Seminyak 1981
Seminyak lay on the northern outskirts of the sleepy beach town Kuta
The main road, Jalan Raya Legian, was barely paved, and flanked with meter high red and yellow ginger flowers planted in a neat row, that ran from Golden Village to the center of town, Bemo Corner.
The Seminyak morning light was enchanting; it beamed down obliquely, it dappled thu the foliage in thick golden shafts illuminating the mists that arose from the damp earth. It had rained the night before and the lingering crystalline dewdrops refracted the golden light like tiny prisms, radiating a spectrum of shimmering colors. The fragrance of cool and damp earth and the ever-present frangipanis was intoxicating. The bamboo groves were home to chirping birds and the giant swallowtailed butterflies that lazily played in-between the shafts of light.
Traffic on Jalan. Legian at 7:AM was crowded.. with bicycles; each with a bell and the cacophony was a mesmerizing gamalon symphony of twinkling chimes. The Balinese, sadly, like today, drove with the same complete abandon that only a strong belief in reincarnation could ever allow. I carefully navigated the rickety Volkswagen convertible around potholes and the cyclists, drinking in the scene. Strangers waved and shouted, “Hello!’ My VW was the only car on the road.
Ibu Ayu, made the greatest Nasi bunkoos on earth, and at 7:00 AM her warung did the briskest business, serving warm rice, vegetables and a small dollop of fiery sambal, for 500 rupees. It came packed in a carefully rolled banana leaf, pinned together with a sliver of bamboo. Every worker stopped by for his lunch pack and the traffic jam in front of her place served as a meeting place. There, the younger men boasted of the previous nights conquests, and others bragged of their exaggerated wins at the local cockfights; you could hear the roar of bawdy laughter, and know it was over a dirty joke.
The sound of bicycle bells, was punctuated by the songbirds many Balinese kept and hung out in their cages to catch a little morning sun. Their song sang to the rhythm of the incoming waves from the nearby shore with a chorus of crowing roosters; this was the soundtrack of early morning in Seminyak.
I had just arrived the previous night from a 22-hour trip starting in a freezing March New York City, The jet lag had me up at this time and afforded the chance to be the first customer at Mades Warung in Kuta.
The road was barely paved and potted like the surface of the moon, it was a single lane 2 way main thoroughfare, at harvest time, horse drawn bechaks piled high with sacks of rice slowed the open backed bemos, and belched clouds of pitch black smoke that choked the bicycle riders stuck behind them. Traffic jam on Jalan Raya Legian.
Thru the morning mists, like a vision, Nona appeared; Her olive skin glistened with the sheen of coconut oil, mixed with the sweet fragrance of her pachouli oil, she smelled as sweet as a piniacolada. She was barefoot, and clad only in an antique cotton batik sarong, her mountain of thick brown hair was piled high on her head, pinned together with a single chopstick that stuck out like an antenna. From one ear hung a single slice of a seashell, and black coral bracelets dangled from around her wrists. Around one ankle was an ancient slave bracelet from southern India. A frangipani tucked behind her other ear resembling cross between a Gauguin Island nymph and a Shivite Sadhu. In her arms she cradled a pile of long stemmed Ginger flowers bursting in red, yellow and white.. She had been picking them along her way back from Kuta to Legian. I wondered if she was up early or returning from the previous nights adventure. I slowed the car, She smiled, and shouted, ”Selamat Pagi” cheerily as she pulled open the door and hopped in.
“Hiyawhereya goin?” She wined in her New Jersey accent. I gestured to the pile of fabric in the back seat and my rattan briefcase loaded with business papers. “I m going to bring this cloth to the printer, then to the factory to go thru the new orders, and continued to run down my list of the days plan.
I mentioned I was just in from New York the previous night, jet lagged and up early, hoping to get a jump on my garment production, before settling down to a beach mode. I asked her if she cared to join me for breakfast.
“Welllll”, she drawled.. With that she opened a small cloth sack she had tied into her sarong, and produced a pile of beautiful delicate purple top magic mushrooms…. “I have been nibbling on these” she confessed, “It rained last night, and I wanted to get to the cow pasture before the sun got too strong,” she smiled a sort of crooked grin that revealed she had been sampling them along the way. “I know a little warung where they will make us some omelettes with these.”
In no time we were cutting scrambled omelettes laced with ginger, garlic onions and purple top psilocybin mushrooms. We washed them down with sweetened cups of black coffee grinds and boiled water; muddy kopi Bali. These mushrooms, the fruit of last nights rain in the cow pastures, were the real thing, the stuff Mexican shaman used to invoke spirits see into the future. For centuries used by mystics and holy men the world over, they promised a vision of the “other side” and a guarantee ticket to the mythical psychedelic enlightenment.
We set off along the only halfway paved road that eventually led us through the giant gates, the brick and carved lava stone Chandi , that formed a gateway to the pristine beaches of Nusa Dua. The beach that morning was deserted as usual, but for a few fishermen wading out in the knee deep shallows tending to the seaweed crops they harvested there. The silence was broken by the sound of the thundering surf breaking half a kilometre offshore.
The sand on the beach was thick coral with a pinkish glow and packed down tightly by the last nights rain and the receding tides. Not a footprint was to be seen. We walked along over the virgin sand, towards the temple that towered above on the cliffs at the end of the long beach.
I looked down at my feet sinking into the sand, it felt mushy, like my body was sinking into my knees, Nona chose to wade thu the shallows stopping to pick up the tiniest of perfect seashells, and bring them to me to marvel at… As she waded out into the shallow water, again, it looked as if Godlike she floated over the surface..
The mushrooms were kicking in.
I sat on the tilted bank of sand looking out at the sea in silence. I could hear the sound of Nona sitting next to me ripping her sarong in half. “Here “, she said to me. I had only then just realised I was clad in a pair of sandy jeans and must have lost my tee shirt somewhere. I removed my jeans, and wrapped the half sarong around me, more like a toga than a sarong. There was no doubt that under the circumstances it was more appropriate. With the other Half, Nona tied the edges behind her neck, draping it quite elegantly, like a cocktail dress. With a lock of her hair spilling off the side of her shell earring, she would have been perfect in any five star cocktail party.
I looked up and noticed the Technicolor sky, it was the most perfect crystal blue, a thin cloud stretched across the sky and was fragmented in a thousand tiny pink tipped scales, like the body of a twisted fire breathing dragon, as I stare up at this spectacle, it slowly morphed into a wild cockfight, a swirl of talons and feathers, beaks and blood with all the fury of an Affandi cockfight.
A sudden urge seized me to capture this dream before it slipped away,. With that I motioned silently to Nona to look up and witness the magic taking place in the sky above us. I plucked th3 chopstick from Nona’s hair releasing a cascade of chestnut hair that tumbled town covering her bare breast. I used it like a pencil; etched the picture in the sky onto the hard packed bank of sand, I scrambled to capture it in a gigantic drawing that took up at least 20 meters of virgin beach, Nona dropped her sarong and waded out into the ocean in a thong, as I rushed to capture the flurry of feathers and turbulence of the fighting cocks in the sky above. The Dragons tail wrapped around the fighting cock’s comb and they shared a talon that scratched a wound in the red tipped clouds. Scales turned into feathers as the dragon gobbled up the unlucky rooster; his head and wing separated and broke into a thousand tiny red tipped fragments.
Out of breath, I stopped in the middle of it to survey the scene.
Nona was standing silently behind me, wet and naked. In her hand she held a piece of coral. It was the exact size and shape of a perfect human brain! “A present” she said, breaking the silence that seemed like it had lasted for Hours…. The crooked smile on her face and her pupils enlarged reflected a message loaded with significance, from another world…
With that she placed the coral in a strategic spot right in the middle of the massive drawing..
She tore a shred off of her tiny sarong and tied it around my head to hold down the mop of sandy hair. She laughed telling my now my head looked like a mushroom. A sudden exhaustion came over me, and I lie down using the brain coral as my pillow. The action in the clouds above seemed to have turned into single calm and Zen like giant drawn out brushstroke, ending in a few dots and splashes of slivery white on a crystalline blue gradient.
It was then It suddenly occurred to me that I had only just now finally stopped, from a journey that began 36 hours ago, in a freezing Kennedy airport. A 17-hour flight to Hong Kong, a quick fried rice, and the next flight to Jakarta for a one hour lay over, and change to another flight from Jakarta to the sleepy airfield on the peaceful island of Bali.
The journey”s jet lag gave me the time to arrange the day’s production and paperwork. But before breakfast, somehow, things took a rather unexpected turn…
I laughed out loud at the thought. Nona sitting beside me seemed to be lost in her own thoughts, but giggled as if she could read my mind.
At that moment the cloth she had tied around my head slipped down around my neck, and turned into a necktie!
‘Man you think about work too much,!” she chided me,. And then she said the only serious thing I had ever heard her say, “Look out there”, she gestured towards the wild surf breaking far offshore. “That’s the world of business, that’s the world of New York, and the hustle for money. Here we sit looking on, detached, like Gods witnessing the follies of mankind. Here we sit in peace….. “