It is 6 a.m. Monday morning in Ubud, Bali, and one hour before Super Bowl kickoff. I am trying to explain to the staff of my little homestay what I am going to watch. I pantomime the throwing and catching of a football until a group light bulb goes off and all three young men put on their motorcycle helmets and begin banging into each other and laughing.
We Americans are constant entertainment to the Balinese.
Nuri’s popular t-shirt
I have watched the last three Super Bowls in Ubud at Naughty Nuri’s, an infamous open air bar owned by an Indonesian woman, Nuri and her New Yorker husband Brian. Nuri’s is famous for its martinis (a curry dish at Nuri’s costs around two dollars, whereas a martini, due to the huge tax on alcohol, will set you back $10. A three martini lunch at Nuri’s costs more than an average Balinese makes in a week.)
I arrive at Nuri’s at 7, and most of the good seats are taken by a group of Americans who, for all I know and wouldn’t surprise me, have been there all night. Beer is flowing, Bloody Marys are refilled. A regular stares at me with the glazed eyes of a man who has been hit by a tranquilizer dart. A couple across from me is drinking beer and eating runny eggs and fried potatoes with so much ketchup on their plates it looks like a CSI crime scene.
Big screen where game is usually shown
Colts 3, Saints 0
The first sign of trouble. Brian is skipping through the 500 Indonesian channels looking for the game. This goes on for a half hour. Highlights: A thin, large breasted Asian woman (unusual) is selling us something while what sounds like a dental drill orchestra plays in the background. Either a Dutch or German weatherman is screaming at us with the vocal tone of an SS officer telling us what to expect on this morning’s Death March (Sunrise 6: 21 a.m. chance of rain 70%). An advertisement for an Indonesian soap opera that features animated ducks sitting on chairs talking with the human actors (How could I make that up?). The only game on: two teams from the dregs of the Pac-10 men’s basketball conference.
Colts 10, Saints 0
It is clear that we are not going to see the game, even though you’d think Brian would say something. He and his group slowly move discreetly away from the television, like the cowboys in the old movies who slink away from the saloon doors before the shootout begins. Now there is, on my left, Jack, a retired security consultant from San Antonio; on my right, Darren, from New Jersey via San Jose and his friend Phil, from, maybe Santa Cruz. I say, maybe, because it’s impossible to get a straight answer out of anyone in Bali. There are three languages in Bali: Indonesian, Balinesian and ExPat. A simple enough question such as, “What are you doing in Bali?” leads to a complex web of vagaries, interspersed with faraway glances and exhalations of breath. Not unlike interviewing Sarah Palin.
Darren is a quick-witted, charming guy who doesn’t like football but enjoys drinking beer in a bar at 7 in the morning. He’s brought his laptop to check email during the game and he is bathed in revelation: Darrin has Skype on his computer, he will call a friend in the States who also has Skype, have him point his computer video camera at the television set and we will get a feed back to Bali and watch the game on Darrin’s laptop.
The excitement of Gilligan’s Island when the professor came up with a rescue plan pulses across our little table. Darrin, our MacGyver, makes a few calls to friends in the States.
No one answers.
Colts 10, Saints 3
Bill is behind me. He has a friend, Tom, in San Francisco, well, really Oakland, who’s a football fan, and a real partier, Bill adds. While Bill calls Tom I try to decipher what Bill’s resume of Tom means. He’s not just some regular football fan; he’s actually quite the partier as well. What a dichotomy, a football fan/partier. He sounds like a Renaissance Man.
Tom appears on our screen, with a post-waterboarding daze on his face. All of us yell at him until he lines up his camera correctly for our laptop. And then, game on. I can see the number 18 on a blue jersey. A cheer goes up from our table. Brian and his group, on the other side of the bar, don’t seem interested at all.
Game Time!
The quality of the image is blurry and washed out, a recently discovered home movie from the 50s. The speed of the action is jumpy like an old projector or, better yet, like watching dancers in a nightclub under a strobe light. I’m reminded of the frame by frame examination of the Zapruder Kennedy Assassination film in the movie JFK.
Manning, I think, throws an incompletion and the Colts punt. Brees and the boys come on the field. They march deep into Colts territory, in the Red Zone, then…
The screen goes black, the connection gone. Bill’s on it, calling Tom and, reiterating once again, that Tom’s a partier. The connection is back, just in time for Pierre Thomas to be stopped for no gain on 4th and 1. We watch the rest of the half without a glitch.
Colts 10, Saints 6
Halftime
The Who? How absurd is this? Why? How much more vapid and meaningless can this be? A band who hasn’t even released anything new in almost 40 years and a band that is missing two of its four members? Why not the Jackson Four? The Blues Brother? Why not, seriously, to reflect the symbolism of New Orleans, have Fats Domino and the Neville Brothers and Dr. John out there? Why not celebrate the resurrection of a great American city, a city we left for dead, by having Fats sing “Blueberry Hill.”? Instead, let’s listen to a quasi-band that symbolizes nothing but excess and obviously 40 years of writers block, as they sing about a blind kid who’s been molested by his uncle. Charming.
Of course, as to sound quality, what does it matter who’s playing? Norah Jones would sound like a witch drunk on two bottles of cough syrup through our feed. Impossible to identify any of the Who’s songs, Roger Daltrey’s voice is thick and sludgy, the electronically altered pitch belonging to a member of the Federal Witness Protection Program testifying behind a curtain at a Senate Hearing.
We have another technical blackout and miss the onside kick, but get the feed back just in time for the go ahead touchdown. Darren didn’t have his power adaptor so we had to move the laptop to a table near an outlet. Brad grabbed a stool and set it on the table to elevate the computer screen. Now the owner Brian and his crew have joined us and that creates another visual impairment, the smoke screen.
Everyone and everything in Bali, it appears, smokes. A gecko in my room has a smoker’s hack. I hear him coughing up phlegm at 3 in the morning. And it’s not just Bali; all of Asia will soon be one big black lung. Asia became the market for the tobacco companies after America went soft. Hah, you think you can stop us with your little smoke free restaurants and advertisement bans? Well, watch this. In 20 years the death and misery from cigarette smoking in Asia will make malaria look like post nasal drip.
One pack of Indonesian cigarettes has enough tar to pave a cemetery driveway. Dean, a Nuri’s regular, lights up another one. It ignites like a road flare, creating an inversion of smog over the laptop screen. Hard to tell through the field burning, but I think we’ve lost our connection again.
Colts 17, Saints 13
We did and we missed another score. A call to Oakland, some fiddling by Darren and we’re back on. A sense of weirdness washes over me as I squint at a commercial that I’m pretty sure has two chickens sitting on a couch. First the ducks in the Indonesian soap opera, now this.
Colts 17, Saints 16
It is after 9 and the tropical heat is filling the bar with early morning heaviness. Darren is obviously bored, walking around taking photos of innocuous objects…a table top, a wall menu, an empty glass. The smoke is getting to me and I step outside before I start coughing up blood. I hear someone pontificate, “Quarterbacks get the press, but without a great center, you’re nothing.” A pause for dramatic effect. “Nothing.” I try to name five NFL centers.
Saints 24, Colts 17
Another blackout. Tom doesn’t answer his phone in Oakland. We’ve been warned about Tom. Maybe the party’s over. But, no, after 5 or 10 minutes we’re back and we squint at a replay of a diving catch in the end zone. The play is under review. Good thing we’re not the judges. The picture is so bad that I have to look around and focus on other things in the bar to make sure I’m not going blind.
The play stands. There are sounds of joy and sorrow, mostly from the gamblers who have entered the football pool. For the gambler, there is only loyalty to the bet, the line. Who cares who wins? It doesn’t matter how you play the game, it matters about the spread. And according to the regulars, our owner, Brian, has won each quarter.
Saints 31, Colts 17
What’s happening? Someone in a white and yellow, or is it gold, jersey is running…a long ways with, I’m betting but can’t see, something in his arms. With the slow feed it looks like I’m going to have to shave again before he reaches the end zone. It’s over.
And Brian wins.
“Hey, you should buy a round for us,” Bill says to Brian as he swells to a drunken oration. Brian looks at Bill like Republican senators look at Al Franken when he mouths off to them. Of course Brian is going to buy a round. For Brian, Bill is obviously a cheap drunk, unaware of tradition and respect.
“This is the guy, right here,” Bill says, motioning to Darren to come over to him, as if this were an awards ceremony. “Without him, none of this would have happened. He made it happen.”
Bill says it with emotion, as if Darren had rescued a baby from a burning building. Darren, a smirk on his face, doesn’t look up from texting on his cell phone. I slide out the front and head home.
“How game? Your team win? You happy?” the owner and his staff ask when I walk into the garden.
Post Game Analysis With Raka and His Dog and Raka's Sullen Granddaughter
“Saya senang. I’m happy.”
Two of the staff butt their heads together again and we all laugh. I love Bali.
During the mid-80s I worked at the Vine Street Bar & Grill, a small jazz supper club located in Hollywood between Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards. Legends from an earlier age played there every week, Wednesday through Saturday. Nina Simone, Anita O’Day, Yma Sumac, Eartha Kitt, Joe Williams, Moses Allison, Esther Phillips, Shirley Horn, Carmen McCrae, McCoy Tyner, Marlena Shaw, Houston Person and Etta Jones (not James).
It’s beautiful when legends exit gracefully, but few of them do. Working at Vine Street my heart was constantly tugged by a mix of sadness, respect and compassion. There was Esther Phillips, still my favorite soulful singer of all time, walking from the dressing room to the stage, dressed beautifully, wasted on heroin, taking a detour behind the stage wall to the kitchen, puking in the trash can, wiping her mouth on a wash rag, straightening her hair and going out and ripping her heart open for the audience. “I’ve got scars on my knees/I’ve been praying so long,”she’d sing. She died a few weeks later of liver and kidney failure. (Esther’s interpretation of Gil Scott Heron’s “Home is Where the Hatred Is” is an incredibly raw and emotionally naked performance by an artist in any field. (“home is where I live inside my white powder dreams/home was once an empty vacuum that’s filled now with my silent screams/home is where the needle marks/ try to heal my broken heart”) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvdnMzQGbEQ
Nina Simone, long in exile in Barbados, coming back to L.A. to perform at Vine Street, having a psychotic break in the middle of her first set, screaming into a pay phone, then stomping out the front door, leaving a dressed up Hollywood crowd staring at me for an answer. I didn’t even know the question.
(Those who love always give the most/We’re cryin together from coast to coast/Love leaves us cold and hurt inside/These tears of ours are unjustified/Beggin ya ta, SAVE ME!/Yeah, need somebody to SAVE ME!)
And Anita O’Day, knocking back shots of scotch at the bar (“don’t put any soda in it, goddamn it, it hurts my voice), insulting the daughter of a long time fan, then going out and screeching on stage, her voice gone, sounding like a cat with its tail caught in a Cuisinart.
And then there are legends that rise from the ashes and go to new heights. Mondays were dark at Vine Street until the owner, Ron Berenstein, decided to make Mondays Blues Night and the headliner every week would be…Etta James.
Anybody who has read Etta’s recent obituary knows her basic story from the 50s to the 60s, her resurgence in the 90s and Grammys in the early 2000s. However, the 80s was where she began to come back. She had opened for the Stones in the early 70s, then dropped out with new substance abuse issues and cleaned up and Vine Street was her first regular gig in years. She didn’t have a manager, her two sons played in her band with a young blonde haired lead guitar player.
I wasn’t really familiar with Etta James at the time she started at Vine Street. I grew up in a neighborhood surrounded by the sound of jazz and blues. Across the street from my mother’s house lived Sweet Billy, who loved to have me over and play Muddy Waters, Lightning Hopkins, Big Mama Thornton, Big Maybelle, Howlin’ Wolf. Varnell Williams, my childhood buddy, first introduced me to Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins and Etta Jones, the jazz singer, but not Etta James.
But when she first walked out on stage at Vine Street the first night, in front of maybe 20 people, most of them comps, and broke into “Tell Mama,” she opened a door I didn’t even know was there to be opened (“Tell Mama all about it/Tell Mama what you need
Tell Mama what you want/And I’ll make everything alright”).
Word spread through the L.A. music circle and soon Monday nights were sold out (maximum 100 people in the club). Movie stars, musicians (Stevie Ray Vaughn would show up and stare at Etta, mesmerized by every syllable she sang) and producers and fans came to see her. When she sang “I’d Rather Go Blind” the house would fill with moans, goose bump shivers and gasps as we all relived our major heartbreaks: “Something told me it was over/When I saw you and her talkin’/Something deep down in my soul said, ‘Cry, girl’/When I saw you and that girl walkin’ around/Whoo, I would rather, I would rather go blind, boy/Then to see you walk away from me, child, no.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YApNirMC9gM
I don’t know how long Etta had been clean and sober when she started her run at Vine Street, but for the first few months her AA sponsor, a huge biker would come every Monday night and sit in the front table to support Etta. I would ask him what he would like each week and he would say, “Give me a 7-up!” in a tone and volume that made me think he was about to disembowel me.
Etta charmed us all, playing with the audience, laughing at herself . And for a few of us young men who worked at the club, she was our dating service. She would stop between songs and heap praise upon us. “Ladies, and especially you ladies, are these young men taking care of you tonight the most charming, most handsome men in the world. Look at Alan and Peter and Tommy. Aren’t they great? You single ladies better grab one of them before somebody else do.” Then she would sing “At Last” for us. (At last, my love has come along/My lonely days are over/And life is like a song/Oh, yeah, at last/The skies above are blue/My heart was wrapped up in clovers/The night I looked at you)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOKd8dsqqQU&ob=av2n
After a few months of sold out shows there were two men sitting on stools at the bar one night, sliding quickly into their drunken comas, slamming back straight shots. They looked old and haggard to me, the one man’s skin, even in the dark light, had the texture and color of bleached parchment paper. He motioned toward the bar and raised two fingers over the empty shot glasses. I can’t remember how I broke the news to them they had enough to drink and they were cut off, but the older man seemed to take it well, sheepishly, like a reprimanded over eater.
Right then, Etta ended a song and said, “Everybody, the greatest guitar player in the greatest rock and roll band in the world is here. Let’s get him to come up here. Keith Richards!”
Keith Richards! How did I miss him coming in? Vine Street was a small club. I looked around the club. The man I’d cut off was reacting in a funny way to the Keith Richards news, raising his hands and shrugging and mumbling. Etta had walked over and given him a hug. I just cut off Keith Richards, I thought.
“No gwtr, no gwtr,” he slurred to Etta in that drunken patois of lost vowels, strumming an air guitar with his hands. Etta helped Richards off the stool and walked him the short distance to the bandstand. Richards listed to his left and to his right, a centenarian who’d lost his walker. The blond lead guitar player handed Richards his guitar. Richards pantomimed that he didn’t have a pick. Etta snapped her fingers to four and the band started a basic 12 bar blues jam. Richards looked confused, as if he had been thrust into an avant garde music scene with esoteric musical scales and complicated time signatures.
A breeze of embarrassment floated through the club as Richards fumbled through the song. Etta looked at her guitar player, he whispered something to her and he hit the opening bars of the Stones hit, “Miss You.” Richards perked up, his head straightened, a marionette brought to life by a wizard of subterranean musical memory. Richards added fills while Etta sang, did the automatic solo he’d done a thousand times before and finished off the tune with some quick runs. As he walked back toward the bar, the packed house on their feet, he turned to me, a star to be served, and motioned for a drink.
No, I shook my head. He stopped, puzzled. We looked at each other for a moment. Then he smiled, shrugged and gave me a soft bow, acknowledging my sovereignty and integrity.
Every Monday night, after the show, Etta would sit back in the funky dressing room and I would serve her favorite dish off our menu, clams in a linguini sauce. The first time I brought her dinner she handed me a tip. I waved it off.
“That’s not necessary, Ms. James.”
“Yes, it is,” she said, holding the money out to me. After I took it, she said, “And, it’s Etta.”
That little moment was a symbol of how Etta respected all of us and the part we played in her world. Many of the performers at Vine Street were aloof and demanding and it carried over to their performance: technically rich, emotionally bankrupt. Not Etta. She had the strength to be soft and open and it reverberated through the club every Monday night.
The last time I saw Etta was, I guess, 1987, my last week of work at Vine Street. After the show, as usual, I brought her the linguini. She looked up at me.
“Thank you, Tommy. Sit down, you’ve been on your feet all night.”
I pulled up a chair next to her. We didn’t talk while she ate and there was a comfortable, post show/work serenity in the silence. She looked over at me a few times and smiled. When she was done, I stood up and reached for her plate. She looked at me with the joy we give when all we see is the good in someone (and why don’t we look at everyone like that?) and she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek and tousled my hair.
It was a moment of pure sweetness, affection and love. I walked to the door of the dressing room and stopped.
“I love listening to you sing, Etta.”
“I love singing to you, Tommy.”
When I heard she died, I put on my headphones, lay down on some cushions, closed my eyes and, for an hour, listened to Etta James sing to me.
“What is good for me will be good for my family and what’s good for my family will be good for our company and what is good for our company will be good for the world.” —from Mrs. Claus: A Bottom Line Story
I was born to run a Fortune 500 company. At age 7 I owned, operated and franchised a chain of successful drive-through lemonade stands. In middle school I reengineered the cafeteria food lines to maximize playground time. As high school treasurer, I funneled “donations” through the principal’s office to soften his views on the independent study.
I went on to earn my MBA from a prestigious business school in the Midwest. For my master’s thesis I evaluated the efficiency of my own school’s business department. As a result of my recommendations, four professors were denied tenure, two assistants were urged to “pursue other opportunities” and my advisor, an old friend of the family, was stripped of his pension.
Upon finishing my Workaholic in Residence Program at the local branch of the Foreclosure Bank of North America, I graduated at the top of my class. Recruiters fought over me as if I was a blue chip athlete. I chose a small-cap, high growth company with rapid multiple product introductions. Within months, with my solution-oriented instincts for problem solving, I became an invaluable member of the senior management team. However, after the first leg of my oxygen-depleted career arc, I found myself curiously unfulfilled.
I set a goal to get back on track. I hired a Chinese Feng Shui master to re-energize my office. Mr. Woo built a moat around my desk and filled it with exotic Oriental goldfish. He hung crystals from my ceiling and replaced my phone ringer with a ceremonial gong. I reread the #1 bestseller, “Rationalizations Seven Successful CEOs Use to Convince Themselves They’re Doing Something Worthwhile With Their Lives.” I even refused to work more than 12 hours on Sundays.
Nothing helped. Was it me? Was it my job? Headhunters contacted me constantly, but I turned down lucrative offers every day. Then, one night, at 2 a.m., I turned in early. While flossing my teeth, checking my voice mail and playing an obscure Mongolian word puzzle, the business section fell off my lap onto the floor. I leaned out of bed and a block of letters from the page expanded in front of me:
IMMEDIATE OPENING!!!!! Efficiency Expert at the North Pole Serious Inquiries Only
The North Pole! Now, that sounded interesting. I emailed my resume from my phone I kept on the nightstand next to my bed. I nodded to sleep and tiptoed into dreams. I skied across the white frosting of a gigantic birthday cake with lit candles the size of pine trees. I laughed and giggled until a horn went off in the wilderness. I stomped my feet and yelled for it to stop. I woke up to the sound of my phone buzzing that I had a message. I reached overand turned on the light:
Would like to schedule an interview tomorrow night. Is midnight okay? My driver will pick you up. Dress warm.
Ho-ho-ho,
S.C.
To the amazement of the cleaning crew, I left work by 11 that night. I rushed home and changed into my blue wool power suit, assertive but friendly. I opened my laptop and reviewed my list of compensation requirements — short-term and long-term bonus potential, transportation allowance, 401k, stock options, first-dollar medical and dental.
My computer-scheduling program beeped. There was a thud at the door. It was midnight. I put the laptop in my briefcase, grabbed my coffee cup and stepped onto the porch of my condo. On the sidewalk stood 8 reindeer and a shiny, red sleigh, glowing like a hot coal.
“Wow, reindeer,” I said, icicles racing down my extremities.
“You think?”
“Excuse me?” I said, looking around for the source of the voice. The reindeer in front of the pack turned to me.
“I said, ‘You think?’ What part of that didn’t you understand?”
I dropped my briefcase, coffee spilled over my shoes.
“Talking reindeer.”
“Double duh.”
The other reindeer chuckled and stomped their hooves into the ground.
“You must be here to pick me up?” I said foolishly.
“No, lady, we were just in the neighborhood looking for our cousin Rudy and we thought you might be roasting him over an open fire.” The reindeer laughed, stomped and nudged each other with their antlers. They mumbled parts of the joke: “…just in the neighborhood…open fire…might be roasting…”
I checked my watch, straightened my suit, trying to act businesslike in front of 8 talking reindeer. I reached my hand out to the head reindeer.
“Hi, I’m–”
“Bob.”
“Excuse me?”
“Name’s Bob, ma’am. You have a problem with that?”
“No…uh…Bob is a lovely name…for a talking reindeer.”
“Bob is a lovely name for a talking, flying reindeer, lady. Let’s go.”
I stepped up into the sleigh and grabbed hold of the reins, a feeling of wonder sizzling my skin. The reindeer shuffled their hooves and lifted off, the momentum plastering me to the seat. We rose above the trees, the houses and the high rise office buildings. We flew north, above a quilt of clouds, the stars blinding me like flashbulbs. Bob told stories while the reindeer joked and sang. I held on, the wind biting my face, spinning my hair into steel wool. As we began our descent, the greens and reds of the Northern Lights danced in my head like a cartoon. We landed in the middle of the light show, on a snowed-in runway with a barely visible sign that read: WELCOME TO THE NORTH POLE
For the last 20 springs and summers I’ve had the greatest job—guiding people down the Tsirku and Chilkat Rivers through the Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve, the site of the largest gathering of bald eagles in the world. My little town, Haines, Alaska, is in the Chilkat Valley, carved, over the centuries, into a U-shape by thousands of feet of moving ice. The braided Chilkat River is the fertile highway for five of the salmon species: King, Sockeye, Silver, Pink and Chum. Hundreds of thousands of salmon run up the river every year. The salmon provide a buffet line for the eagles and bears. The low lying willow, ferns and marsh plants is an all you can eat salad bar for moose, herbivores that eat 50 pounds a day.
The Chilkat Valley is the home of the Tlingits, the native tribe of Southeast Alaska, master totem carvers and legendary businessmen who once maintained a trading route from Northern California through the Chilkat Valley into the interior of Alaska. The Tlingit’s mother village, Klukwan, a treasure chest of native history, sits along the Chilkat River 25 miles up valley from Haines.
Haines itself sits in the middle of pure beauty, on the tip of a peninsula, the Inside Passage’s ocean waters on one side, the Chilkat River on the other. The postcard shot of Haines most people have seen is taken from Picture Point with the snow packed Chilkat Mountains booming from behind the town.
I fell in love with Haines the day I stepped off the ferry 20 years ago. The artistry of the landscape, the aromas of the rainforest, the people who made me feel at home right away.
This blog will look at my 20 years of guiding in Haines and Southeast Alaska. Funny stories and tragic stories. How things have changed and how things have not changed. What I’ve learned and what I haven’t learned. What makes a great guide and an examination of why there are so few great guides anymore, a reflection on where we’re at as a culture and a country.
I am grateful to many people for helping me achieve my goals in Alaska. All of them are great river guides who have been great friends to me. John French (Frenchy), world class international guide who brought me to Haines 20 years ago; Michael Pratt, a great guide who supported me with friendship and guidance; Lorin Hayden, who laughed with me through many a challenge; Joe Ordonez, who mentored me and opened doors of possibility for me; Mike Speaks, who trained me on my first Tatshenshini river trip and set the high bar of great guiding for me; and Bart Henderson, owner of Chilkat Guides, who allowed me the freedom and gave me the platform on which to continually grow and learn.
Also thank you to the hundreds of guides who came and went in the Chilkat Guides system over the last 20 years and, in many ways who I learned the most from, the thousands of people from all over the world and from every walk of life that I’ve rowed down the river.
