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FOOTNOTES
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We pretended to play but anyone would have known we didn't; since the location was right in front of the derelict house and not the playground. Then the door was opened. And we were let down, big time. From today's eyes I could say that the man was good-looking, with long hair reaching his back, he had a weirdly nice smile that lit his serious face, and he was around five foot seven inches, and his jeans were real Levi's; but at the time I was as disappointed as everyone else because he was too slim to be believable as an irrefutable killer, he didn't have a big blade or hopefully a gun on his belt, and to top all the disappointment, he didn't get out of the house to beat anyone, but to sweep the yard around the house with a broom. For a week or so the headstrongest among us still followed the man every day like flies around a buffalo's ear. He would have been legally blind not to notice the annoyance, but he acted like we weren't there at all. Only once when we were coming down the steep dirtroad and my friend's bike suddenly made up its mind to go straight to the electricity pole, and did it, the man helped us by lifting the kid and the bike single-handedly and took the task of telling the angry mother that the kid didn't fantasize about being in a race or anything and the brake was broken by itself. I thanked him, and that was the only encounter I got. But sometimes he sat on the concrete seat and read a kung-fu comic book. There was always someone that came up to him at those times, in a respectful distance, and he read and smoked and talked with them. Once in a while other men brought him some whiskey, which he never drank alone, after they knocked at his door and left the bottle he always came to the crossroad and shared it with them. I'd never known when he was drunk. He always looked and sounded the same, sober or not. The younger aspiring criminals around mostly got louder and hotter-headed when they were. And I thought I sort of fell in love with him, even though he had no gun and hadn't committed homicide. But we hadn't seen anything yet. The local headman was a quiet, sort of rich, restaurant owner, and he didn't have a kid of his own so he adopted a son from a distant relative's excessive domestic baggage. This son was enrolled into a good public school and dropped out after knowing ABC, he was re-enrolled and never showed up there at the new school; the parents gave up and let him grew apart from them among the professional extortionists in the town's business district. He got home several times a week - usually to leave trails of aimless violence behind when he went away again. He had probably beaten every subteen boy around for no reason that anyone could comprehend. The headman's purse kept throwing its content up to compensate the victims and to freeze the mounting general resentment. Then of course the son got to jail. Several times before the headman had succeeded in preventive actions, buying his freedom, but this time it was a serious offense - public property damage and random injurious assault of the innocent bystanders, a scene when the boy was putting an impression into the Tionghoan shopowner's mind that he got to pay the security fee or else. But he was released sooner than his time of two years, again by the power of the father's banknotes, people said. And the father instantly put him into a boxing club, because he sensed that this was a Tyson who got the instinct out by crimes and not a criminal who got to be Tyson as the job required. The young man - he was seventeen or eighteen then - seemed to condone this decision and for a while we hadn't heard anything about him. Then one day he appeared at the crossroad - just a few steps away from our house - in a condition a watermelon might have been after being run over by a tank. And it wasn't gotten anywhere around the so-called sport of boxing. A shrieking female passerby immediately brought everyone and the man's parents there, and nothing of him could be seen anymore from behind the window even after climbing a chair. But voices could emigrate from the thick human wall. It turned out that the boy never went to the boxing club. He only went to another gang. And this gang messed up with our fabulous housebreaker's men. So everyone ended up like that and fled the town, but the boy wanted to go home and got a revenge - wasn't clear which was the priority. The female parent cried so high it could have broken scores of crystal glasses. She shouted the nastiest things about the ex-con up there and his wife and daughter - and she swore vengeance, and so on - her husband slapped her but she only got more hysterical. It was awful because this woman, as the headman's wife, had previously always played up her role - detached, respectable, a whisper among the shouts. A lucky kid who was on the avant-garde of this spectacle told me what happened afterwards. The derelict house opened, the man's wife came out and straight to the un-doctored badly damaged flesh. She knelt there and said she was sorry but he should have known better too, and the mother grabbed this woman's hair and started to claw her up. A few men were needed to restrain her and they dragged her home totally without her consent that the entire existence of the headman's wife was lifted off the ground. They locked her up in her room. And the bleeding wife of the legend still, the eyewitness said, knelt there and still talked to the young man who finally spat at her. Only then people knew that the husband had been among them since no one knew when. At the instant he pulled his wife up, and pushed the sole of his sandal down the young man's mouth. No one dared to move or say anything until the man and his wife were back inside their house. Then the headman had the son carried, not to hospital but to his house just like the mother, and slowly people dispersed, leaving blood on the ground and a few lingering murmurs. We'd never seen this social alfalfa again. They said he was put into someone else's care in another town, where he, after beating the caretaker up over some coffee, fled from the scene and after some other public crimes got into jail again and this time nobody lifted a finger for him. The ex-con and his family rented another house a little further from ours, and he was still in the business when we left the place to a house several hundred meters away that was already another district and out of this one. Grandma couldn't help relishing the fact that at least everybody in the old neighborhood had known that we had nothing worth stealing; the code of honor among them was said to be leaving alone their own neighbors in the same quarter but any other was a prospective prey. This other house was almost three meters above the alleyway. The entrance was even steeper than it looked; another ninety degree kibosh put on my way - riding the bike up there was after a few years nothing to talk of, but at first a threat of broken bones was imminent. I actually slid down with the bike nearly into the deep flume below once. The upside of being up there was, we're way above anyone's head - even though the rocks supporting the houses behind ours were even taller. So the front porch was for the first time in the kindred history a front porch - we did sit there late in the afternoon, at night and morning. This seemed ludicrous to be thought of as a luxury, but it was a luxury. The previous house was so close to the public meeting place, the crossroad and its concrete seats, that our narrow yard and porch were taken as an extension of them. And in rain season it was always full of shivering pedestrians taking refuge from the torrent, and whenever an event was held in the garden our yard and porch were also used as a parking lot or to house a stall. And a semi-private front porch in a house with no front room for guest-receiving was badly needed at the time, because both I and my sister were in high school. But down there at the gateless entrance were a pair of concrete seats, and these, being immediately at the side of the alleyway, were public. Concrete seats are, generally. So you got to find a house of a total misanthrope to avoid them. Our landlord didn't mingle with the neighbors but he made this concession. So there were in most afternoons and every Saturday and Sunday nights people sitting on the seats and on the cemented bikeway; whenever I got home from wherever I got to manage to get through this crowdedly-manned site of my own home address. Like the previous quarter, this one was just as full of kibitzers and ex-cons and generally unpleasant sort of persons. But they were not so into business as my former outlaws. Most of their activities were non-profit, even extolling certain prices they got to pay, the chief occupation being mass-brawling. Once in a while they would be seen preparing themselves for the fratricidal wars - sharpening knives, oiling homemade weapons like modified gear wheels, gulping pills and filling themselves up with a liter of booze. They were not 'my kind' of criminals, so I didn't really pay them any attention if I happened to be at home. The gang consisted of everyone from age seven to unlimited, there was no definite leadership, and the quarter was in a dangerous surplus of puberty. Really busy with mine, I'm afraid I can't tell a lot about this geographic spot in my life. But the house a bit slanted at its left side, across the alleyway, was brimming with life. It was a surrogate empire for the lost and perpetually lost; the rightful owner was a middle-aged woman, an ex-madam who seriously retired from business, and she gave lodging to anyone she liked, mostly little kids left by their kinfolks and some of them stayed as illegally adopted kids until they're adult. I got this info a bit too late to prevent my amazement to see that the woman's children curiously didn't look like each other at all. One of the kids had grown into a twenty-three year old female who was not a woman. Being gay in the neighborhood meant nothing to halt your step - the sense of 'one of us'-ness came from deeds, not private sexual life, not even gendered roles were to be observed there as they were in the village. The person dressed like a man all the time, cut the hair short, and the only thing she didn't do was roaming around naked to the waist as men in suburban quarters always do in broiling afternoons. She had had a few girlfriends, not serious, until she met a singer in a dangdut band and brought her home. Here the rule that was obeyed even in the compound that no man and woman shall live together outside wedlock was abandoned, since it said nothing about gays. So they shared one room and be like husband and wife as far as the rest of us were concerned. The singer was almost pretty, and her voice wasn't ear-aching, but her main asset was the body, and this asset was monopolized by the spouse, so for the first few weeks an adjustment was to be endured by everybody - attempts at some sexual stuff by the restless drunkards, to be followed by quarrels and fights, but we had no chance to see how physically able the gay person was, because it was usually stopped at pulling knives and she got the whole hodgepodge of a family behind her - more than six grown-up men and maybe a dozen boys full of adrenaline -- so the rivals got to get lost. From Grandma's bedroom, on her chair where she used to read in the morning, we could see the couple unobservedly when they had their coffee at the terrace - the door and window of the bedroom that opened to the steep walkway up were covered by thick bushes. I was only in a "good morning" and good evening" term with them, until my bike got awry and this time no one could tell what was wrong with it. I left it at home and one day at the thought that another attempt of revival wouldn't hurt, the gay person was asked by Mom to re-diagnose the Japanese brute. So I got home to find her vivisecting the bike at the front porch, and we talked a lot more than for the past few years in one afternoon, but only around bikes. I knew she was trained as a mechanic, but I thought she specialized in trucks and buses - sometimes I saw her working with others at the side of the interprovincial street. She still worked with the bike the next afternoon and told me how she got off the addiction to hashish. A disgusting tale about the so-called rehab clinic. Her story was full of meaningless religious rote, redundancy of it, and repetition of the redundance - interspaced by literal whipping and when one of the patients tried to run away and caught they held his head under water until he fainted, and when he came back to his senses they whipped him, and told him to get back to the religious rote. We also talked about football, one of my pet hyperboles. The one and only TV station owned by the state was choking the air with official events involving the President and not much else, so the atmosphere of this everlastingly footiemad nation back then was not so intensively football-frenzied like today. But we talked about the World Cup held in Mexico as if it was next door - and while it had been over two years before. Such a total lack of perspective football fans always have. We have been knowing for good since the eighties that Indonesians are not made for this game but to watch it; the town's football club at the time wasn't so bad and sometimes I went to the stadium to cheer it up, but the wish for a real footballing nation even by then had been given up. We didn't reach any other agreement. The mechanic's favorite club was A.C. Milan . I had already been a mad Manchester United fan, and on my way to the ten years of agony before its peak of glory. Finally the mechanic finished tinkering with the bike. It worked for one or two days but it got back to its previous immobility and was sold as it probably had been wanting all along. It hated the ways home. But something else was to be broken in a few months. The singer left the mechanic without saying anything and with all her money in addition to the golden jewelry she had been giving until the woman looked like a pawn shop. They said she eloped with one of the adopted sons of the ex-madam - two of them were not there at the time; one was probably in jail, but which was the one with the singer? The jilted didn't wait to find out before slitting her wrists. It was no crybaby attempt - she was serious, and they said the floor was thoughtfully covered by a wide plastic sheet, and the cut was nearly thorough. The door was locked from the inside and they got to break it to pieces; the matron knew her kids enough to suspect this to happen, so that was how they found her when she didn't show up all day and the room was sealed. Since the house was occupied by several platoons of people, even as they were delayed by the doorbreaking they still had time to rush her to the hospital which roof was visible from my house, and she slowly made it. It involved neurosurgery or something equally expensive, so the episode drained the matron's resources and she didn't take any new kid in for years afterwards. The mechanic had never been the same again when she was coming back to sit at the terrace with a lonely cup of coffee. The masculine strut had gone, she didn't talk much before and now she positively shunned conversation, she just sat there in a frazzled t-shirt and jeans cut at the knees. This isn't the broken heart that takes the longest time to heal, that I know of; but it was the saddest to me - from my world of the right-handed, able-bodied, heterosexual, the mechanic's story is something. I'm never good when it comes to elaborating emotional tides and ebbs, and I'm the lousiest storyteller alive. I wish I weren't, but wishes don't use typewriters. So I had never used the true story as anything in writing, and this I always regret. As an addition to my irritation around my impotence, I was reading Therese Raquin at the time. It magnified the gloom. Midnight races were my illegal activities those days; for a few dollars junior and high school kids - ninety-nine percent of which was male - risked their necks and everything else to be the Speedy Gonzales of their kind. That cops were constantly on the lookout made it even more alluring. My bike had been in such races, but I didn't mention it to the mechanic or anybody else - it was one of the reasons for its premature ageing. The log one kept would have been beating Cristobal Colon's in length, captaining the racing life across the eighties, in the matter of visits to hospital alone - a thing you had to do to render repentance impossible against all odds. A friend of mine died in such a typical accident by a sudden appearance of an interisle truck full of cows. Another did by another truck, whose load was unknown. Some were seriously disabled for various temporary length of time. And one got half of his face burnt like the villain of Batman's. My biggest accident, though, was disgustingly outside the respectable sphere - the brake was broken in broad daylight and rather than hitting an innocent pedicab the bike had chosen to crash me against an innocent concrete seat. Some said they had seen at least one in sober dawns and all in alcholholic hours of the ghosts of the teenagers departed on two wheels. The favorite location for the races was a long, straight, wide, quiet street some steps out of the town where nothing but cops would be around after nine o'clock in the evening. It was an ideal spot for sightings if you were a ghost. I was a disbeliever, but someone said his accident was caused by a deceased comrade that way. He was on his bike alone one night, when another bike suddenly passed him by in full speed indicating a challenge. Just for a misplaced pride no sane biker would let this to happen even if no financial reward was at stake, so he raced after the stranger and was about to Eddie Lawson him when the stranger turned his face to him and sneered and it was our fellow who died several months before. Stories like this were always tailing bikers and believed with all their hearts, especially when it was the only alibi they could give to answer the rage of their parents upon seeing them in hospitals. But basically like sportspersons and entertainers they all had typical superstitions and self-imposed tabooes. Hospitals were put away from humanity at secluded spots invariably reported as haunted by at least a pair of invisible lost souls. Some were relics of the colonial times and in those years they hadn't been rebuilt into some other architectural eyesore. Hospital yards were infested by cats, said to be intentionally kept as recyclers of the biological waste. Like an opera house, hospitals got their own pyramidal outline of services. The bottom of it was full of patients of the lower financial order; one room was occupied by four to ten of such persons, in visiting hours they acquired the lively appearance and sound of a village's market. Their sole form of entertainment was loose tongues. The second level was for the monetarily better patients, less noisy and less spread of newspapers on the floor that alert relatives spent the nights of vigilance on. The first class of sicknesses were tended in more or less private spaces, at most one room cut asunder by a permanent partition, with a shared TV set. The peak of services was a few rooms generated by penthousian ideas, they got private sofas and a TV and a phone. Most of the races-related sinister aftermath happened at the foot of the hill of terraced medical attention, so the patients could trade ghost-stories with fellow-sufferers of broken arms and readjust their personal superstition according to the fashion. Being mostly outdoors on midnights had given me the odd balance of the personal ache for solitude and the specieswise instinct to be gregarious. Backstage after an open-air show, on the roadside after a race, the clear sky of the dry season's hottest days in July and August and its countless little stars reduced every mammoth of worldly problems into sheer nothingness - nothing mattered, nothing whatever did in the short ride we call Life. Nights like that made us feel untouchable. And it was, anyway, needed after thousands of watts of music or two hundred kilometers per hour of speed. I guess the way I spent my time then didn't make any sense to some, and looking at them now they still don't sound like sensible - frantically speaking there was nothing that I did not do, except hallucinogenic substances. I was with the school's gymnastic, choir, sprint, drama, 'scientific' debate and dance teams at the same time whenever the elementary, junior or high school got to show its achievements up in exhibitions or enter competitions against other schools in the area. The New Order regime was under the delusion that such contests told the absolute, indubitable worth of the schools. I can't get rid of the idea that the germinal aspiration was to clone what they believed as the cleverest student around -or at least to encourage the educational system to be more like the Army and less pedagogic. It seemed to wish that everything would be more like the Army, to begin with, but still education should have been left out of the magnitude of disfigurement. Because of its predetermined curriculae, such contests and exhibitions almost always happened around the same dates on the calendar, the end of a pedagogic year. Our teams won trophies and medals and other useless metalwares, alright, but the fact that I was there in the unrelated and sometimes opposite activities had, in my mind, shown how unreliable this system was. And I wasn't the only one who thought so.
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