Pretty Women

A few nights ago, I got home from my daily workout session at Klub Bali Center Fitness dan Kolma Renang (swimming pool) around 7:30, and I found myself inescapably bummed out. The feeling had been gnawing at me for the past few days, and I guess to a certain extent, it was to be expected – I had just returned from a month of holiday to some of the world’s most intriguing and wonderful places, and now I was sitting alone in my palace of fluorescence, jamming peanut M&Ms down my gizzard by the handful. I was staring at my still-blank white walls, contemplating how I should go about hammering nails into the quasi-cinderblock substance they consist of, when my buddy Shendi sent me an SMS (text message): “What’s up bro? have u a plan for tonight?” As a matter of fact, I was planning on settling down behind “Verandah of Violence: The Background to the Aceh Problem”, but the thought of sitting alone on my floral print sheets reading summaries of eighteenth century Dutch military travails quickly began to lose its appeal. Instead, I told Shendi that we should go investigate Fire Club, Madiun’s only disco and liquor-serving establishment.
Lo and behold, twenty minutes before Shendi was supposed to arrive, my membantu (literally ‘helper’ but used to mean housekeeper) and surrogate mom Bu Nana decided to make an unscheduled visit to clean my house – why she would do that at nine o’clock on a Saturday night, I will never know. She doesn’t like me going out after 9:00PM, so Shendi and I were forced to keep our rabble rousing low key, for the time being. We hung around the house for a while and watched “Pretty Woman” on the as-of-yet unused TV that I bought nearly two months ago. When your time is occupied with modern-day tales of Islamic woe and self-taught Bahasa Indonesia lessons, there is nary a minute left in the day for the cultural riffraff of the American hoi polloi. We both did, however, enjoy watching a young and vibrant Julia Roberts strut about Rodeo Drive in her uniform of the night.
After Bu Nana left, we took off on Shendi’s motorcycle for Fire. To sum things up, my time there answered a few of the more pressing questions that have been running through my mind regarding Madiun and Islamic culture more generally. As we walked in through the main door, it took me a few minutes to grow accustomed to the smoky darkness inside the club. A pretty, scantily clad girl in go-go boots was singing on stage, and as my eyes adjusted, I saw groups and individual men sitting at small tables with drinks in their hands, staring silently at the girl on stage. Towards the back of the room, crowds of even more scantily clad women lingered and mingled together in small flocks, lasciviously eyeing Shendi and me as we walked to a table at the far end of the room.
“Wait, so Shendi, these ‘pleasure girls’, as you call them, aren’t hookers, but you’re supposed to pay them to sit at your table and have drinks with you?”
“Yes,” he replied, as if that made total sense. “Maybe sometime you get hand phone number and call maybe. But is very dark in here.”
As the singer left the stage and the Manchester United versus Portsmouth game fired up on the projection screen, a twenty-something year-old woman in tight jeans and a low-cut, spaghetti strap shirt approached our table. After unsuccessfully trying to communicate with me – the blare of developing world techno had destroyed any chance for proper conversation, and was giving me a pulsing headache on top of it – she sat on Shendi’s lap and laughed as she twirled her heavily perfumed hair. She got up and left some minutes later, and sauntered back to the bar.
“So what was that about?” I enquired of Shendi.
“Oh, she just a friend from high school,” even in this pitch black room, I could see the smile creeping across his lips. “But now she work here.”
Interesting.
After another twenty minute bombardment from the heavily amped sound system, I told Shendi that I had to leave. Several middle aged men were dancing like seahorses on methamphetamines, clutching at their female escorts as the high pitched screech of the currently popular dangut style techno reached a crescendo. My head was pounding, and even the dimly lit, scantily clad, pretty women couldn’t ameliorate the menace of highly syncopated bass lines. “Ok, bro, we go see my friends.”
After a short motorcycle ride we found four of Shendi’s close friends, some of whom I had met before, at their favorite local haunt, sprawled around a bamboo table drinking whisky cokes and eating bits of fried tempe. As Rocky IV spilled from the overhead TV, the guys talked with me about iPods, masturbation, Jews, the ever popular Free Sex, and how many bottles of Jack Daniels I could stomach. We left at 1:30AM, and Shendi dropped me off at home.
To make a vast and perhaps painfully broad generalization: The vast majority of people in the non-radicalized Muslim world share the same impulses, desires, and aspirations as anyone from any number of strata in the modern, secularized portion of the world. Here, however, many of those impulses must be confined to the fantasy of a dark corner and a devious rendezvous. As I drifted off to sleep on top of my floral sheets, I was alone again, but I had a smile on my face and a head full of thoughts (and pretty women) to keep me curious.