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FOOTNOTES
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Once, our team of five girls just won a Javanese dancing contest one Saturday; the dance was the most intricate and grueling piece so it took us months to learn beforehand and another month to synchronize ourselves with the coreography. On Monday I was with the debate team that had to endure the final in a radio station, the debate was broadcasted live; we had passed a long ordeal of kicking out other schools' teams to have the semi-final behind us, and it took weeks. The team of sprinters got to get to the stadium the next Thursday after a year-long practice. And my drama group was to get onstage at the end of the week culminating its endless rehearsals for months. The choir had to ride four hundred kilometers away to the capital of the province for the grand final the next Tuesday. Imagine my un-surprise when a district board of education member, upon seeing me again and again, remarked to the coach "You must have something up your sleeve, having a dancer in your team. Oh, and an orator, too." Yes, it was a lurid account. The sprinters didn't get a medal, for the record, ending the game at fourth place; but the choir won; the debate team was proclaimed the champ; so was the dancing team; the drama night went splashing. I can't think of any worse fate than having the Indonesian educational institutions' system of merits in the eighties. In the debate team, for instance - there were three kids, each representing the specialization of studies or be a part of the trio of suspected excellence; I might have been a bit okay in delivering boring arguments around history, economics, sociology, and so on, but if I were asked something like "What is thirty-nine times seven?" on the spot, they would have found out that I shouldn't even have gotten a kindergarten diploma. Debate teams were still less malignant compared to the, alas, ultimate achievement in being formally educated according to the Ministry of Education at the time - to win a pedagogic quiz show where the ones asking the questions and the juries to give them numbers indicating their worth in the world were the authorities in this matter. The idiotic character of every quiz show was there. Only one single answer was deemed correct, and whoever failed to yield this was an automatically assumed pedagogic imbecile. The tests to tell your parents of how bad you did at school were assembled around the same line. The questions were like the imaginary Math problem I might have had to face, regardless of the subject matter - if you think asking such questions around sociology is sane, I'd say you're not. And, being in a constant craving for exact stuff indiscriminately, there was a yearly quiz around the state's ideology - just that one single subject, and the questions and answers were thought up the same as of "What's the temperature it takes to have some water boiled?" to be replied "One hundred degree Celcius" - nevermind the Fahrenheit, doesn't matter the Reaumur, there's no difference whether you are in a kitchen downtown or up the cliffs of Mount Everest. I think it is inhumane to ask your most-hated enemies to be contestants in such a quiz show. Roman emperors like Nero had never even thought about it when assembling their instruments of torture. But it is still sacrilegious to say anything about our state ideology now; I'd better shut up. They had at last scratched the quiz off the program in the nineties, anyway - that was a good start. Plus it would generate an independently obese book just to dredge all about this up. So, though the anthology of questions and answers on other subjects are still growing extra pages, there might be a step to the right direction somewhere in the future. It is enough for me to say that I had had what I took as good reasons to not getting proud of formal education's anything; to take its numbered worth of our intelligence as bordering on criminal; to see the cum laude stuff and academic titles and virtually everything there as nothing whatever; and to have that kind of education myself, or else I wouldn't be able to burp out the previous lines. By the way, I was also in the team participating in the kind of quiz that I just told you about. The only contests I had never entered, no matter what, were writing contests. It nauseated me the most if this thing were to be measured that way. Even at the bottom of the junk yard that had been my mind there got to be some limit. The geography of education was varied through my years. First the rote learning was commenced inside an ailing concrete building next to a Javanese (Protestant) church. The school was one of the religious institution's tentacles. It started and ended in mass prayers and mass singing and mass silence in listening to the day's quote of Jesus and his contemporaries. There were six grades in elementary schooling that the New Order later made compulsory for every citizen to attend, the theoretical age to start was seven and to head to the exit twelve. But nothing was to be observed rigidly at the school I came every morning to. The teachers sold homemade snack and their yard's harvest in classes. The building stayed in the middle of a spacious grassland, despite its address that was in a rather big street. Its backyard was the athletic ground, somebody's front yard (the church's stationed keeper), and a vast garden of squashes and gourds. The school's janitors, a pair of men related by progeny in their twenties, lived in a bamboo shack there. Their job was to clean up the whole yard and classrooms if they had nothing else to do; to hit the rustic piece of a stolen railway part to indicate the end of a class and school breaks, if they didn't forget to; and to make some tea for the teachers, if they were in a good mood. The teacher's table in a classroom was full of the glass of tea, a gratuitous kind of flower vase with haphazardly dusty artificial flowers, a torn box of broken white chalk, a ragged chalk-eraser, a few books and snack if he or she was of this category of unscrupulous businesspersons. The junior high a few hundred meters away from it was an old Dutch building of the shape of the letter 'O' in Verdana font, graciously laid-back among casuarina rows, devastated by the sudden twentieth-century obtrusion of a brand-new lab of Physics right in the middle of its seclusive yard. One of its classrooms was underground - mine for the second year out of the three. The door was level with every others', but behind it you got a crescent of terraced floor, the blackboard and teacher's table was at the center of the lowest ground. I hoped the place was once used by the Dutch medical school to vivisect a live criminal like suggested in a painting of Rembrandt's, and I wasn't discouraged though everybody said the building was not so overage and dismissed this possibility of horror. Its old, concrete gym was wooden-walled inside, and full of ancient equipments of galvanization an awkward kid would have been enduring those days. They said this gym was haunted. But only when one had gotten the first sip of vodka. The kids catered for by this stage of schooling were thirteen to fifteen, so the nearby services took the task of supplying the appropriate vices accordingly. There was a lonely, deviating small cassette-selling establishment, a few canteens that provided cigarettes and warnings if the Good Behavior teacher was spotted, a private parking-lot that distributed illegal chemical substances, and mobile enterprising enterpreneurs offering pornographic reading materials. The next school was three-quarters of the town away, a trio of square boxes on top of each other. It was also built by the Dutch, and it was also ruined by tasteless post-Independence additions. It was far from everywhere but a 100% masculine technical school - whose inhabitants were in a cold war against my school's boys, a lifelong silent enmity accentuated by random skirmishes. The ground floor was for the staffers and the first graders, the second for the second yearers, and the third for muffled adrenaline and inrush of adulthood. The main and spoiled ingredient of this pedagogic compound was a horde of unteachable athletes. The landmark was the town's sportscenter, just across the street. Indoor and outdoor alike it had been the place to hold drag-races, slalom-tests, events of athletics, martial art fiestas, dancing contests and jazz and rock concerts. Kids from sixteen to eighteen flocked there ('there' = the schools and concerts and so on) to get their dose of execrability. Back to the late eighties; maybe it was characteristic of puberty that I wasn't dragged down an abysmal fatigue - yet - at the time. And I forgot to mention that weekends, whether they were jammed by students' contests or not, meant the end of the time's musical rehearsals by getting onstage somewhere not for medals but for some real life. There was something great and pathetic in mobile rock concerts of the eighties that circled the town and once in a while covered up the extra miles close to another. A slapdash wooden and bamboo stage would be erected by the local committee, somewhere under the sky, usually in someone's yard if the area didn't have a public plaza. Badly screenprinted names of the bands were flying on a long, narrow piece of cloth under the lights, horrible typos were to add to the original miscreation, so in the end the name didn't say anything at all - for instance, one band had somehow came up with the name Byzantium, while they, somehow, were convinced that it was spelt Bizyantium, and some local committees believed they got it right when emblazoning the billboards with Bisanthyum and Bzyantum. Avoiding such utter recklessness, our manager had chosen a name no one would misspell - nor remember. People paid twenty to thirty cents to watch such concerts, and some endured an hour of a crammed bus ride to the location. Bigger concerts at the town's stadium could draw a crowd from other towns around it, being able to boast the presence of some known bands from Jakarta or the Rock City of the time, Surabaya. Local and interlocal bands alike were following the tradition of such music in Indonesia; the legendary God Bless and Cockpit were among the gods that set the precedence. To start a band all one needed was amiability to delude a despondent, talented guitar-toting junior high dropout and a flippant, powerful drummer who was a Math teacher during the day - and get some money to build or rent a studio and equip it accordingly, and know the right people to get the gigs from, and possess an adequate sense of justice for paydays. Then you got to get a name first. It had to be garnered before anything else for the sake of a communal identity - high school kids wouldn't join anything nameless. As a starter of course you had no song of your own, but for practice and financial reasons alike you could pick up one durable icon and learn all their songs and watch all their live videos until you have memorized every gesture. That was how the town got itself deluged by Queens, the Beatleses, the Rolling Stoneses, and Bon Jovis. Although unspecialized that way, my band was kind of Led Zeppelining itself and it drew a lot of Yngwie Malmsteen , Kiss, and Deep Purple. It didn't matter that during one concert at least two different bands played the same song - once it was even more nerve-wrecking: Bon Jovi's You Give Love a Bad Name was given by four bands in a row. But don't worry about the crowd - they rarely objected to anything as long as they could yell and headbang and get drunk at once. And the skill of the musicians always differed, and the unintelligible English from the singers' mouths had never sounded the same, so it might just be four different songs. Such concerts were almost invariably great for your sense of humor. Singers never knew the meaning of the words they crooned across the night, and concert-goers were even more clueless. Forgotten lyrics were made up in the most bizarre ways - one evening, acting like a big Californian fish, a band asked what they should play next to the audience, and ended up with a request for Cinderella's Nobody's Fool - the guitarist knew it, the drummer had never heard of it, the singer didn't remember the words, but promptly they fulfilled the duty, flinging the lyric of Deep Purple's Wasted Sunsets while the drummer relied entirely on instinctive beating. They got some applause when the torture ended. In a similar situation another singer had succeeded in unwittingly rewriting Bon Jovi's Livin' On A Prayer impromptu onstage, by making Tommy to seem to harbor some political ambition in which he supported the Democrats with all his heart (Original lyric says Tommy used to work on the docks, the the Union went on strike, etc. How come the word 'Union' got to get replaced by 'Reagan', I had no idea). Even 'the bloody song' Stairway to Heaven, one of the most often brought onstage those days, came in every impossible alterations, among which was done since the very start of the song: "There's a lady who scold all that glitters is sold". (Correct lyric: "There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold"). All those had been going on uncriticised without eliciting any damage beyond certain ears on the spot. Concerts that started at eight in the evening usually ended around one a.m. We didn't go home after packing up the equipments and sent them back to the studio - we just lingered around the town, that was fast asleep in 'good' neighborhoods and always got clouts of life in 'bad' ones. One or two guest bands from big cities sometimes added themselves to the aimlessly wandering musical gang. At the center of the town or alternately on the way to the airport slightly out of town we sat on a mat sipping hot jasmine tea or ginger coffee with lump sugar, talking or being silent all night until daybreak. Roadside pushcarts that catered to this kind of need were sparsely distributed all over the town. Usually they were manned by one insomniac person who kept roasting cows' foot brochettes, soybean cakes previously steamed against palm sugar, or milkfish. Those and fried cassava were the ceremonial dish for nighthawks. Forty miles away such a niche had been populated by poets, artists and dramatists - but this largely prosaic town's were only full of clueless ignoramuses like us. Of course there is nothing spiffy in going out of the house after midnight just to drink stuff available for relatively free at home and eat what was worse than the supper therein - but some really believed this was creative romanticism. Actually I did not and never do. I went for the thing itself. If the blast of the sound-system that had drilled through our ears for hours had evaporated earlier than dawn, sometimes we then dispersed; half of the band would install themselves somewhere obscure to drink the early a.m. away, and I usually went to one of the town's smaller plazas - a friend lived nearby - and just sat or laid down there on the grass until sunrise, while someone else pierced through the darkest hours of the day by whanging some strings almost automatically following his drifting mind. Guitars always fascinate me, and in those days I considered anybody who played it for a living gods. I'm afraid I still do. But some of the kids' idea to download some musical relaxation from discotheques at the time was hilarious to me. I came there to sweat. I had severed my ties with a dance group before, which was a thriving business in town in the early eighties - it was glamor to join the ludicrously attired boys and girls with some makeup edging towards the Kabuki. Despite the looks, such groups were professional or at least only semi-amateurs. Artistic homosexuals in town usually joined them as coreographers, make-up persons and fashion designers. The most salable girls grew up into models and TV series' nonacting starlets. Even in the darkest of nights and on the blurriest mirror I wouldn't imagine myself to be of this league, but unfortunately I could dance and even if it didn't generate several bucks maybe I would still have joined in just to get the legitimacy for dancing. On the other pole, discotheques were full of kids who were only there to hide themselves or to get drunk or to get high or all three, and the rest were saddening dancers who should have been prohibited from attempting so by a court order. Outside those, parties had been going on all year long because that time everyone turned seventeen - and most of the parties came with dancing. By coaxing some innocent passersby I got both the dancing gigs and a few bucks at once all through the year of ordeals. The sweat money went away as cover-charges to buy more sweat. By the way, I had almost never met my little sister all those years, and she had almost never left home at all, so I got no idea what had happened to her to suddenly reporting to me that she was calling from the top of a skyscrapper in New York in the middle of a dancing party sixteen years afterwards. With a different set of idlers I had long rides on a convoy of bikes, too, whether it was day or night. We went as far as a hundred miles away from home. Never been owning any, I thought cars were alright as long as they were shaped a bit like hummers, but motorbikes were still my choice for roving. The sharp wind that slaps your face couldn't get substituted by anything - and the rain on you is a blessing. We went to mountains and beaches and faraway discotheques - this was the eighties, alright - the need was simply, I suspect, to go, never to arrive. While those in other compounds were trying everything to be like everyone within, the artistically-inclined was teeming with half-hearted individualism that took the glamor in being unlike anyone else the ultimate achievement. Alas, this, most of the time, did not include the artistic outcome. Inside the semi-professional drama group of mine were locally infamous poets, real dramatists, genuinely eccentric people and a varying degree of perverted untalentedness. There was also an array of different disinterestedness in drama itself. Some were high school students like I was, some were pros, some were university students; age meant a thing there, as the right to trend-setting. Those days such a group endured a good many rehearsals and pre-show overtures that required more muscle than might and both than mush. Running miles, for instance, just like bootcamps' daily round; gymnastics, and so on, beside the wacky things trademark of the artistic compounds like standing in a circle barefooted on the sand in a beach at midnight shouting one syllable over and over - said to be a 'vocal training'. Dropped-out misled beginners were to mark the first stage of membership - like all outsiders, some believed that the theatrical bunch were nothing but a gang of unkempt artists whose daily business was inhaling crack. Realizing that it was not so, they, naturally, fled and continued to jam the idyllic waste of youth outside, which requirements, though equally horrendous and hard to attain by the luckless, a bit more fitting into their idea of a sense of belonging. Which was what being a teenager was all about. Dance groups rehearsed in the middle of everything in town, in the usually wealthiest element and founder and owner of such throngs' daily residences. The lamentable architectural patchwork that was chic at the time always left a spacious room that couldn't be thought of as anything else, and this was to be the main place to do some legwork. Sometimes the houses were dumped by the architects around the main street, others were gravely distributed to crammed quarters reachable by narrow driveways, but basically their looks were the same. The rich is most of the time reliable to commit one or the other landscape-assaulting architectural blunders en masse. From the outside, the place I frequented was a gargantuan legroom in the midst of a strong slummy embrace of the surrounding makeshift shacks. Its wholly blank front yard of unhesitant concrete was filled up with motorbikes and cars arranged in an unrepentant recoup of the loss of human touch in the production of such machines by some human disorder - so whoever arrived first couldn't remove him or herself and the vehicle from the area until everybody else had gone. The barren dance floor was redeemed by a scandalous piece of art; a gigantic ceramic vase allegedly antique and suspected as coming from the overhyped Mings of which the easily excited caucasians and their artificial oriental reveries should have been decreed as responsible for. The vase was never moved to any other naked spot of the big house although its presence among kicking legs and such was criticized everyday. The dance room was the one casual visitors and thoughtful prospective employers came to, so the owner insisted on the permanent hint of extravagance. It was a bit shameful to come and go there in the afternoons when the neighbors of the house were having their outdoor cooling-off activities before sunset, and some restful hours after the Maghrib prayer -- the contrast between the hard-working urbanites that stayed poor and the luxurious idleness of the wealth that came from God-knows-where of the house sometimes got unbearably too vivid to miss. The drama group was the exact opposite of this; its rented homebase was a small mossy open structure usually found as the forevista of a traditional Javanese mansion, among buildings similar to it and houses made of bamboo plaits. In the attached veranda was a complete set of the Javanese orchestra - the gamelan with its huge gongs being the most prominent sight, being twenty-five inches or so in diameter. The inhabitants of the surrounding area were the usual pedicab drivers, food hawkers, and assorted blue-collar workers. The grassroots pretension at the time was subtler than today's, so were the persuasive modes to pull the neighbors into participating in the rehearsals and sneaking into the casts to justify the theater's claim of being 'the people's'. There were always two or three members who manned the base, and finally some university students among us came to live there permanently to make do with the limited financial resources so they didn't have to pay the rent in dormitories. The headquarter was, visually, blending into the environment.
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