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FOOTNOTES
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Studios were mostly buried inside overpopulated quarters, so owners of these noisy establishments couldn't be but the well-liked or indispensible figures in the social sets. The studios were parts of the owners' private houses that were halted midway to riches or halfway from decay. One of the studios was adjoining the household's culinary sphere and songs were to be played along the menu of that day's domestic supper. Most didn't bother to try to find a substitution for the unaffordable soundproofing interior design. Steadier amateur bands usually came from a bunch of kids of the wealthy Someones, a few of whom were unfairly good musicians. But semi- and professional bands at the time were often built of the financially depraved, of whom there were creatures fairly antimusical. To the latter the tools of the trade were not private and the perfectionists among them got to face the woe of impersonalized guitars, because the managers of such bands usually let the studios for rent hourly. These places stood (sounded) out in their whereabouts - but the mixed-up pedigree and social positions of their frequenters subdued the unavoidable contrast. Like in the drama group, a person whose habitual appearance was alien was usually thought of generously as artistic, and glimpses of glamor as personal crackpotty qualities. A girl of fifteen was a singer for a band I knew; a creature intended to be beautiful, with long straight shiny hair and big eyes under curvy lashes; and she naturally dreamed of making it to Hollywood. She was on the brink of dropping-out of junior high when I first met her backstage. It was her very first gig and it was great to see that she wasn't even remotely nervous. She had been accustomed to performances in front of a lot of eyes - her mother was a freelance prostitute and full-time snake dancer (the snake was literal, the dance was not really). She was an extra in some of the woman's performances. So singing full-dressedly onstage was no sweat. She was good, to begin with - a local throaty groaner with a dash of operatic grace. But despite the weekly income the mother and daughter and a succesion of 'uncles' didn't live quite alright; somehow she couldn't afford anything down to face-powder and shoelaces; the two supported the lives of the remainder of the family who all lived in a village somewhere. She would arrive early at the concerts, scanning fellow singers backstage for wearables that she could borrow for her turn later, and when it came she appeared in some majestic quilt of leather and metal and lipstick and all to the unsuspecting crowd. After descending the stage, regretfully she would have to return the stuff to the owners, sometimes she asked them to let her keep something that she had borrowed for good and sometimes she was let to do so(this was successful only when the owners of the trinkets were males). Sexually as a matter of circumstance she was several leagues more advanced than girls of her age at the time, who were mostly surrealistically romantic and had no idea how realistically lusty the world was. According to rumors the singer wasn't into her mother's pastime, yet (this addendum represented the average anticipation). But the concerts didn't offer much of either overnight nationwide stardom nor stairways to the boutiques in town; after a while she started to accept offers of interpersonal performances that inevitably came her way, carefully picking up clients who were better-off than the mother's. School then had ceased to block her way to window-shopping, and in time the windows ceased to be her affliction; she was seen wearing at least the second-best stuff from time to time since. But luck was to desert her one or two years after this sudden affluence. Instead of staying and keeping on being singleminded, the girl fell for a silent boy whose job was to load studio equipments onto roomy trucks to and from concerts. So half of her then dwindled into an affection entirely devoid of monetary considerations - after some time this even got a hundred percent of the girl's existence and she was again seen in indescribable sandals and old t-shirts of the zillionth of appearance. At that point the backstage was once more the place of hurried transformation. Then one day she got pregnant and ran away from the mother's rage, leaving the boy behind, who continued to upload and download drums without any visible change at all while the girl was never to be seen in town eversince. Dress codes, the subject of forever ever after in teenagers' lives, were of course the immediately perceived superficiality of sense of belonging, grouping, communal identities. The arid hours of TV didn't function the way it had been elsewhere westward - you must be nuts to download the clue of fashion from Presidential speeches. So magazines played a big role in shaping the unshapely teenage lives garmentwise. Scavenging scenes related to fashion was almost a job to some. Those days only a few subscribed to magazines, being a bit too much for ordinary pockets; but the available bit was circulated wide and far by renting and borrowing. It wasn't so bad, the printing press at the time; even women's magazines were containing information, not "10 Unspoken Testimonies That Your Man Still Thinks You're Sexy" - we were to import this plethora of enlightenment much later in the end of the nineties from the illustrious American imbroglio. Dance groups necessitated miniskirts and little else. The glam rock that hadn't yet deceased made the band people busy selecting fake leather and metal paraphernalia, onstage and offstage alike; the ones still in school got to endure teachers' anti-artistic notions that went against their long male hair and body-piercing and tattooes. Though I rarely showed up there, my school still found it necessary to try robbing me off my sinful multiple earrings and chain choker that lent me the looks similar to a bulldog's - which they shouldn't get any objection about, in my opinion. In obeisance of the other species of roundabout teens' codes everyone wore a Country Fiesta, Hammer or Osella polo shirts - it made us all look like wayward apprentices of a senior caddy in a perennial search of an imaginary golf course. The artistic circle demanded Javanese male jackets to be worn hideously over slimy t-shirts and jeans in literary gatherings, in bed, in the toilet, in funerals and even upon saying the marital oath; sandals instead of shoes; and no makeup for the women. To comply to all of those at once I would have to have more than one self to adorn. So the compromise was - myself. In a discotheque I looked like an artist, onstage I looked like a biker and in funerals I looked like either an abnormal teenager or a stray aforementioned personnel. My most often worn camouflage those days was a U.S. Army jacket that had known real tropical battles outside Vietnam. Personal idiosyncrasies, as long as they were original, were good to see anywhere - one boy who would be a pilot, for example, had always worn a plane captain's headgear from dawn to dusk and during school breaks. He was a blessed creature of seventeen then. Had seen a film about the World War II fearless fighters (I'm not sure that it wasn't the kamikaze men) at ten, and since then on had never ceased to dream of being a combatant among the clouds and loud engines and a fifty-fifty chance of getting the parachute open or not; he was a singular mind unrivalled in all my life. But the airforce wouldn't have him after high school for some reasons. Thank God the commercial airline academy took him in to prevent a lifelong monomania, and in this lesser kind of light he has been basking today, now in a perpetual fantasy of Osama bin Laden. I had never understood his favoritism that fell on Kittyhawks those days - he kept saying these contraptions were 'friendly with the air' - maybe he was too dreamy to spy on Australia so the airforce wouldn't have anything to do with him. And he was way too impolitical. Politics and the mystique were pulling a number of us for the same reason gangs and groups had done; the country only had three fixed contestants every five years, two parties and one whole regime; winning votes by a margin like 96% : 0.4% was a caricature it drew of itself. The Golkar used force and persuasion at once to get the biggest number of votes deemed impossible elsewhere in the world. It gave pedicab drivers and other urban lower class members some money, stuff like rice, and promises, so they voted for it. Anyone joining its rally was given some 'gas money' for the ritual bike convoys around the town. But in my days when I wasn't even eligible to vote yet the sirens were the other, smaller, helpless parties, the (Islamic) United Development Party and the (rest of the populace) Indonesian Democratic Party. My temporarily political buddies joined both parties' rallies just for fun - only once in five years you are allowed to break every traffic rule and dress up in broad daylight for a seemingly noble cause 'for the people' - imagine how yummy this was (still is) to this segment of the under-eighteen. Underdogs' charm also worked its way there; so it didn't matter that they got to pay for the gas by themselves - it wasn't more than a discotheque's cover-charge anyway and the fun lasted all day. If lucky, they could even get some noble violence against other contestants if they happened to show a support from your gang's arch-enemy. The would-be pilot, when the campaign began, got out of the house at three in the afternoon, to wave at us who rode by his vicinity. Street rallies those days were a little more organised and it surely only annoyed people, not frightened them like the ones we have been accustomed to, today. In such a benevolent police-state that we had then, the law still got some respect even from the randomly violent. At any rate, political illiteracy has never been seen in Indonesia. Good or bad that is a fact. My neighbors, for instance, disliked the ruling party and the President just like every other, and some of them took the bribe without going to the rallies and without coming near a voting booth when it was time. A local functionary of the Indonesian Democratic Party, a friend of our family who had been a little swayed to Sukarnoism, used to drop by and told us stories of the day's campaign. He got some helping hands for free to glue the posters of the party around the neighborhood. In less guarded quarters the two parties' posters had been deliberately scraped off the walls and/or covered by the Golkar's; not so in the location around my house. Every resentment towards everyone and everything of the past five years had had themselves poured out in collective floods preceding election day - no wonder that for a while lives were centered upon the political battle, no matter how superficial the partisanship was. Under a regime of promiscuous prohibitions, this kind of temporary identification is normal. You would have been looking for any crack on the wall to let your frustration out through, without risking your neck. This is impervious to lectures. The quiet bystanders and inactive onlookers, too, understood this mode of operation. Some refrained out of a genuine dislike of politics; some were really indifferent; some believed that it was recondite and insuperable; some recoiled because of sanity - what's the use of being in a political acrobat if the winner of the race had already been decided before the contest began? The mass media, of course, didn't say anything like that - they pretended that the election mattered, they dwelled upon details and tried to forget the unpalatable basics. So if you read the papers at the time it seemed like some real happening was going on to determine the fate of the nation. Other than a few of the artistic people almost everyone I turned to those years were so to speak illiterate. The girls never read anything out of school and the boys devoured only comic books and neither wrote anything outside the realm of personal signature. Parties and apparel-shopping and aimless wandering gulped much of their second-decade years, whose geographic characteristic was the absolute center of the town. But these kids were lucky that they had had it foregone and done with in time to enable them to face the prosaic adult life without the nervous-breakdown characteristic of the mammals whose wish to fly came ten years too late when he is already deeply aground in the working class and baggaged with three children and a wife. Of the kids that I underwent these excursions with had emerged now two commercial airline pilots, three assorted professionals having something to do with banks, a homemaker who shops in Singapore in weekends, a professor in Economics and a freelance drug-dealer - and the nondescript myself. The guitar-player is still such, three-quarters of the bands have died, some still exist as a pastime, one or two remain all they had been, only fifteen years older and getting bald. All the pleonastic dispatch was something that laid the base for bracing the dog days to come. The most devilish quality of the first eighteen years of your life is that all these can't be delegated to anyone else. You either do it yourself or come another way to your senses. Watching Young Guns won't mean you were a galloping outlaw and reading A Catcher in the Rye doesn't make you a bumpkin coming of age in the New York underground. There is a strict line between fact and fiction. Between the two, real life is the more fantastic realm. |
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