A Bag of Chicken, A Bag of Rice, A Girl in the Back of a Truck

The chicken bags are dripping blood juice. We’re standing in a line, me, the Fulbright teaching assistants, and about forty to fifty local volunteers, passing sticky bags of freshly butchered poultry from one of several delivery trucks to the kitchen tent at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, a makeshift flood relief center in the middle of a city turned to water. It’s been about a month now. Since the end of the rainy season, the rivers to the north have been slowly moving south, past the sandbags and retaining walls erected around the Chao Phraya River, filling Thailand’s capital. Twenty-three of the fifty districts in the city are affected, mostly the poorer areas, and today about 200 of us will prepare, package, and deliver meals to roughly 45,000 people displaced by the largest natural disaster to affect the region in over half a century. Tomorrow we’ll do 60,000. Give or take, the monks at the monastery down the street prepare food for an additional 15,000 affected residents, and there are other centers also. Small pockets of volunteers are scattered throughout Bangkok, men and women and students and children who have put their lives on hold, coming when they can, before and after work and classes. Beginning at two am in the morning the effort runs until I don’t know when. I have no idea how many of these centers there are, or how many people are in need of them, how it works as smoothly as it does. Also, we’re operating without government assistance.  The army’s here, providing tucks and muscle, but, oddly, the government, elected to operate and protect the country, is not.

“We refuse to work with them,” my adviser informs us, “they can’t be trusted. If we want to help each other, we have to do it for ourselves.” She laughs when she says this, like she’s serious but only partially. Oddly, she’s always laughing. I’m not sure what to think. Back home it seems to me we’d be in an uproar if the government didn’t rush to save us. Here, on the other hand, it seems people just dig in and work.

           

The bags of chicken pass from one set of hands to another. Rubber-banded shut, they leak. Blood-juice is on my fingers, on my forearms, on my face. There’s no way I’m not getting salmonella. This, I accept. It reminds me of killing chickens back at the farm in Wisconsin where I worked before I started grad-school, though here there’s considerably more fowl, over a ton of butchered birds in plastic bags which the cooks will eventually turn to curry. I continue moving meat. The girl ahead of me, though, an attractive and skinny vegetarian from Harvard, has had enough.

           

“Can’t do it,” she says, putting her hands up, shaking her head, and walking toward the station where a group of other Fulbrights stand at a line of tables stirring rice. The rest of us laugh—deep down, those that know her knew she wouldn’t make it—but only for a moment. The line requires a certain amount of regularity, a fast and steady pace that can’t be broken. If a person slows or pauses or gets distracted for any real duration they end up with a bag of soggy chicken to the chest and the line backs up and has to be restarted. Also, the woman on the mega-phone will yell at us, which isn’t what we want. What we want is to get the chicken from the truck and to the kitchen as quickly as we can, which takes about an hour. It’s hot, and the sun is baking down on us between the trees, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it except to grab what they’re handed and pass it on. Behind me, a chubby kid with glasses drops a bag between his fingers and chicken splashes on the floor, a pink and fleshy pile.

Today is also the first day I’ve met any of the other people in my program. Stationed in various small towns at schools and universities across the country, the heart and soul of the Fulbright program are the English Teaching Assistants, of which there’s roughly twenty. The ETA’s are young and eager and excited to be here. Most of them have just graduated college and they have that look in their eyes specifically reserved for the hopeful and the radically un-jaded, those rare and special souls for whom the world is still full of possibility, openings, doors. The rest of us, researchers with grants to pursue our own agendas and stationed primarily in Bangkok, are a little older, more weathered maybe, more rough around the edges, though we’re excited also. The ETA’s rub off on us, make us young again and ready to be of help in a place and point in time that has no need for anything but faith and effort. Our faith is that eventually the water will recede and people will be able to go back to their houses and rebuild them. Our effort is aimed at the time and place until then, the uncertain space in which so many have so little, and so we gather together at the University, the Monastery, where ever it is a center has been set up, and we stand in lines together passing bags of meat.

This, to me, is necessary. I have been in Thailand for approximately three months, living in a relatively unaffected area, holed up in my apartment. I read and write and exercise and cook. I go out sometimes, but only sometimes, to parts of the city reachable by sky train, and I have yet to see, feel, or experience the flood in any significant way. For me, it isn’t really happening, though people have died and homes have been destroyed. I have empathy but it isn’t actually empathy. I want the waters to recede and things to start again and run again, but it isn’t real, the wanting for these things to happen, because the desire, at least until today, remained, for the most part, abstract, a reaction relegated to a place which is not a place at all but an idea of how one is supposed to feel given the crises of a situation that one has only heard is real, a responsibility to respond but not the response itself, an obligation. Feeling from afar, unfortunately, is not enough, not when there is work to be done. And it is nice to have the chance, finally, to do it.

           

A couple hours later, after the chicken line is finished, after the vegetables, too, in a line, are moved into the kitchen where an army of cooks have already starting chopping and throwing things in oil, the pretty vegetarian and I are in the back of a gigantic camouflaged truck, ten pound bags of rice and miscellaneous provisions flying through the air in our direction, thrown at us by a group of young marines on the ground below. I catch them as best I can and, in a single motion, keep them flying backwards where every now and then Rachel takes a bag in the chest before she’s ready and ends up on her back against the mass of bags already piled in the back. Though I’ve only known her a day and we are obviously different people from incredibly disparate lives—I have a sense she’s likely a Republican, incredibly religious and from money—for now she’s my partner, the one person in the world who’s standing next to me, whose help I need, and I’m grateful. She’s half my size, doesn’t seem the type of person wired for hard labor, and yet here she is, working every bit as hard as I am, likely even harder.

           

When the bags stop coming, I stop for water, catch my breath. Rachel is talking up the Thai Marines in Thai, which they appreciate. They gather around her. One soldier in particular, bright eyed and smiling, an incredibly beautiful boy in a tight green shirt who laughs at everything she says. I don’t understand what they’re saying and I don’t need to. The sun is out and it will stay out. Any moment now, more rice is on the way.    

Down by the River

There are bodies sprawled in odd directions everywhere, cocooned in shades of multi-colored silk, sleeping on their shoes. Amid the masses at the train station in Varanasi, Kelli and I step out onto an overcrowded platform, smell the air and wish we hadn’t. Back in Kolkata, I almost threw up upon arrival. The bathrooms on the trains, open holes which drip down ugly on the tracks, wreck the air entirely. Also, I was terrified and terror happens, at least for me, in the stomach. If there is anything I’m afraid of, it’s the absolute indifference of chaos, a world without order and without regard for the existence of individuals. India, especially when it comes to public transportation, is exactly that. I’m doomed. Pushing my way to the restrooms, I stood for a moment above the squat toilet with my hands on my knees, which was a mistake. The air wasn’t any better there, much worse in fact, so I got out, found an isolated corner, and started taking breaths. Thankfully, in Varanasi a low breeze moves in off the Ganges, carries some of what is rancid here away. Eventually my stomach calms and in no time at all Kelli finds a driver. We throw our bags in the back of his car and head out into the center of town. Where the river is. Where the Ghats are. And where, in a matter of two short days, I’ll fall in love completely with a city half a world from home.

             

It probably shouldn’t surprise a person that any of India’s seven sacred cities turns the stomach inside out and back again. According to legend, the seven Shakti Peethas were founded in places where various bits and pieces of an immolated bride, Sati, wife of Shiva, are said to have fallen. If the legends are correct, after Sati committed suicide, Shiva took her body over his shoulder and proceeded in a rage specific to a God whose heart is broken and who carries the carcass of his bride across the universe, destroying everything, everyone. Being fond of their creation, the other Gods quickly and violently intervened. Vishnu, in particular, followed Shiva cutting Sati into seven pieces. Varanasi, I believe, is where her left hand fell, the Ganges filling up with blood.  

            

These days, the Ganges fills with feces. With fecal coliform levels hundreds of times higher than is safe for a human to encounter in good conscience, the river is one of the filthiest bodies of moving water on the planet. Literally, it should kill you. The fact that it doesn't is perhaps the only argument outside of the experience of faith that there is, in fact, something holy to her. Everything else is waste. For the most part, Kelli and I are scared of Hepatitis C, a disease we’re certain enters the current when Hindus submerge their dead in the waters of salvation and which we accuse each other of having contracted every time we step in a sludge puddle.

             

“Get away from me, you’re infected,” I say.

“Whatever,” Kelli says, shaking off her sandals. “What the hell is this anyway?” 

The “this” she’s referring to looks, remarkably, regrettably, like diarrhea. Draining slowly from a hole in the bottom of a crumbing staircase, the sludge is half liquid, half solid, pale brown. Bits of things, I don’t know what, partially floating, partially not, but in either case they’re dragged along by gravity toward the hoard of bathers who line Ganges to our right.

            

Earlier, after the sun crested the pollution line, turned into a bright pink ball on the horizon, the two of us sat together in a wooden rowboat, saying very little and watching from the river the city slowly come to life. First, noises, low and distant sounds. A dog barking. Silence. Then more dogs. From far away, the muffled clank of bells like metal pots, human chanting, clamor. The boat rocks back and forth. Silence. More bells. Silence. For whatever reason, we speak less and less these days, but it isn’t awkward, it’s nice, calming even. And in India, the experience of calm is rare, if ever, and it is best allowed to last. There is nothing to do but cherish it, the two of us side by side and rocking in our little boat, the still and sacred water, body of the Goddess Ganga, dirty as she is.

             

Every morning the men, women, and children of Varanasi flock to the Ghats to cleanse their sins and start the day from scratch, covered in sewage, Hepatitis C, and the ashes of the dead, a new slate. Watching them, especially with cameras, feels strange, so we take our pictures from far away. Up close, though, is where the magic happens. The men strip down to nearly nothing, which means we see a lot of scrotums.

             

“There we go,” I say to Kelli, “that’s your boyfriend.” Her newest boyfriend, a large and rather unattractive man with a mustache and gangly hair is touching himself without mercy in front of everyone and calling up to her from where he’s standing in the shallows of the Ganges covered in white soap.

            

“Miss, where you from? Hold on. Miss, I take you on my boat!”

            

Because she’s white and pretty and looks like she has money, though she doesn't, the men of India all call out to her. For all anyone knows, Kelli could be my girlfriend or my wife, but it doesn’t matter. The men all flock to her, nearly crash their bicycles, their cars. They come up and want their pictures taken. Usually, she obliges, but I can tell it’s beginning to annoy her. We’re constantly accosted.

            

 “Talk to the white girl,” I like to say when the kids come up to me, which Kelly absolutely loves. Recently, though, the kids specifically have ceased with even the slightest pretense of a courtesy and refer to Kelly simply, honestly, as Money.

            

“Hallo, Money,” they call in unison, “Hallo, Money. Hallo, Money.” At times they follow us for blocks.

            

 “I can’t take you anywhere,” I say.

             

Back on shore, the cars have started in, jockeying for position on the crowded streets and letting their horns go. The holy city is awake. At the moment the locals are preparing for a festival, which we’ll miss. Some 200,000 people are expected to flock to Varanasi tomorrow from all corners of the country to drink and bathe in the water together, to rub it in their gums and spit it out, to bottle it and take it home and use it at their altars and pray to it and cleanse themselves and save themselves from sin. I don’t get it, but I don’t need to. I really like it here. I can't explain it, but I do. For whatever reason, the river is a special place, even to an American who’s not a Hindu and who, furthermore, is utterly dismayed by the way the river has been treated. I could sit by her for hours and I do. Yesterday we watched a body burn, five of them, in fact, stood up in silence and walked away.

            

The morning before we leave, Kelli and I get breakfast at our favorite restaurant and walk the ghats together for a final time, stopping every now and then to take it in as best we can and hold it, hoping that it lasts. Down below us, the boatman are cleaning up their boats and painting them. Tonight they’ll fetch about a hundred times their normal prices for a single trip, which seems ridiculous, but Hindus, if anything, are devoted. They will pay to pray here. It doesn't matter how much or how far they have to travel. Come dark, the body of the Goddess Ganga will light for miles with millions of candles lined in perfect rows on the terraced concrete steps. In droves, the devoted will sing and dance and chant together as they’ve done for centuries. As a single entity, they will do these things. They will take the river. They will put the river in them. 

How Much for Your Picture?

In November in Kolkata the ground disintegrates and rises. Without the rains of the last few months to pack the dirt down hard, with only wind and sunlight the air becomes primarily a vehicle for sediment, a pollution made of yellow sand kicked off the road by traffic, particles of concrete, clouds of cattle excrement, exhaust. Breathing is impossible. In fact, little, if anything, is easy here. Far too much is happening. Incessantly in a state of disrepair, India’s third largest city, a population approaching 16 million if you include the suburbs, is perpetually under construction, its matrix of roads and crooked alleys lined by men and women whose hearts and lives belong to weather. Here, the heat and rain turn brick and mortar into rubble, pile it with little mercy at the feet of people who have nothing. We’ve only been here thirty minutes, my friend and I, but in thirty seconds I know immediately Kolkata is a different monster all together. New York, Chicago, Bangkok, of all the major cities I’ve spent time in, Kolkata wins, period. This is Kali country, after all, Hindu’s Goddess of destruction from which the city derives its name, famous for her necklace of demon skulls, drinker of blood, devourer of worlds. Weak people do not live here, they only visit.

 

From the open backseat window of our car, Kelli leans out quickly with her camera. To our left, a group of men gather around an open vat of mortar, mixing the water in and staring coldly back at her. It is hard to tell if they are angry with us specifically or if it’s something else. Given the utter poverty of a place and point in time which feels impossibly unforgiving, abject and surreal, the glare that finds the average tourist seems unfortunately appropriate. As a foreigner in a place where one does not naturally belong, it’s hard sometimes, really hard, to know where lines are drawn. When a person sees me watching them, I intuitively turn away, though I wish our eyes could meet and our separate lives could co-exist despite our differences, even if only for a moment. One girl in particular, a sori wrapped around her the electric color of the ocean, the color of the electric sky. Surrounded by taxi cabs, tuk-tuks, she catches me with my camera directly on her. In the shot I get, she turns away from me, which for whatever reason breaks my heart. I want terribly to know her name.

Regrettably, the observation of a people and of a place too often appear in the same fast action as their exploitation, in the click of a camera, for instance, when all the object of the photograph desires is to cross the street in private and in peace, or the drop of the jaw when confronted by a man decapitating chickens on the sidewalk, as the case may be. Either way, the exotic, the subjectively unreal. 

“I can’t believe this,” one of us will say.                            
“Where the hell are we?” the other one will say.                     

And it goes on like this, the two of us, our eyes propped wide as they can get because India both is and isn’t actual. Nothing here makes sense, which “is what it is” as Kelli is fond of saying, though I wish at times there was a way for it to be something else, something, I don’t know, less intrusive.       

The problem is our being here changes the place entirely, causes people to see tourists as potential income, which isn't human no matter how you look at it, not on either end. Kelli and I complain a lot about being accosted for money we don't have, but we both know in some sense its our own fault for being here, a context we ourselves and people like us  create around ourselves by stepping off the plane. We leave our homes in the west, flee east, and leave a little of ourselves behind us in our wake, a process that in India has been happening en mass since the East Indian Company set up camp in 1612, mining spices for the crown and eventually colonizing the sub-continent entirely, an era of racial oppression and financial exploitation spanning just short of a pair of centuries. The residue of the British Empire is still apparent here, for better and for worse. Even though I’m American and brown and don’t think much of Europeans as a silent rule, I feel implicated, and I am.

When experiencing for the first time a way of being in the world of which I am completely ignorant, inadvertently, through no fault of my own except that I myself decided to arrive here, I risk the work of Empire, which isn’t what I want. As a tourist “trying to see the world,” there is a way in which one mines the daily lives and actions of the local population for their own abstract and often selfish reasons. Of course, the fact that I’m aware of this softens my guilt, but only to a degree. To the person on the other end of the camera going about their day, who has no knowledge of the extent to which I’m aware of what I’ve doing, I’m still a foreigner, a person from a richer place who wants to take their picture and show his friends back home how poor they really are, how hard it is India, how crazy, how beautiful, how other.

 

“You’d never believe it,” I’ll say.                                                 
“O my god!” they’ll say. “How do they even live like that?”

Furthermore, if I’m aware I’m doing it, doesn’t that make it worse? Furthermore, I’m doing it right now. My mouth in my hands, I breathe in and out between my fingers, filtering the dust, but only barely. Sunlight splinters through the spotted windshield, the sound of car horns, cattle. Poor people do things in the street, eating, talking. I look at them. I take their picture. I write about it, them, me. This, for now, is India. I don’t know what else to do.

Where the Cruel Waters Flow

From the window of my apartment, the world looks well enough. For now, bright sun on the roofs of houses to my right, a line of clothes strung up on a neighbor’s balcony, a blue sky, clouds. The people from the shanty down below are bathing again, a daily ritual in which water from a yellow bucket pours across their backs and shoulders. An elderly woman in the corner of the lot harvests something green from a patch of weeds and concrete. I wonder what it is, if she can eat it. From here, eight stories above the world and safe in my apartment, I can even hear the street dogs barking back and forth between themselves four blocks down, a distant conversation, constant and somehow reassuring. This is the scene I wake up to everyday in Bangkok, even when it’s flooding. In other places, not more than twenty minutes from here, the streets are rivers filled with garbage, abandoned animals, the rain.

           

The problem is my city is about to become an island, and there doesn’t seem to be anything that anyone can do about it. Cutting directly through the heart of Bangkok, the Chao Phraya River, one of the country’s major water ways, is also the river into which the majority of Thailand’s northern rivers empty. Given the incredible flooding in the north this last rainy season, the cresting of the Chao Phraya has now become the problem of the central provinces, mine in particular, home to about 10 million people, many now without their homes. We are pressed between the mountains from which the northern rivers flow and the ocean below us to which they’re drawn, a flat and incredibly populated expanse of land and city which hasn’t seen this kind of water in over fifty years.

For the last week or so, the messages coming from the news and from the government have been pretty mixed, half assuring us of their control over the situation, half retracting that assurance and telling us to ready for the worst. Currently, especially in districts nearest the river, there are people and places that are thoroughly and utterly in trouble. I think about three hundred or so have died so far, but I can’t be certain. So little is for certain. I do know that evacuation centers have been set up, but, unfortunately, some of these have already had to be evacuated. Similarly, the FORC, the government organization in charge of dealing with the flood, currently operates out of the Don Mueang airport and are quickly being surrounded by water at their headquarters. The international airport, so far, continues to operate, though the majority of flights out of the city have all been booked.

The worst case scenario is that all three major defensive positions at the city’s northern edge fail and do so utterly. Every day they reinforce these walls with sandbags, but an article I read this morning warned that the country was quickly running out of sand. Kids across the country have even started digging up the fields where they play soccer, bagging up the ground to make a wall of earth that all of us pray to god can hold. If it doesn’t, the water, which has been building slowly for the last few weeks, will over-wash the capital in an estimated 5 feet of water, last for about a month. The flatness of the landscape makes the drainage of water incredibly slow, which is good in a way because it allows a more sustained attempt at holding the water back, but should that attempt fail, it means the water is here to stay. The prime minister said today there is about a 50/50 chance of slowing down the water long enough for people to be prepared. The goal, I think, is to control the amount of water so no single area gets hit all at once. The idea is to disperse the water slowly, spread it out. But if the water does suddenly get through, and if it stays, at that point I don’t know what happens to Bangkok, or to the country for that matter which relies heavily on its capital as the financial epicenter of its economy. If the walls to the north go down, I will probably have to leave. Granted, if they go down, I probably won’t be able to, so, well, I don’t know then. I really don’t.

What I do know is that now that Riley’s back in Chaing Rai, I’m here alone, for the next week at least. They’re building an impromptu brick and mortar wall around my building, about five feet high and reinforced with sandbags, so hopefully that does the trick. Also, I think we have a generator, so I should be fine. Although the government recently declared an emergency “holiday” so businesses have an excuse to close and people can evacuate, there is a shortage of ways to leave. Planes and buses have all been booked, and I don’t have a car. At the moment, I have enough food and water to last me about two weeks, but I hope it doesn’t come to that. Also, next Wednesday I leave on a flight out of Bangkok to India. There, I will take refuge with Kelli for two weeks traveling. I pray that by the time we return, the world, or at least my portion of it, is still alive, afloat and breathing. I love this city very much. I want her to remain. 

A Day in the Life of Hammers, Ants, and Fatness

Today I woke up early because of hammers. There are men in the rooms around my room, and they are hitting things. Every now and then, they take out drills, buzz saws, and really get to work. I sit at my table wearing ear plugs for a while, drinking instant coffee, looking out my window. Down below me, what passes for a public bath, a big concrete square filled with rain water which people from the shanty shack like to stand around in wearing just their underwear. They take buckets and pour the water over their heads and backs and shoulders. Usually, a little naked brown kid jumps around and giggles as his/her mother tries/fails to bath them. I like watching them, the naked and mostly naked people, though it makes me out to be a creeper.

When the hammering doesn't stop and I can't take it anymore, I decide to get some groceries. I go to the wrong train stop, get off, and fail to find a store which isn't there. I try again, this time at the right stop, but the store is mostly empty. The city's flooding at the moment, in fact the whole country is, so I guess the delivery trucks aren't bringing us any food. That, or else everyone but me stocked up. Typical. I go for water, but that too, the water, has all been taken. I wonder for a moment what I'm going to do. I buy some rice and a pot. I will boil water. I will then eat rice. Great. I take my rice and metal pot and get back on the train.

Back at home, hungry, I grab a bag of cashews left over from the week before and I dump them in my mouth. Even though they’re stale because I left the bag open, they still taste pretty good. I chew and chew them. Suddenly they hurt. They hurt again. What the hell? I spit them out into my hand where little half chewed ants squirm around amongst the soggy chewed up cashew bits. I look in the bag. Yep, totally ants in there, little monsters. I take my finger and start to hollow out my mouth. I spit their bodies in the sink, turn the water on and wash them down the drain.

Ear plugs in, headphones over ear plugs, the hammering becomes somewhat manageable. Also, I am naked, which is the best. I sit back down and try to finish the essay I’ve been working on, the one in which I try to turn my first three weeks in Thailand into something clear enough to read. I want it to make sense of things for me, like tell me word for word what the hell it is I’m doing here and how do I stop thinking about a girl I'm pretty sure is over me. I’m supposed to be here writing poetry, but, for whatever reason, it comes out wrong, in sentences, most of which are proper, or at least I think they are. Also, I’ve started reading novels. What the hell? In the essay, I get to a part where I’m trying to remember meeting my old girlfriend for the first time, but I don’t remember it correctly. I don't remember it at all. I remember a different moment, so I lie and use that one. Is this ok? Why don’t I remember right? I’m pretty sure she’ll kill me when she reads it, if she reads it. In all likelihood, by then it won’t matter much to either of us, which is the way it goes sometimes, though I wish there were some other ways it went sometimes.

Now I’m in the gym, staring at my muscles in the mirror the way my friend Jacy taught me back at Gold’s in Wisconsin when we used to go there. “Physical fitness/physical fun?” he’d text me in the mornings, but it isn’t as much fun without him. In fact, it isn't fun at all. Mostly, I just get tired and give up. Now, instead of lifting weights up over my head, I’m sitting by myself in an empty room, slumped over on a padded bench and staring at my sneakers. I’m getting fatter by the minute, I can feel it. I stand up, pull my shirt up around my chest, and push my belly out. Yep, totally getting fatter. I pull my shirt back down. Tomorrow, I tell myself, tomorrow I’ll do better.

Like What Wall Street Looks to Me Appearing Here that I am Far Away from You and With

I’m not really sure what’s happening in America. I read about it on my computer, links on Facebook posted by my friends, brief comments and calls to action through the internet. There are people occupying Wall Street, and I feel strange about it. Although I'm proud of them — I like the images of strangers sleeping side by side, together in the street and covered in each other’s cardboard signs and placards, borrowing the sleeping bags of friends they’ve only known hours — I live in Thailand, or at least for now I do, and I feel incredibly far away. Like their fight isn’t my fight, though I hope some good will come of it. Like somehow, terribly, I’m not a part of things in the country that I’m from. And in a place where I can’t speak to people, this means that I’m alone.

I don’t want to be alone.

           

Maybe I’ve been gone too long. No, it’s only been a month. Maybe, then, I left before I left, the spirit leaving long before my body did. Maybe it was years ago. How much time has passed since I actually really cared?

When I was young, I used to make believe I was a youthful revolutionary, dress up dark in filthy patchwork clothes and scream in punk bands on the weekends, loud as I could. At the age of sixteen I went to an EarhFirst! rendezvous in Crandon, WI. There, cops chased us onto an Indian reservation. Half terrified, half proud, I called my dad to tell him I'd be in jail. Also, an occupation of a park in Minneapolis. In the middle of the night I hauled cement which we mixed and placed in holes so protesters could physically attach themselves to metal bars cemented in the ground, their wrists chained within the earth they were trying to protect. “Dragon Traps” I think we called them, or something to that effect. The worst, though, and this I still feel sick about, was the way I used to pride myself on a riot I was in and partially started, like being beaten up by cops meant my life was meaningful and more important than the lives of people who hadn't been in riots. At the time, I really felt it, passionate and full of rage, raw love in a world of mediocrity. Sometimes I wish I still did.


Somewhere, though, maybe in my middle twenties, the spirit kind of faded, puttered out and changed. Focusing instead on pretty girls and poetry, and ultimately on school, I cut my dreadlocks off, put my favorite pair of pants away. Instead of Chomsky, I started reading Beckett. I gave up screaming in a punk band, got good at writing poems, and learned to cook. I’m not sure why this happened, or what it was that I got tired of, what it says about me as a human being, but lately, especially when I read about the people in New York and in other cities across the country expressing solidarity, I’ve been feeling a whole lot like I need to say I’m sorry.

The problem is: to whom do I apologize? The second problem: what do I do to stop this feeling altogether, kill it quickly where it hurts, right here, right now in Thailand.

The first person I need to say I’m sorry to is a friend of mine from Iowa, a poet named Adam, whose work, both in and away from poetry, is about as good as work can get. He’s been in the city, at the occupation taking care of protesters, making sure they're warm. I feel bad because he’s done so much. I haven’t. And I don't want to let him down. The other day, in Bangkok, after not hearing from him for very many months, I turned on my computer, an email, and started reading this:

#occupywallstreet

#happywiththewaythingsaregoing

#writingandactivismmerging

#inwaysthatareexciting

#andnew

spending time

in the occupation

in new york

recently

was wonderful

i joined the comfort working group

which helped people get blankets

and tarps

and warm dry sweaters

it's been raining a lot

i worked with

great people

it reminds me

of how you like the country

and your punk past

and how much of an asset

you are

and will be

in the revolution

you're always invited

to come stay with me

wherever

we are

Unlike Adam, I am incredibly uncertain how to be political anymore and continue writing poetry, a problem which Oppen, perhaps the most important and influential poet in my life, solved by abandoning poetry altogether. I am not, at least by most standards, and most certainly not anymore, an overtly political personality. Obviously Adam is, my friend in prison, Ian, was, and of course there’s the mass of bodies huddled in New York. But me, I faked it so I could listen to punk rock and not be called a poser. And now I don’t even listen to punk rock. I live in Thailand where the government my friends are attempting to affect gives me money to be a poet. I’m not even writing poetry. America is far away.

Last year, I was living with my girlfriend in Montana when the men, women, and children of Wisconsin tried to take their state back, my state. My parents were down in Madison. My friends from Minneapolis, from Chicago, from Iowa, they were all in Madison as well. They, and however many thousand others, seventy or more if I remember right, god. Every morning, I’d get on my computer as though it made me closer somehow, more back at home than not home. I’d listen to the news on NPR and shake with excitement in my living room, I was that proud. "Jane!" I'd say, "You'll never guess how many are there right now!" When people in Missoula talked about the protests, I’d make sure they knew where I was from. Those were my people, my friends and family filling up the streets.

Ultimately, I think, I want my life to be a part of the lives of the people and the places I belong to, the men and women standing there together in Wisconsin and in New York, whose beliefs are my beliefs, or at least I hope they are. I can’t be certain, which is a problem. I only think I have beliefs, I know I used to, but these days, given the complexity of trying to make sense of everything, it isn't quite that easy. Again, I can’t be certain. It isn’t clear how much of me authentically responds, and I mean actually authentically responds, to the sentiments expressed on Wall Street. I can say I’m with them, click on links and "like" things, I can put up a lonely blog post, but at the end of the day, I’m here. I write poetry which only occupies the page.

Part of this is that I don’t totally understand the situation. I know there are the less rich people upset with the more rich people, the 1% referred to on the signs raised high against the New York City skyline. That, I get. Our country's in a lot of trouble and it looks like a select few made a big fat killing helping it to be that way. Furthermore, I’ll never be a rich person, so, for me, the extremely rich are easy targets. Plus, it doesn’t seem much like they really give a shit about me either, or about most people for that matter, or about the planet on which the rest of us depend for absolutely everything. But this, the extent that I “get it” and to which I share and hold beliefs, not only am I severely limited in my knowledge of the situation, my faith in what I think and feel is rooted almost totally in abstract, shaky ground, an unclear ethic turning over in the gut that feels a lot like hunger. 


My hope is that maybe hunger is enough. If it really is a kind of hunger, a need for nourishment at the level of the spirit which isn’t full without it, a craving for something bigger and more meaningful than what I am alone, than that is my one demand. I mean this in the biggest, most beautiful sense, passion and companionship, a desire to be numerous, fodder in the form of love. I get it and I demand it because its happening, right here, right now, the process of the feeling rising up and slowly taking over, my nascent solidarity. Maybe, if Adam's right, this, the process of beginning to feel, is what all the fuss is actually about, a demand by people for people to finally be people, a process going on en mass and then, hopefully, in each of us, a way to feel alive in the face of forces, too numerous to name, that tell us we're apart. Lately, the further and further I feel from the people and the places that I care about, the more I read about New York, look back upon Wisconsin, the louder and louder it seems to get, the hunger, screaming from my stomach, no longer abstract. The more I listen, the more it’s there, growing, political and more than politics, the more and more I’m home.

Parting in Lampang

In Lampang, a white fan turns in a slow circle around the ceiling, fluttering the saffron curtains of my room. The walls, a shade of brown so dark they're almost black, so shiny they look plastic, let in skinny slants of light that cut across the floor and lay there isolated against the uneven wooden boards. Outside the door, a coil of incense, used to keep mosquitos out, uncoils in a line of bone white smoke which hovers in the air, pale clouds in the corners of the hallway. I am lying on my bed. Through the curtains, the day outside becomes the day inside, an orange and gentle glow. Thailand. Down on the deck, my companions are drinking instant coffee and eating breakfast. From there, they can see the river, a thick and fluid murk the color of bruised fruit which has swallowed nearly everything. On a different day, in a different part of the year, the men, women, and children of Lampang would be sitting on the other side across from us, transfixed by water on the broken concrete steps that lead steeply down the banks and to the shore. I like to imagine they'd be fishing, pulling snakeheads from the filthy deep, but they’re not. Today, at the end of the rainy season with water pouring steady from the north and more to come, the shore is hardly even visible. Every now and then a tree branch, green with leaves, floats by on the dirty surface and turns into a tiny spot downstream. The river is alone.

For the most part, the beginning of the trip is over. In a day, Kelli and I fly back to Bangkok, Riley hops a bus to Chiang Rai, Josh and Daow drive east to Isaan. The last few weeks have happened fast, a blur of days and nights and mornings. The four of us, for better and for worse, have lived, eaten, stayed up, slept in, talked, and drank together in various bars, beaches, restaurants, and guest houses littered from the south of Thailand to the north. Recently, though, we’ve all been slowing down. In anticipation of the months to come, each of us, in our own ways, are preparing to be alone. Riley’s showers have gotten longer, though he still sings in there, and he’s been smoking more, a habit which brings him out onto the sidewalks where he likes to stand with a bottle of Coke beneath the awnings and look around. The last few days I’ve gotten up as early as I can, hoping for an hour to myself in which to read, drink coffee, write, though it isn’t easy to leave the comfort of an air conditioned guesthouse in this humidity. And Kelli, Kelli’s been pretty quiet lately, though I’m not sure why. She may be getting sick.

Yesterday on Josh’s houseboat we floated for a long time down a narrow lake where he hopes someday to open a resort. We stopped at the abandoned caves of former forest dwellers where we sent Kelli squealing through the bat infested dark, a game we dubbed "Squigs goes first," which she didn’t like. Also, big limestone cliffs which lined the shore where Riley jumped off into the water. We sat out on the deck a lot, in the sun and in the shade. We took turns taking naps, eating BBQ fish, chicken wings, and pork ribs, drinking vodka tonics, Singha on the rocks. On the big stereo at the back of the boat, we listened to the Weeknd, Bob Marley, Dengue Fever, and Sade. In a lot of ways, it was a typical day for us, slow and steady and a little drunk, but it was also our last day, which made it a little sad.

When it started getting late, Kelli and I sat out at the front of the boat together and let out feet hang down into the water. Soon it would be dark out, the whole boat lit by lantern light, and it would get hard to tell the jungle and the mountains from the sky.

“Look,” she said, pointing to a space in the clouds.

“I know,” I said, “finally.”  

Strangely, for the last three weeks, perhaps because the rain's been so persistent, the night sky has remained entirely and stubbornly full of clouds, starless, but last night they really came alive up there, thousands of them, little silver pins, and for as far as the mountains would let me see, they shimmered tiny in the distance. Around my feet, the water of the lake was black and warm, barley moving. Every now and then a twig would stick between my toes and I’d have to reach down and take it out. I'm not sure how we ever made it home, but we did. I remember we turned a bend in the lake, slowly--it is hard to know where one is truly going--and then we turned another.

Zombie Hooker Nightmare

The streets are dark enough to harbor monsters and/or ghosts. At two in the morning, the storefronts, gated shut, look deceptively the same, which is a problem. Actually, it’s a huge problem. Kelli went to bed about an hour ago, Josh and Riley are busy “playing ping-pong” with a couple bar girls at place called Ying Yang Bar in Hua Hin, which leaves me to myself. So here I am, wandering the pitch black streets and alleys trying and failing to find our guesthouse. Every now and then, a human in a tight dress and three inch heels steps out from the shadows of an awning, asks where I’m going. In the day, it’s hard enough to tell the sex of sex workers, but at night it’s practically impossible. Normally, Kelli would be with me, her presence a greatly appreciated protective bubble against the men and women of the night, but tonight I’m on my own. 

“Mai aow, Mai aow,” I say, hoping the boy/girl understands me well enough to let me be. I don’t want a blowjob, I want my guesthouse. Where the fuck is my guesthouse? I turn left, right. Nothing. I turn right again. Nothing. Where am I? I decide to backtrack, which proves to be the wrong decision. I have forgotten the path I came here by, which unlit ally I turned down first, which street connected to the street I thought I walked just fifteen minutes back. Christ.

The last time I was this lost and this afraid was in the mountains of Northern California, hiking the PCT with my friend Bill. There it was only cougars and the darkness they infested, the shadows of the trees and the opening between them where I imagined all kinds of angry animals, lurking there with their teeth and claws and hunger. But here in Hua Hin, having walked past the same frail prostitute for the third or fourth time, I’m afraid for a reason real enough to have a body, an actual face, and she/he is now aware that I am lost, which means that I am helpless, prey, which also means I am being followed. I quicken my pace, try to walk with more authority. Why the hell did I leave my phone in Kelli’s purse? Finally I find a street down which I can see the lights of the part of town where there are bars. That’s where Josh and Riley are playing ping pong. I need to find them, start over, try again, which is what I do.

At the Ying Yang Bar, a very drunk version of my friend Josh is being beaten badly in ping pong by a busty Thai girl in a low cut shirt. Ning has yet to loose, which obligates him to continue drinking, trying, failing. I’ve been gone an hour, looking for a place roughly four minutes from here. He looks at me, he shakes his head.

“Really?” he asks.

“Really,” I respond.

Riley gives me directions and I set off again, meandering past the girly bars where the heavy thumping of the clubs blends together with the holler of the girls in dresses lined up on the sidewalks. A half hour later, I’m back at Ying Yang.

“Really, again?” he asks.

There is nothing I can say for myself. I sit down on the linoleum floor of the Ying Yang Bar and sulk. I am very very tired. Also, given that Josh and Riley and Ning and Nook are “playing Jenga,” I’m absolutely in the way. Drunk-Josh knocks the tower over. A cockroach scrambles across my foot, disappears into a crack.

For some reason, my sense of direction is totally retarded. It has always been like this, but here in Hua Hin it matters more than it does, say, in any other place I’ve ever lived or visited. Given the nature of these shadows, the specific hunger of the animals which inhabit them, more is immediately at stake. Thankfully, Riley has pity in his heart and we steal off into the night, the two of us. My hooker friend is exactly where I left her, but now I’m not alone. Everything is going to be ok.

In Thailand, one of my guilty pleasures is girls in heels on scooters. With them, I don’t stand a chance. They get me every time, their legs gripped tight around the small machine and zipping past me. When one of them passes us, I always look. This time, the girl in the scooter stops ahead of us. Slowly, very very slowly, she gets off. She turns around. Good god, what the hell is that! Riley stops dead in his tracks. He looks at me, and I at him. This time, the question is not of sex, but species. Can a human being look like that and still be human? The face is sunken in and I can hardly see her eyes. The way her shoulders cripple forward at awkward angles make her chest cave in like someone dropped a heavy rock on top of her and crushed it. Her neck is long and crooked. This is either AIDS or meth or both. Now she, whatever she is, is hiking down her skirt and walking towards us making noises. We cross the street immediately.

Back at the guesthouse I’m leaning my head against the door, saying Kelli’s name until it opens. She’s half asleep.

“Where’d you go?” she asks.

“Don’t ever leave me,” I say, “ever.”

“Sorry,” she says, “I’m sorry I had your phone.”

Safe in my room and behind locked doors, I close my eyes. Next to me, my friend is making sleep noises. It is nice this way, in bed and not in the alleys of Hua Hin being chased by zombies on scooters wearing tiny skirts. If I were to look out the window, right now I’d see Riley zigging and zagging back and forth in the street below me, the zombie with her arms outstretched in slow pursuit. If my ears were better I’d hear the gurgle coming from her throat like something died in there, some kind of plague infest rat, and Riley’s frantic “Mai ao! Mai ao krap!” ringing out in the empty city night. Now, at the edge of a shadow cast across the street, the zombie woman’s arms are wrapped around him, which he doesn't like. The dead thing in her throat lets out a groan and so Riley, in the darkest dark, is running, fast as he can, following the lights of distant bars where he and Josh will last until the sun comes up above ocean. It’ll be two whole days before I see them. Sometimes these things happen, things I can’t repeat. And so it comes, and so, at least in Hua Hin, it also seems to go.

 

Making Alms for Abbots

It’s six a.m., Chiang Mai in a thin and early light. Beside the occasional lone monk moving down the street with a plastic bowel in search of alms, the city is an empty shell. None of the tourists of last night’s frantic market bargaining for trinkets, no song-thaews cruising through the damp and filthy alleys. At this hour, there are hardly even dogs. Thais, apparently, are not a morning people, or at least today they’re not. Normally, I’d be fine with this, but this specific morning the four of us are up early in order to make breakfast. Also, Daow, Josh’s girlfriend from Khon Kaen, has joined us. We’re sitting groggy eyed and yawning in the lobby of our hotel, drinking Nescafe and waiting for Riley. We’re always waiting for Riley. As far as Americans go, he’s slow. As far as Thais go, he’s right on schedule, a delay so perpetually reliable that after all these years Josh and I have no choice but to appreciate it at Riley’s expense.

“How much you wanna bet right now he’s lying in bed, making noises, and thinking of B-ing his T’s,” Josh says, referring to one of Riley’s many short-hand expressions for things he likes to do, one of which is taking way too long to brush his teeth. 

“Twenty Baht says he’s taking a shower first, then B-ing his T’s, then taking another shower,” I say.

Kelli laughs at this, but Daow doesn’t get it.

“Does he have problem,” she asks in a brand of English so broken it’s cute enough to make you want to hug her.

“Yes,” I say.

“Farang," Josh says, "on Thai-time.” T0 this, Daow nods her head, smiles, and then starts soaking her arms and legs in bug repellent, a mist which smells suspiciously like sugar water mixed with powder flavored teenage body spray for girls. A mosquito lands on her thigh and bites her. Eyes half shut, Riley approaches down the hall, wanting coffee in order to want a cigarette. He’s wearing blue jeans, a t-shirt, a blue polyester shirt, socks, and black sneakers. Six a.m. and he’s already mostly sweat. Josh is mostly  laughs and head shakes.

The fact that we’re a half hour late to Co Co.Ok, the restaurant where we’ll spend the next five hours cooking breakfast for twenty five monks at a local temple, doesn’t seem to matter. Josh’s dad is waiting patiently in the parking lot and the owners greet us grinning. They bring us coffee, Oreo Cookies. They bring us water. We eat and drink and talk for about an hour. Sayan, a French ex-patriot living in Chiang Mai, is partners, business and otherwise, with Yupapan, the owner and head cook. Also, he speaks English and is incredibly enthusiastic to have us here. There are pictures of the farm where the food we’ll make was grown, a video he shot of the river which runs through it, dark water moving quickly over mossy rocks and through the jungle.

In the kitchen, Yupapan, her sister, and a girl with braces who I’m not sure of wrap us tightly up in aprons, give us tasks. Kelli and Riley are pulling shit strings out from the backs of shrimp in a glistening, gigantic shrimp pile. Josh is hacking at an ugly lump of liver. Daow is cutting lemongrass. Me, I’ve got a big bright knife and I’m turning a vegetable, some sort of half-soft tuber I’ve never seen before, into big white cubes. Yupapan takes the knife away from me. Apparently, my cubes are wrong.

“Like this,” she says.

“Like this?” I say.

She nods and I continue cutting. Outside a dog barks back at another dog. It’s hot as hell in here. Our knives go thud thud thud against the wooden cutting-boards.

Hours later, our menu looks something close to this:

Main Courses

Shrimp and Cashew Stir-fry (shrimp, cashews, peppers, onions, garlic, chilies, sugar, fish sauce, oyster sauce, etc.)

Laab (liver, pork fat, pork skin, pork, lime juice, cilantro, chilies, chili paste, sugar, toasted rice powder, fish sauce, etc.)

Tom Ka Gai (coconut milk, galangal, lemon grass, weird white tube vegetables, cabbage, tomato, chicken, garlic, tamarind paste, sugar, etc.)

Chicken Wings (coriander, sugar, deep fried lemon grass, peanuts)

Dessert

Mango with sticky rice

Coconut soup with salted egg and boiled pumpkin

We’re proud as hell, especially Riley, who has managed half his life to feed himself by having girlfriends, and Kelli also. She's the kind of girl who keeps an endless schedule of friends to go to dinner with back home so as to keep herself from starving. We pack everything up in the back of a pickup truck and drive in the hot sun to a temple at the edge of town. There, the monks are waiting for us. They’re not allowed to eat after one pm, which gives them about an hour to fill their bellies. We watch them eat, which is hard because I’ve been up since dawn and I’ve only had an Oreo. When they’re full, we take what’s left and put it in our faces, which is a lot.

Here's something, a ceremony which I don’t understand. During it, I walk up slowly to the front of the room where a big fat golden Buddha is frozen serenely in a lotus pose. I light a candle. I use the candle to light some more candles, then some incense, then some more incense which I hold in my hands while kneeling at the altar. I pray for a while, to what and for what I’m not exactly sure, but I’m going through the motions anyway. I put the incense in a pot of sand. My friends all do the same. And now we’re pouring water. We’re supposed to pray a second time while pouring and so I say “I love you, I love you, I love you.” I say this over and over to myself in the direction of a girl I care about who's far away until the water’s gone, and I’m hoping that it counts. By this point, however, given the heat and time at which our day began, I can tell that Kelli is at the end of things, “hitting the wall” as we have come to call it. Usually, Riley hits the wall, but today it’s Kelli in her purple dress and black sweater, entire rivers pouring down her face which is kind of sagging downward from exhaustion. I can tell her eyes are tired because she keeps taking her fingers and stretching them back from the corners, a habit of hers which makes it look like she’s slightly racist, pretending to be Asian. One of her eyes is bad, so the other one works too hard. Usually it takes all day before she starts to pull her eyes back, but today, at two in the afternoon, my friend has nothing left.

And here's another thing. We’re sitting cross-legged in a half circle around the Abbot, a man whose name I can’t pronounce but which translates loosely into Full Heart. Draped in a deep brown robe, he is lotused at the front of the room. Behind him, an arrangement of flowers and realistic, life-sized plastic statues of monks are sitting eerily and still. I know I’ve seen their faces before in posters and in pictures hanging on the walls of houses, but their names and reputations are alien to me. There being here gives the appearance we’re in a wax museum, and now one of the wax replicas is moving his hands about, talking to us in a language we don’t get, and now, pointing at me, he’s laughing. In fact, he’s almost always laughing. I ask him questions and he responds, through a translator, with long, circular narratives, stories about his life and the lives of others. Usually there is suffering, death, poverty, and starvation in there. Ultimately, laughter.

From what I can gather, which isn’t much, the Abbot decided to become a monk in his early twenties, a decision sprung from reverence, culture, and a lack of real alternatives. All Thai men are required to spend part of their lives, even if it's only seven days, in saffron. The King, I think, did fifteen days, which doesn’t seem like a lot, but sitting with my legs crossed beside my friends in a half circle around the Abbot, even for only a couple hours, makes me hesitant to take my turn at the temple should I finally gather courage to. Riley and Josh have agreed to join me in a monastery at some point in the ten months I’m here, but to see them now, Josh perpetually shifting and re-shifting, Riley making little noises now and then that mean he’s suffering, glad to be given an audience, but suffering nonetheless, makes me worry. And then there’s Kelli. Right now, Kelli is a puddle in a black and purple dress, pulling back her eyes.

“What do monks do for fun,” I ask, which is a mistake. The Abbot with the full heart asks me what the nature of fun is and I come up empty, dumb. Unsurprisingly, he tells a story and I struggle vainly to trace it back to what I asked him.  In it, a man from Chiang Mai walks for a long time over great distances. He has neither food nor money. Eventually, a woman gives him noodles, which he likes. In fact, these are the best noodles he has ever eaten, will ever eat. When he dies, he will remember those noodles, their greatness.

“Death is every day,” the Abbot laughs, “like if one day you try to speak, and then another day you stop trying, you’re dead already!” He pauses and his eyes light up, a brighter shade of brightness spilling out from his face onto my face. I look at Josh. His face is red with brightness also, though of a different nature, and his knees are cramped up tight against the marble floor. I can tell that he agrees, which makes me glad we're here, the four of us, deep friends. I look outside. It’s raining. Rain, too, is every day. Death and rain. Rain and death. And sweat. Sweat is every day as well. Riley trying hard to listen, Kelli staring at the ground.