, which Miw called muscleman curry, because it had the most dry ingredients of the curries and required the most effort with the stone mortar and pestle set. Everyone in the group got along well and it was fun to eat the food that we had just made and talk about how many Euros a plate of it would fetch in Germany or France.
Body work is available all over the place at not to be denied prices, so it is pretty much required that one be massaged often in Thailand. On the streets it’s more hit than miss. The parlors to avoid seem to be the ones with nice brochures. Someone in Thailand is hip to stock photography and there is no reason to believe that where you are headed will resemble the photos at all. Gea and I made this mistake one day in an effort to go get a good marathon massage together. We found a good deal on a three hour package, the parlor sent a tuk tuk for us and it was a little further away than seemed necessary and a little creepy when we got there. The host was one of those notorious she-boys with a mini skirt hemmed so high that it was just begging people to stare at it and try to spot the tip of a penis which surely must be dangling somewhere in sight but never is. They soaked our feet in Kafir lime skins which was nice but they used plastic wash basins that I kept feeling may also have been used for washing dirty dishes. The Thai portion of the massage was gentle and a little flat. From there the masseuses moved on to the famous method of massaging with hot compresses, which can be nice but in this case just felt like being eternally wiped with scorching hot rags. There was a facial and I had to wear a yogurt mask for like thirty minutes of pure torture because I didn’t like the smell of it and it was slathered on heavily just under my nostrils. Although I will say that my skin felt nice when they finally wiped it off. Of all of the Thai massages that I have gotten (and there have been so many that you would think I took at on as some sort of charitable fund raiser), it sticks out as one of the poorer, while still having been funny and an experience I am glad we had.
Back in Bangkok, adjacent to the protest zone, in a swanky hotel called the Siam Siam, things went off the rails. Systemic issues in my relationship with Gea had flared in the islands, again in Chiang Mai, and then erupted on the streets around the hotel. Gea and I were not communicating well, and I found myself possessed by a powerful desire to be elsewhere. It was evident that we needed to spend some time apart. Baba and Lee had a room a few floors below and were able to help out with Zizi. The tastefully decorated, air-conditioned rooms that soared above the streets felt suddenly very distant to me from Thailand. I engaged the backpack feature of my overstuffed piece of normally rolling hybrid luggage, rode the elevator down to the ground level, and took a couple of days to myself.
Just a block away from the Siam Siam hotel, the people of Thailand had closed down a few square kilometers to hold a sit in protest designed to instigate reform before the upcoming elections. Thailand is governed mainly by Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra who happens to be the sister of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, a billionaire living in self-imposed exile since 2009. Thailand’s middle class seems concerned that Shinawatra is using his sister as a puppet, and his money to sway the elections, particularly in rural provinces where the locals are perhaps being fed lies and false promises in exchange for their votes. Thailand’s government is a constitutional monarchy and King Bhumibol Adulyadej just had his eighty sixth birthday and is the world’s longest reigning monarch, though his reign is mostly figurative he is much loved and respected and capable of making a difference politically. I paid for a cheap room at a guest house inside the protest zone. There were plenty of vacancies since almost everyone was sleeping on the streets. At first I wandered cautiously through the protest zone looking for soldiers, cops, or armed protestors. There was none of that, in fact I never sensed even a shred of angst. It was the third full day of the sit in/road closure and it reminded me of Shakedown St. in the parking lot outside of a Grateful Dead concert. There was cheap street food, and beer for sale. Lots of booths hawked shirts and whistles. There was a platform stage in the middle of the road closure, with large screens and speakers that projected north, east, south and west so everyone could see and hear. The speakers changed about every fifteen minutes and the sounds of people’s cheers were occasionally deafening. I don’t know any Thai so I don’t have a good feel for the content of the speeches other than to say that I heard the word corruption a lot, or at least a skewed pronunciation of it. Thai sounds nothing like any Latin derived language and I found it odd that they borrowed that word. Thailand is ninety five percent Buddhist, they probably had to borrow the concept of corruption before they had to borrow the word to describe it. I couldn’t help thinking about how nice it would be to not even know what corruption meant. Not to be daft w/r/t the definition of the word itself, but to really not understand it at all.
I spent my final day in Thailand alone, hiding out in the city. I hired a tuk tuk to take me back to the Khao San so I could see it again. If I was going to tap the reset button on my life, those entropic streets seemed like the place to do it. There are probably very few languages I didn’t hear spoken that afternoon. I shopped around for goofy souvenirs and trinkets, and felt a little old because so much of what was there, which used to be for me just wasn’t for me anymore. The t-shirt selection was lewd but funny; a blow job is better than no job, a horned devil saying ‘God’s busy, can I help you?,’ I don’t need Google because my wife knows everything, a picture of the word Facebook written in cocaine with a blue finger-nailed brunette applying a coiled up Benjamin to one of the O’s, I get enough exercise pushing my luck, one of Pamela Anderson flipping the bird, an equally erotic one featuring a lot of ass cracks and ammunition, drink drank drunk, and the endearing if not somewhat condescending Same Same.
Massage isn’t the only type of bodywork it can be economically efficient to stock up on over there. I found a decent little dentist with a cleanish office and had him polish up my chompers for about fifteen bucks. At home it takes me four months to get an appointment with the esteemed hygienist, Clydine. In Thailand the actual dentist did the cleaning, rather than the hygienist, it only took fifteen minutes notice to get into the chair, and he even gave me the requisite lecture about flossing and I made the requisite promise that I would do a better job, though I’ve made that promise to American dentists before. So far I’ve been true to Dr. Parapat.
With my clean teeth, I sat at a table at a cozy cafe and alternately people watched, read Infinite Jest and thought for a few hours. Being as I was, in the midst of a relationship crisis, it would’ve been easy to be bitter. But I tried hard to elude that trap. Mostly I thought about Ahimsa and Sathya. Both of these concepts are structural components of the Yoga Tree. Ahimsa is the practice of doing no harm, in thought, word or in action. It is an exceptionally difficult practice but often considered to be the highest attainable human virtue. What often complicates its pursuit is Sathya, the next branch, which is the quest for truth. The process of navigating these two paths gets challenging when they run in different directions. As we all know, the truth can so often inflict harm. I don’t know how I summoned the motivation to get up from the table that afternoon. It was like getting out of the boat and off of the Mekong. My legs just felt changed beneath me.
Sexual Tourism is definitely a thing in Thailand and I am not a good source for information on the subject. For better or worse I have different addictions. But after tuk tuk-ing back to the fringes of the protest zone from the Khao San, the driver handed me a rather shocking laminated menu of things that could be witnessed for 500 Baht, which included by the way, one free beer. There must have been about twenty entrées I guess; pussy smoking a cigarette, pussy blowing out candles on a birthday cake, pussy eating with chopsticks, pussy peeling a mango, electric pussy, pussy opening a beer can, etc. Despite being generally curious (who wouldn’t be?) I passed because there are certain things that I am not morally capable of perpetuating; please understand that it also doesn’t bother me in the slightest that such opportunities do exist. With freedom comes weirdness and it is a good trade. I did read the whole menu.
The protest zone had thickened like a curry. Bangkok was buzzing everywhere I went. It kept lifting my spirits when they wanted to fall. I shelled out the last of my Baht on t-shirts and noodles then went to my room to recuperate, expecting the following day to be all about a brutal and tense flight back around the world.
It wound up being alright. Gea and I were both in the mood for amnesty. The wind was to be at our backs all day, and it so happened that both legs of our flight seemed to have more flight attendants on them than passengers. There was a thorough selection of on demand films and it was easy to get supplied with fresh drinking water. I was expecting anxious and it turned out to be restful, and there was plenty of time for me to continue working with the book.(6)
Re-acclimating to life at home after traveling is legitimately tough, especially when there have been many time zones traversed and the cultural backdrop is completely dissimilar. Routines need to be re-established, and summoning motivation for things like work isn’t easy to do. It was winter and thankfully the weekend, there weren’t any big disasters in our absence, and the house was clean and warm and a nice place to decompress from the trip. I hung out in the basement mostly, trying to keep some space between Gea and I without taking on anything too major in a weakened physical and emotional condition.
Science Night was coming up at Zizi’s school and we had started working on his presentation before the trip. It was an experiment that dealt with gravitational acceleration, and mostly just consisted of us timing balls and cars of various sizes and weights, to see how long it took each one to travel from the stripe at the top of our homemade wooden ramp to the stripe at the bottom. Each ball or car was rolled twenty times in an effort to reduce the possibility of human error tainting the experiment’s results. It’s a fascinating experiment. Zizi assumed, in his hypothesis, that the heavier balls would travel faster than the lighter ones, and that smaller balls would travel faster than the larger ones. Of course it doesn’t make any difference. Some of the balls which were softer or had coarse textures slowed up a little bit from frictional forces but almost all the other times were within a few hundredths of a second. Isaac Newton did almost the exact same experiment when he was working to understand gravity, and the results of the experiment can be used to work towards establishing gravitational acceleration for objects on earth,(7) as well as to establish the gravitational constant which can be used to calculate the active gravitational attraction between any two objects in the universe. Some years ago I was having a conversation about this very topic with a co-worker of mine named Timmy Kurkinen. At lunch we got into it over some pretty heavy subjects. Timmy didn’t have the benefit of my substantial experience with hallucinogenic drugs, but he had logged quite a few hours in church pews and was used to intense introverted thoughts and we were often able to meet up on some pretty high ground. Over lunch one afternoon we got to talking physics and I was explaining to him that the gravitational pull between him and I, calculated in Newtons, was precisely: Newton’s Gravitational Constant(8), multiplied by my mass in kilograms, multiplied by his mass in kilograms, and then divided by the square of the distance between us in meters. Timmy gave me one of his puzzled looks and told me it seemed stronger to him than that. I miss that kid. He said a lot of smart, simple things. And he’s right that the force of attraction between certain people on this planet defies description in the language of science. That’s how it is with Gea and I.
I know that it often seems easier to turn away from difficulty than it is to confront it. I think it’s because really confronting difficulty means confronting ourselves and that is the scariest thing to do. It’s pretty easy to behave as though our own flaws are justified, and that we should get to keep them while simultaneously holding other people accountable for theirs. I can blame being a little image-obsessed on growing up in the men’s fashion business in the 80s. I can blame my marijuana dependency on the Bolivian roommate they housed me with as a freshman at Penn State, and the fact that I have been surrounded by it for as long as I can remember. But those are just excuses not to deal. They make me sound like a victim and put me in the same category as the newly sober attendee of the AA meetings who has to state the reason they had to start drinking, or using heroin; they were abandoned, raped by their foster fathers, fired from their jobs. The Crocs shake their heads and say what they always say, Keep Coming Back. And after finally arriving at that place of understanding that your choices all belong to you and you alone, still keep coming back, and share that wisdom, because there are so many people who need it. Gea thinks we hit rock bottom and that things will be better now and I hope she’s right. We have a tendency to lose one another and ourselves in all the noise of our lives, and we may wind up much better off for checking in with ourselves, and to make sure that we are on the right paths. The people we are trying to be are more important than the people we are, and a beautiful feature of a universe where everything spins is that there is always a chance to try again, and do a better job, to be more like those humble, kind, helpful, tactful, cheerful, nonjudgmental, tidy, energetic, sanguine, modest, generous, fair, orderly, patient, tolerant, attentive, truthful types that hang around Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.
Right around page 750 of Infinite Jest there was something like a plot development. It was subtle but it gave an indication that the book’s multiple slopes might intersect. Even worse, it could end. For me, I would’ve been perfectly fine with going on reading about the internal affairs issues at the Enfield Tennis Academy, The Ennet Recovery House drama, and the hard to pin down philosophical and tactical trajectory of the legless quadruple agent from Québec, Rémy Marathe, indefinitely; infinitely is probably a better word. This may be exactly what Wallace was going for, something that was more like life. Where there was more joy to be found in the minutiae than there was in some sort Disneyesque heroic theme.
Unable to sleep at night and dragging all day had been the way of it. We were all trying to suffer through until night so we could rest up and get back on schedule but the adjustment to Pacific Standard Time just wasn’t coming that easily. I resisted the urge to read IJ all through the wee hours because I knew that I needed the rest. In retrospect I wish I’d fought less hard. Exhausted beyond mention, just after lunchtime on a bright sunny late January day I elected to take a bubble bath, figuring it would loosen me up and hopefully rejuvenate me enough to stay awake for dinner and a movie after. Of course I brought IJ into the bath with me. It’s a tricky one in the tub just because the weight of it forces you to keep your wrists highly active, and because it can’t be managed in one hand. On page 828, with Gately lying in a hospital bed recovering from the gunshot wound that he endured protecting his residents, and in incredible pain because he is not allowing the doctors to administer to him any drugs stronger than Tylenol because he is a recovering addict of orally consumed Demerol, I nodded off and dropped the book in the water.
It kerplunked right down to the bottom and I awoke stricken with a case of the howling fantods. After being hauled back up to the surface it was still capable of serving some of its purposes. But reading it wasn’t going to happen, and the folding of the origami cranes was also out.
February 2nd, 2014
Bangkok Thailand: The protests continued. It was to be the day of the election and there were significant disruptions at almost twenty five percent of the polls. Voter turn out was low and the Democratic Party is petitioning to have the results proclaimed invalid, which was their goal. Although a staying of the results means that Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra will simply stay in power until another resolution can be found. She would have won anyway and it’s fascinating that the Thai people are okay with her retaining power just so long as she is not re-elected. It is an admirably farsighted perspective for a protest movement.
Philadelphia, Pa: My mom had dinner with a few of her gal pals to celebrate her 70th birthday, then headed home to watch the Super Bowl, which was being played just up the road a bit in East Rutherford, N.J. The Seattle Seahawks went on to trounce the Denver Broncos and prove that a group of passionate pot smokers from the northwest can outperform a team that is composed, calculated and experienced.
Glacier, Wa: A long way from Thailand. Gea, Zizi and I were spending the weekend at a friend’s cabin, close to the end of route 542 and Mount Baker. Zizi and I got some snowboarding in and we all hiked the dogs through the deep powder fields under Table Mountain in the afternoon. Since Thailand, Gea and I had been communicating better than we had in years. This stretch since Thailand may be the best time I can remember having with her. If coming to the edge of separating from one another permanently in Bangkok is what it took to get us to where we seem to be headed then all of the trouble was worth it. It’s not like it got us to a better place, it just seems to have put us on the road to one. I believe that there is a secret to life. I also realize that when people get wind that there is a secret, ears perk and loom close in case the secret turns out to be something that they already loved and was accessible; like pizza. The secret is really effort. And it’s a disappointing secret because it isn’t even a secret. It’s well known despite still not being too popular. The trick is learning to love effort. My yoga instructor always tells us not to shy away from hard work, because it gets easier over time, until it isn’t work at all anymore. We practice handstands, but our goal is to learn to sit perfectly still. One practice serves the other.
There is a private hot tub behind my buddy’s cabin, and I took my crispy second copy of IJ into it with me.(9) With a waxing crescent moon sneaking its light through a copse of tall cedars, and a Petzl headlamp shining on the pages in front of me, I read the end of Infinite Jest.
Hilo, Hi: Baba and Lee drove out to the land to check on the school bus, the chickens and the trees. They mowed the crab grass and collected fresh guava. They found ten eggs scattered and one dead chicken that may have been got at by a wild boar. Baba’s got the place grown in nicely and after it was spruced up they had a cool drink in the shade under the mangos. Both of them were rested up from the trip and getting around just fine. The weather in Hawaii being just unimaginably nice in the winter.
Some Final Thoughts on Infinite Jest
Finishing an anti-entertainment feels like an anti-accomplishment; like I’ve somehow fucked up by reading the final page. In the middle I had a burning to desire to see this book through to its end, but I realize now that in the middle, I was already there. I have this hollow feeling that I often get after reaching the end of powerful books that I had spent a lot of time with, and that affected me deeply, like Bolaño’s 2666 or DeLillo’s Underworld; just sorry to see them go. The last fifty pages or so of IJ are just like the rest of the book. Wallace continues to explain every little thing in the context of past experiences and new characters are still coming into the narrative and it starts seeming like there is no way that this book is going to have anything resembling the type of gratifying ending that a reader surely deserves after such an investment of time and of thought and of course it doesn’t. Its non-traditional arc plucks an uncomfortable nerve. And the final passage during which the reader is treated to the reality of something so blissful that it is worth spending days steeping in a pool of your own excretions just to spare the effort of getting up and risking losing for a single moment the acquired sensation of complete and total chin-glued-to-chest-contentedness. Although the scene doesn’t reveal the specific contents of the avante-garde film maker Himself’s entertainment cartridge entitled “Infinite Jest” which provokes the same reaction in any one who views it. Instead it chronicles the events that made possible Fackleman’s acquisition of a mountain of wholesale Dilaudid, the realization that Fackleman was going to get sniffed out and probably killed by Sorkin’s men, and the subsequent binge that lasted for days which I’m sure was blissful for Fax and Gately even if it did look and smell gruesome to observers.
It’s interesting that the film (Infinite Jest), which apparently has the capability to provoke what is implied to be the ultimate human experience, the sensation that nothing is worth moving the body for at all, was the product of a filmmaker whose primary focus was always on lighting and optics, and that he never gave content much thought. The book is the same, it’s a vehicle for Wallace to express his obsession with language, to mine its depth for possibilities, the plot distracts from the beauty of the writing and sets an ironic trap for readers, especially the hyper-vigilant ones who are working extra hard, and trying to see to it they don’t miss anything; the ones taking copious notes that attempt to hone in on the complicated framework of the O.N.A.N., worrying all along about wether or not the A.F.R. are in bed with President Gentle or what, hoping Pemulis doesn’t get tossed out of E.T.A. for the Eschaton debacle, stressing over what the outcome will be when a sober and apathetic Hal shows up to play at the WhataBurger Invitational, wether or not his brother Orin the punter will attend the match, tortured like Mario over the absence from the airwaves of Madame Psychosis, and wishing hard that Gately could just somehow have a couple morphine drips to assuage the horrific pain from the gunshot wound but not so much that he falls off the wagon. All right, I was one of those people. My point is that the story winds up mattering much less than it seems like it will in the beginning. Which I assume is what Wallace is trying to say about life, that the addicts understand it best, that it isn’t about getting through it all at once, it’s about getting through one day at a time. A thousand page bumper sticker.
Toward the end of the book Wallace starts writing Hal in the first person. There’s no explanation for this shift, and it’s natural to think that Wallace simply burned out on disguising himself and succumbed to the truth about writing fiction; there are no rules that absolutely must be followed. Hal makes it as far as a recovery meeting but his arc, as far as within the pages of Infinite Jest is concerned, ends there.
Footnotes
1.) Professional Association of Diving Instructors
2.) Lee told me that there was a tremendous amount of grass smoked by all of the adults involved in producing the television show that more or less raised my generation. Those in denial of this particular piece of information can feel free to rationally explain the existence of Snuffleupagus to me, and I promise that I will listen.
3.) Where we loaded onto one of these transfer buses it was extremely hot and there wasn’t any shade. The driver got flummoxed by the heat and the process of heaving all of the tourist’s luggage haphazardly into the luggage hold beneath the bus. He in fact loaded everyone’s belongings so carelessly that they didn’t come close to fitting, causing him to have to take them all out and then put them all back in. Seats on the bus got scarce, patience amongst the travelers felt thin and the poor driver had worked himself up a thick lather of perspiration from all of the stress and the hard physical work. While he was standing at the front of the bus trying to find one more seat for a perturbed German he completely overheated and started scratching above his own ears and shaking his head like a dog that had just fetched a ball out of a lake. In doing so he drenched a contingent of French Canadian girls in the front row with his sweat, all of whom were mortified and spoke of nothing else during the hot one hour ride.
4.) The horse show out of Québec called Cavalia travels with a stable of over a hundred horses that stay calm and are able to perform because they are all stallions or geldings. It occurred to me that if all of the tigers were castrated males it could account for some of their docility. But that is hardly the only topic worth of speculation w/r/t the treatment of the animals at the Tiger Kingdom.
5.) In the book, Hal and his buddies refer to marijuana as Bob Hope, and to the prospect of giving up marijuana as Abandoning All Hope.
6.) I am obviously an admirer of the work of DFW, and intrigued as well by his life story, and the fact that he was a genius and a topflight junior tennis player and such a productive author. On the flight I got to thinking about what it would be like to write Infinite Jest and I got so wrapped up in the mood of the whole book that I started believing that I could write it too. And I don’t mean copy it or write something like it. I didn’t even feel the need to finish it first because I already knew that the end wasn’t going to change anything and I just opened up my journal and started writing. Not from memory, strictly from feel. In a fashion or mode not unlike the one Borges’ Pierre Menard succumbed to when he took it upon himself to attempt to write Don Quixote, again. Unfortunately Menard and I both had our work heavily criticized. Details of Menard’s undressing can be sought out in Labyrinths, but my own dismal experience I will share with you now...
The book, IJ, came out originally in The Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad and was widely discussed. Critics like Eugene L. Crett of The Southwest O.N.A.N. Literary Review (5 issues annually) right away started publishing reviews of the book’s opening pages and chapters, unable to restrain themselves long enough to finish the book. Crett cited the following passage from page 13 in the fourth issue of T.Y.T.M.P. which is always released on the 288th subsidized day of the year:
“You have to love old-fashioned men’s rooms: the citrus scent of deodorant disks in the long porcelain trough; the stalls with wooden doors in frames of cool marble; these thin sinks in rows, basins supported by rickety alphabets of exposed plumbing; mirrors over metal shelves; behind all the voices the slight sound of a ceaseless trickle, inflated by echo against wet porcelain and a cold tile floor whose pattern looks almost Islamic at this close range.”
Crett goes on to say:
“Wallace is incredibly gifted at a creating a sense of place. His ability to exhaust objects by describing them near to death awakens all of those thoughts that live in our subconscious minds, making us nostalgic for experiences we didn’t even realize that we had. When he talks about the ‘alphabet of exposed plumbing’ and the ‘ceaseless trickle’ I can not only see it but I can hear it and I can smell it too, and I like what I am smelling. The line about the citrus disks in the trough makes me want to go out there and find a nice public trough to take a piss in. Maybe shake the hand of the man pissing next to me and see who he is and what he is all about. And of course the tile which looks ‘Islamic,’ adds a touch of the esoteric and an implication of high standards.”
Crett is still at large and writing for the Literary Review magazine which has expanded to represent all of western O.N.A.N. and now goes by a shorthand title; The Western. On the 144th subsidized day of this Year of the Glasses-Free Interactive Panasonic Television, Crett excerpted a passage that I wrote from a draft of the first few hundred pages of my version of Infinite Jest, which was stolen from me and delivered to him in secrecy.
“You have to love old-fashioned men’s rooms: the citrus scent of deodorant disks in the long porcelain trough; the stalls with wooden doors in frames of cool marble; these thin sinks in rows, basins supported by rickety alphabets of exposed plumbing; mirrors over metal shelves; behind all the voices the slight sound of a ceaseless trickle, inflated by echo against wet porcelain and a cold tile floor whose pattern looks almost Islamic at this close range.”
Crett was unimpressed and wrote the following:
“Smith couldn’t be further off the mark here. He starts the passage off with this facetious comment about loving men’s rooms, and then goes on to distract his reader’s attention away from the fact there is absolutely zero sense of plot, with a disconnected string of descriptions of objects any civilized person would be repulsed by. The elements never mesh to create something the reader can actually feel, he separates all of his descriptive elements with semicolons because it is easier than writing proper English sentences, and as if that isn’t enough, he takes a smarmy stab at Islamics.”
7.) 9.81 m/s2
8.) 6.7x10-11
9.) I didn’t drop another one into the water, I was being extra careful. And it does amuse me that the first one I bought, I carried all the way around the earth and back only to ruin in my own bath.
Works Cited
Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest. Little, Brown and Company: New York, 1996.
