There have been quite a few times in my life where I have wished that I could replay the previous 5 or 10 seconds. It has happened a few times when I bumped into things with my car.  That horrible feeling of “oh no what have I done?” You get out of the car and have a look at the damage and you think to yourself, gee, I wish I could have that few seconds over again.

When I smashed my car in the desert, I kept wishing that I could somehow miraculously have the recent past back again. It seemed like such a small thing to ask for, I was actually surprised that I didn’t get my wish.

But… but… if only?

As the wise old Omar Khayyam once said:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it

Or as my old grandmother used to say:

“If, ifs and and were pots and pans there’d be no need for tinkers.”

Back in 1983 I was in Isla Mujeres, Mexico, walking along the shoreline at night when I saw this truck backing up on a pier to unload its cargo onto a boat. A couple of guys were behind the truck guiding it as it backed down the pier, when it suddenly broke through the timber decking.

It’s a pretty sure bet that the truck driver wished he could have had those few seconds over again.

When I was about six, my mother (a widow) moved with my sister and I to New South Wales to start a new life in Sydney with her new boyfriend.  Although we lived in rented accommodation it was in a very up market part of town called Cremorne that had harbour views, and my first school in Sydney was in the posh suburb of Mosman.
 
My very first day at Mosman Infants School was memorable for the fact that I was beaten up by about 5 or 6 other kids.  I suspect that no one told them that kids from well-to-do suburbs were supposed to be gentlemen. I also guess that because I had bright red hair and freckles, I was marked out as someone who all the other kids could pick on. 

Years later I read The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski and I felt that I wasn’t alone. In the book a love sick game warden captures birds and paints them whenever the mad woman of the village he loves, will sleep with anyone but never him. The painted birds were released and the game warden gained some sort of solace as all the other birds would attack them.
 
I can remember my first few days at that school being quite miserable, as it seemed though the other children were competing with each other to see who could be the meanest to me. I guess one day, I just snapped. I had enough of the ill treatment and I turned around and started hitting back. I remember on one occasion, I walked up to a group of boys who are playing and asked them if I could join in.
 
My request was met with an aggressive push and a snarling, “NAH!”
 
Before I could even think, one of my fists had knocked out one of my antagonist’s front teeth.  He ran off screaming with his tooth in his hand and blood running from his mouth to tell the teacher what I had done. 
 
The teacher wasn’t interested in hearing what had happened and I was taken inside and caned.  For those unfamiliar with corporal punishment in the school system in Australia during the early 1960s, I will explain what caning is. The pupil is told to hold out his (girls weren’t usually caned) arm outstretched with his hand open and palm up to receive up to six strokes with a length of rattan cane about a half an inch (about 12 mm) in diameter.  Failure to do so would lead to a quick smack around the legs with the cane until the hand was held out to receive punishment. Boy-o-boy, I can tell you, it really hurt! I wouldn’t like to get caned as an adult, never mind being a little child.

There was also a code of honour in regards to being caned. It was considered to be unmanly to flinch and you were considered to be weak if you cried. Weak kids got picked on so it was not a good strategy to show how much it hurt. As soon as one is hit with the cane the automatic reaction is to shake your hand in the air, and quickly sit on them, which was bit problematic sometimes because more the one stroke was often administered. After being caned you were usually sent back to your seat, where you sat on top of you hands for an hour or so.  There was no point in trying to write because it was impossible to hold a pen and control it until the pain went away.
When I look back on my early days in primary school, there weren’t very many days I didn’t get the cane.
 
My time at Mosman Infants School consisted of being terrorised by my teacher, the very butch and cane wielding Mrs Davies and fighting with my fellow classmates during recess.
 
There was one kid in particular, whose last name was Rose, who used to cause me non-stop grief every time we came across each other’s path in the playground. For reasons that I still can’t understand Rose used to attack me (not once did I instigate anything with him) every time he saw me, and by then I used to automatically fight back. He seemed to have it in for me and I in turn, hated him right back. The teachers constantly had to pull us apart.
 
On one occasion I was walking along when Rose, who had been waiting behind a corner, jumped me and started pummelling me.  He got in a couple of good shots before I was able to smack him a few back. Before long we had our arms around each other’s necks in headlocks, and we were rolling around in the dirt by the time the teachers turned up. One of the teachers grabbed a hold of Rose, who was on top of me, and lifted him up off me. As soon as I was free of his grip, and I could see that the teacher was holding him, I ran forward and kicked him in the stomach. The teachers gasped at my un-sporting opportunism.
 
Rose was instantly released and I was dragged indoors and caned once again, and then told to go to the library. I was later told that day, after recess, that I was not allowed to play with the other children any more, and that I had to spend all my recesses for the next six months in the library.  Every time I attempted to explain why I had been fighting so much I was told to be quiet.

Although the situation seemed horribly unfair, I soon grew to love my time in the library.  I spent my time looking at books about submarines or aeroplanes and drawing pictures of them.  When I wasn’t sketching war machines I experimented with various forms of calligraphy.  It was a good day, when I could knock over a U-boat and some old Gothic script during lunch.  Because I used to also read quite a few of the books in the library my reading skills quickly passed everyone else in my class.

By the time my six months in the library was up, it was the end of the school year.
 
I was looking forward to my second year in primary school. I wouldn’t have to spend all my time in the library and I might have a chance to make some new friends. But alas, that wasn’t to be as my bright red hair acted as a magnet for more teasing and bullying.  I just kept on being picked on and as a result, I was involved in a lot more fights again.
 
I was never asked why I was in the fights and it was just assumed that I was a troublemaker. 
 
Again, I was sentenced to six months in the library, for the safety of the other children. My sister and cousin also went to the same school and I can hardly remember ever seeing them in the whole time that I went there.
 
Another six months of drawing and reading in the library during recess, passed.
 
I was finally allowed back into the playground with a warning not cause any trouble. Needless to say nobody had spoken to that miserable little shit, Rose.  Sure enough Rose attacked me once again and this time I got the upper hand and beat the crap out of him.  Once again, the teachers were not willing to listen to what had happened and I was sent to the library again. When it came time to go home that day, I was presented with a letter from my teacher saying that I was to give it to my mother, and they expected her to sign it and I was to return with it the next day.
 
The letter was a summons for my mother to come into the school to discuss my behavioural problems. Poor old mum was told that I was an uncontrollable danger to the other children and she had to take me to a Department of Education psychologist to be tested.
 
That was all fine with me because it meant that I didn’t have to go to school and I’d get a trip into the city instead.
 
I enjoyed my time at the psychologist because I got to play with blocks and answer easy questions.  It was a piece of cake and I thought I’d done well. The psychologist told my mother that I had the intelligence to be anything that I wanted to be, but I would never amount to much because I didn’t have any discipline.
 
When the psychologist heard from my mother about all the other troubles I was in outside of school (a story for another time) he suggested that I’d be put in a borstal (reform school) for two weeks to give my mother and the school a break.  I was told years later by my mother that the psychologist asked her out for a date. Mum thought he was a creep and declined his offer.
 
I was sent to Cronulla Boy’s Home as a punishment, but in fact, it turned out to be the best two weeks of my first two years at school.
 
The age of the boys at the home was between six and about fifteen. Whilst it would be easy to jump to the conclusion that such homes were full of incorrigible juvenile delinquent brutes, my fellow inmates were in fact; all decent guys and they treated me well.  Not once, was I bullied or picked on in the whole time I was there. The older boys either ignored me or treated me like a little brother.  It was the first time I’d ever been in an environment where I wasn’t being subjected to constant harassment.
 
It wasn’t all light and sweetness as the boy’s home was run by very scary matrons (the only male staff we came into contact were the ones we saw during our daytime classes). The matrons wore starched white nurses uniforms, and they enthusiastically wielded metre long (about 1 yard) rulers constructed of a leather, steel and leather laminate. In hindsight, I suspect that these were some kind of tradesmen’s straight-edge used for guiding blades when cutting things like carpet.
 
The matrons and their rulers terrified me.  I had seen them hoe into some of the boys with such gusto that they had me fully convinced that I didn’t want the same treatment.  The nearest thing I can think of that comes close to describing the matrons is the Queen of Hearts in “Alice in Wonderland”. They were the sort of people that one would paint a bush pink for, so as not to come to their attention.
 
Every morning began with a bed inspection and woes betide any boy foolish enough not to have a perfectly made up bed. The beds had to have the sheet pulled down to exactly the right place and the blankets had to be tucked in, neatly with what were known as “hospital corners”. The matrons had me so frightened that I didn’t dare ask them how to do a hospital corner so I used to just fake it and I would to spend a lot of time and effort frantically trying to make the corners of my bed “look” exactly as they wanted them. I never learned how to do it properly, until years later.
 
Aside from the scary matrons, the only other thing of my whole time in the boys home that I didn’t enjoy was after dinner when we got to watch television. All the older boys insisted that we watch “I Love Lucy”. I hated the show as a child and I still hate it to this day.

Back in the early 1970s, Bukittinggi didn’t have very much to offer the visitor other than a visit to the local gorge, and the zoo.

As is usual, when one is travelling, I had met up with a couple of other guys, and we were knocking around town, when eventually ended up at the zoo.  As could be expected from a country that didn’t have too much excess revenue to spend on the welfare of animals, the zoo was a pretty ramshackle affair. Many of the cages made out of a light-gauge sheet of welded mesh that you see used in concrete slab construction, held together with thick wire.  Health and safety issues were merely an afterthought, as you could walk up to any of the cages and stick your hand in for a mauling if you so desired.

I made the mistake of shaking hands with a cute baby orang-utan, that had its arms outstretched through the rebar. It had the saddest most soulful eyes I’d ever seen. 

Almost human. 

The little orang-utan was about a half my height, but it had hands much larger than the average man.  I was totally misled by it’s placid demeanour, so I reached out to touch it’s hand. It softly and gently closed its hand around the mine, and we stood their holding hands looking at each other, when I felt its grip tighten and it started to pull me towards the cage. That hairy little thing was so strong, and with one arm it effortlessly pulled me closer to the cage as I struggled without success to resist. 

Like any little child, my hairy friend was trying to put the object of it’s curiosity, into its mouth.  Luckily, the two other guys I was with were able to pull me back just before my hand went into the gaping maw pressed up against the wire.  I won’t be doing that again!

The tiger cage was downright dangerous.  It was basically a large wire mesh enclosed area. The wire was about 6mm (about 1/4in) diameter and the spacing of the verticals and horizontals was about 20cm (approximately 8 inches) apart, so the tiger could stick its arm right out if it wanted to.  To ameliorate the chance of a tiger pulling a child through the rebar, there was a 1 m high galvanised pipe about a metre and a half away from the front of the cage. The side and back of the cage had sheets of recycled roofing material made of corrugated galvanised iron about 8ft (about 2.4 m) high, all around the perimeter except the front. To enable people to see over the corrugated iron there was a berm about 2 m high, built around the sides and back of the cage.

In the middle of the cage was a tiger, laying on a large log and it seemed to be asleep. One of the guys was I was with, an Englishman called Andy, for some reason I can’t understand, walked down the berm to the side of the cage and stuck his face up against the old corrugated iron roofing to look through one of the nail holes.

I was standing at the front of the cage when I saw the tiger, that we thought was asleep, which was facing in the opposite direction to Andy, suddenly, with amazing speed and agility spin around and leap the 6 or 8 m (6 or 8 yards) between it and Andy, to come crashing with an alarming bang, down on the flexible corrugated iron, smashing into Andy’s face and knocking him to the ground. Luckily, the welded mesh held and the tiger casually turned around and walked away after having made its point.

RESPECT!

Click here to see a small animation, I have made demonstrating what happened.

We rushed over to the fallen Andy to see that he was as white as chalk and in a state of shock with a bleeding nose. The poor guy was in a dazed and confused state for the rest of the day.  I bet Andy won’t ever do that again.

Sumatran tigers are the smallest tigers, but they still weigh about 300lbs (about 136kg) and I can tell you from personal experience, they are FAST!

When I was a kid and I saw those old Tarzan movies with Johnny Weissmuller, I thought with my childish imagination that a fully grown healthy man would have a chance against a big cat but what I saw at the zoo that day, changed my mind forever about such things. In a contest between tiger and a man, my money will always be on the tiger as it would be no contest. I don’t even care if the guy was Chuck Norris. He’d be cat food.

Travelling in Sumatra at that time was an absolute nightmare due the state of the roads. To get to Bukittinggi I had already been on two, agonising 36 hour long  bus journeys. The roads were just dirt tracks with deep water filled holes in them that you could lose Volkswagens in.

The buses were very similar to the school buses that they use in North America, and as such, they have an extended rear end that hangs away over the rear axle, which of course increases the amount of movement one experiences when one is at the far end of a lever.

Being foreigners, we were always given the worst seats in the bus at the very back and because the seats had been designed to fit tiny little Indonesians there wasn’t enough space between the seats for us to put our feet on the ground.  To compound our discomfort our knees were permanently pushed up against the back of the seat in front of us, which wouldn’t have been so bad, but there were hand rails exactly where our knees met the back of the seats.  So for 36 hours at a time, we had the crap beaten out of our knees.  It was unrelenting torture.

I was absolutely dreading the two more trips, I had to make by bus to get to Medan to get out of Indonesia in time to avoid jail due to overstaying my visa.  I wasn’t the only one who felt this way about going on the buses again.  One of the guys that I met up with suggested that we both hitch hike up to Medan.  Any vehicle would have been better than one of those buses.

Hitchhiking was way better than the buses. Not only was it free, it was 1000% more comfortable. We followed the coastal road up to Sibolga, and then we had to head inland over the mountains to go north east to Medan. Just outside Sibolga, we were picked up by a small furniture removal truck. The seats of the truck were filled up with Indonesian so we had to lay down in the back on top of a load of empty acetylene bottles.  The road out of Sibolga climbs into the mountains up a very steep road, and the poor old truck that we were in, really laboured and struggled its way up. As slow as the trip was, at last we were moving forward, and laying on top of the empty acetylene bottles was way more comfortable than being in the back of one of those horrible buses.

Late in the afternoon and about three-quarters of the way up the mountain, we heard a loud bang and a truck came to an abrupt halt.  When we got out we could see a lot of oil on the road. When we looked underneath the truck, we could see one of the con rods had broken and had smashed through the oil sump.

The truck was cactus.

There wasn’t anything my travelling companion and I could do to help, so we thanked our driver and headed off up the road trying to get another lift.  Slowly, we walked up hill through the jungle as the sun went down. It got darker and darker as we walked through the night. The cars just passed us by without picking us up. We were starting to get a bit worried as we were out in the middle of a jungle wilderness. 

My thoughts started to turn towards my memories of the tiger in the zoo at Bukittinggi. If I had been in a vehicle and saw a tiger by the side of the road I would have been thrilled, but after seeing what had happened at Bukittinggi I didn’t want to meet a tiger out in the open.

After walking for about three or four hours our hopes were raised by seeing a hotel at the top of the hill.  Unfortunately, it was a hotel that was under construction.  We were getting a bit desperate for a place to stay, so we went into the unoccupied building site. None of the rooms had doors or windows, and much of the structure didn’t even have a roof on it yet. We found a covered concrete patio with about 30 or 40 cane chairs covered in plastic stacked neatly to one side.

Although the covered patio gave a shelter from any rain that might fall during the evening, it was still out in the open looking directly into the jungle. Both of us were getting a little bit freaked out by now at the thought that there might be tiger a short distance away, stalking us. So we decided to make a pile of all the cane chairs and crawl into the middle of them to sleep. Needless to say we didn’t sleep too well, as every little noise coming out of the bush made our hearts leap with terror.

All our panicky fear was misplaced, because in the morning, we woke up in one piece and still alive.

When I got to Medan I read in one of the English language newspapers about two old men who had been found dead in the jungle in Sumatra next to the dead carcass of a tiger. According to some of the local villagers, the two old men were expert exponents of the Indonesian martial art of “pencat silat“, and it would seem that they had been attacked by a tiger, while out in the jungle collecting wood. I find it absolutely amazing that two old men would be able to kill a tiger with their bare hands, feet and perhaps a machete.  Needless to say it is not much of a victory if you die from the wounds that you received, but they must’ve have been some really tough old guys. They’re probably in Valhalla now, sharing a drink with Ragnar Hairy Breeks and Egil Skallagrimson.

Nine years later in 1983, with the girlfriend from hell in tow, I arrived at the border between Guatemala and Mexico (between La Mesilla and Ciudad Cuauhtémoc), just as the sun was going down. Back then (I don’t know how the situation is nowadays) there was no public transport between these two towns at night. The distance between La Mesilla and Ciudad Cuauhtémoc is only about 4 km and since it was a beautiful warm and starry night we decided to walk along the road through the jungle. It was quite a nice walk, and the first couple of kilometres were very pleasant……. that was until we started hearing, a jaguar roaring in their not far distance.  I nearly soiled myself as memories of Bukittinggi came rushing back. I’m pretty sure we covered the last 2 km of that walk in record time!

After working a couple of years as a laser light show operator in the US.  I was looking for a change so I hooked up with some guys who had an electronic drag racing simulator game.  One of the guys, Mark was the son of the fellow who had invented the game and he invited me to come and stay with him in Minneapolis during the winter off-season.

Most carnies head south down to Florida for the winter, but what the heck I was always one to tread the path less travelled so I headed up north to freeze my arse off for 5 months.

When I first met Mark, I was in awe of what a go-getter he was.  Here was a guy that was 22 years old that had already bought his own house, a large pickup truck with a snow plough and a 1969 MG  “C” convertible.  Mark would work all summer in the carnival, and then he used to snow plough supermarket parking lots in the winter.  He seemed to embody the enterprising American can-do spirit.

Not only was Mark, a go-getter, he was quite athletic, being an excellent skier and ski jumper.  The cherry on top of all of this was his personality.  He was a great guy, very friendly and a lot of fun to be around.

When I first arrived to stay with Mark it was one long non-stop party.  It was just go, go, go and I soon found out why. 

The first clue I had that things weren’t quite right with Mark were all the children’s baseball bats and various other types of clubs in nearly every corner of the house. There was a baseball bat behind the front door, another one just near the door in the kitchen two in the living room, another at the top of the stairs, one in the bathroom, and I know he kept a big one in his bedroom.

Mark was a cocaine dealer. 

There was a constant stream of people coming to Mark’s place, and because they would snort some coke while they were there, it would instantly turn into a motor-mouthing party as all the various hangers-on, gas-bagged on, about nothing in particular, but at high speed and with great enthusiasm.

It’s easy to see why cocaine is so popular as it makes everyone feel as though they are the most witty and intelligent person in the room.  It gives them confidence to make conversation (even if it is about absolutely nothing), with just about anybody, in any situation. 

No wonder they call it the party drug. 

The trouble is, that if you aren’t on coke and you’re in a room full of people high on coke, it can be extremely boring.  The reason for this is that conversation doesn’t actually happen when someone is in the presence of a cocaine user, because a person high on coke could talk the leg off a table whilst under water, but doesn’t actually converse. They just rabbit on non-stop in the most inane fashion, only stopping occasionally to laugh at their own jokes. Basically they talk at you like you’re some kind of cardboard cut-out, not with you, like you’re a person that might also have something to say.

Mark was everybody’s best friend when we used to go out. Beautiful girls used to come up and give him a big hug and squeeze to rub their breasts against his arm while trying to charm him into fronting them a dime of coke.

“Awww common Maaaaark! You know meeeee, I’ll be good for it.”

“Pleeeeeze.”

Mark always said no and it was quite entertaining to see the demeanour of these young vixens change so quickly.

Another sort of perk of selling cocaine was that Mark used to get invited to all the rich kids parties and it was not uncommon for us to go to huge houses with a multitude of exotic cars parked outside.  When Mark arrived, it was as though a hero had returned, and very quickly a throng would form around him, and he would be dragged this way and that, so they could complete their deals with him.

Yes I have done that cliché “nude in the hot tub with the bimbos snorting coke” at the big parties thing…. numerous times. 

Because of the high price of cocaine (it was selling for $200 a gram in 1980) people without very much money would fake friendship with people who did, so they could get some coke. It was not uncommon, for guys on the make to go up to pretty young women at any social event and whisper in their ear, “I’ve got some coke, what some?” Forget about pickup lines, it was all about coke in the early 80s as far as I could see.

Cocaine is a selfish drug. It’s all about money and what it can buy.

“I’ve got some coke, wanna come and do some lines?” “Jus’ you an me.”

One night, a dentist with his wife and their girlfriend turned up at Mark’s placed to score.  I was talking to the dentist and their girlfriend when the dentist’s wife went upstairs looking for Mark. Mark told me later that he was brushing his teeth in the bathroom, when the dentist’s wife walked in and pulled up her dress to show that she was not wearing any underwear, and then proceeded to go to the toilet in front of him.  According to Mark this sort of thing was always happening to him. Women would throw themselves at him in the hope of that he would be like so many other men trying to use cocaine to get into their pants and that hopefully he would get them high for free.

Ahhh…. Men!  Sometimes we are so weak.

Meanwhile downstairs, the dentist was wondering where his wife was, so he went upstairs looking for her, and I was left talking to the girlfriend.  As soon as the dentist disappeared, the girlfriend undid her blouse to expose a breast and took my hand and placed it on it, while saying to me, ”if you are generous, you can have some”.

I said to her,”what do you mean?” “What about those other two?”

“I only hang out with them about two or three nights a week for a three-some and to do some coke, but I’d like to get together with you and party some time soon.”

With the sound of people coming down the stairs, the girlfriend quickly pulled away from me and did up her blouse.  It was obvious from the way how animatedly everybody was talking, that they had been sampling some of Mark’s product upstairs.

They were in a very good mood, strangely enough!

The dentist and his wife got out some of the cocaine that they just purchased and chopped up a few lines for the girlfriend and like the experienced drug hoover that she was, it was gone, with a quick snort. The three-some then invited us to go out with them.

Mark declined.

As soon as the dentist, and his harem left, Mark asked me if the girlfriend had come on to me. When I said yes, Mark warned me with, ” she’s tried it on with me and I guess she’s tried it on with you, because she figures she can get high for free since your my friend “.

“Stay away from her because she is bad news.”

No shit Sherlock!

Mark used to buy his coke of another dealer who had his own business, making sandblasted wooden signage for businesses. He was such a crocodile skin, cowboy boot wearing stereotype.  He exuded the smugness of somebody who lived by the ethos of, “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich….. like me?” I found it very sad to see that Mark saw this arsehole as a mentor.

In the five months that I was in Minneapolis, I saw Mark go from a big healthy strapping confident guy who seemed to be master of his universe to a complete paranoid nervous wreck.

Mark loved coke and what it did for him, and the money that it brought in. He also liked the way how it made everybody love him. I guess that some people don’t really care where the love that comes from, or why it’s coming to them, but they’ll take it any way they can.

I remember very early one morning Mark came into my bedroom and excitedly woke me up, whilst shoving and mirror with a few lines of cocaine under my nose and saying “here, you’ve got to try this is, it’s amazing!” So I did as I was told and sat there high as a kite, as Mark motor-mouthed about what a great party he had just come home from and how good the latest coke was that he had just scored. Then, almost as suddenly as he came in, he said to me, ” I’ve got to dash, we’re going skiing.  See you tomorrow.”

So off he went and there I sat in bed at six o’clock in the morning by myself in a very vibrant state of wakefulness.  It just seemed so pointless. Mark was always offering me coke and he was quite surprised that I wasn’t into it as much as he was.  Cocaine is wasted on me, as I am naturally talkative and gregarious. I certainly don’t think it is worth the money, and I would never actually buy it.  Nowadays, I wouldn’t even go near the stuff even if it was free. 

About a week later, Mark told me that he and his sleaze-bag mentor were going to Aspen in Colorado to sell cocaine to well-heeled skiers.  I was asked if I wanted to join them, but I declined, as I knew that I wouldn’t enjoy the scene and plus it would cost a small fortune to try and keep up with those guys. So Mark bought a pound of cocaine, which at the time cost about $30,000 and he was hoping to realise about $50,000 or $60,000 in profit. Maybe even more if he cut it with the Italian laxative called Mennite, which I had seen him do many times.

Mark didn’t come home for three weeks, and during that time I got worried calls from his father, asking me if I knew where he was and that there were debt collectors looking for him.  Apparently, Mark’s father had been guarantor to all his loans, and Mark hadn’t been keeping up his payments for about the last two or three months.  The creditors were starting to circle around Mark’s father.

When Mark came back he was a shadow of himself.  He had lost a lot of weight and seemed all nervous, irritable and jumpy. 

It turned out that he had spent his whole time in Aspen, constantly partying with new-found friends, and that somehow they had snorted all his coke and he didn’t make any money at all.  He was devastated that he had gone into debt so he could try and make some quick money in Aspen, and he had basically lost a lot. 

To top it all off, he seemed to be in some sort of cocaine induced paranoiac psychosis. 

The change in Mark was startling, and his father who was a born-again fundamentalist Christian could see his son was in deep trouble. 

Mark’s father took him under his wing promising to pay all of Mark’s debts, but only after he had made Mark sign over everything that he owned and stopped taking drugs.  Mark’s father also said to him that he would require him to undergo frequent drug testing.  Once he was assured that Mark was on the straight and narrow again, he would give him back his house and cars.

When I was in the States and I used to work in the carnival (1978 to 1981), after much tequila one night, I started shooting the breeze about a real character called Ron that I had met when I was in Bangkok, back in the early 70s.  A few minutes into my anecdotes one of my audience, piped up and said “he sounds like a guy I met in Greece six years ago in 72.”

” Did he have long frizzy strawberry-blonde hair and always carry around a greasy Moroccan leather satchel?” I asked.

“Yep he sure did. “He was always crapping on about rubbing mink oil into that shoulder bag of his and how good it was for the leather”.

Back in the late 70s, I used to carry about a box of photographs that I had taken when I was travelling around in South-east Asia. So when the guy started saying that he knew the same guy that I been talking about, I was able to pull out the blurry photograph that you see below and ask him if this was the guy.

“Yep it sure is and I’d know that face anywhere.”

So there you go, I was talking to a Canadian guy that I had met two months previously at the Calgary stampede and just by chance as we were exchanging traveller’s tales in Phoenix, I found out that he knew somebody that I had met in Bangkok who he had met two years before me, in Greece.  5 billion people on the planet, and I bump into somebody who met someone else and I knew when we were both on the other side of the world.  There are better chances of winning a large lottery or being struck by lightning.

I first met Ron when I was staying at the infamous Malaysia hotel in Bangkok. I say infamous because the Malaysia was where murderer Charles Sobhraj operated out of at the same time. Ron was staying at the Malaysia with his mother who had come over from the States to visit him during his travels and they were both in the process of buying gems for her to take back and re-sell in the States.  I think the thing that I liked about Ron was his enthusiasm for life and that he was just so full of joie de vivre.

When one travels, It’s not uncommon to bump into people, that one has a met on the road in nearby countries.  It’s almost as though there is a well worn rut that travellers follow like they are some kind of slot cars made out of meat. So it came as no surprise to me when I bumped into Ron again in Phnom Penh several months later.

The other person in the photograph above with Ron is a Japanese guy whose name I can’t remember but for the sake of convenience I shall call him “Idiot-san”. The reason why I use such an unflattering appellation as Idiot-san, is because the guy was a brainless, wasted attempt by nature at humanity.

A real oxygen bandit!

The very first time I saw Idiot-san, I was sitting at a sidewalk restaurant when he arrived directly from the airport by cyclo (a three wheeled trishaw). As soon as a cyclo stopped, he jumped out and paid the driver about 10 times more than the going rate, and then looked at the rest of the small denomination bills in his hand like they were nothing other than soiled toilet paper and threw them into the air. This almost caused a riot, as all the beggars (there are about five of them who used to hang around at the cyclo-rank) and other cyclo drivers dived on the falling money and started fighting with each other over it. Idiot-san just grabbed his bags and made his way straight for us and asked us in broken English where would be a good place to stay. I pointed him towards the brothel that doubled as a hotel across the road where I was staying.

I saw Idiot-san the next day, with a black eye and I asked him what had happened. He said that the police had robbed him within about four hours of his arrival in Phnom Penh. It would seem that his theatrics with the small change had marked him out as being too stupid to be in possession of anything valuable. I was told that he walking down the road when about four police just grabbed him and gave him the “bum’s rush” into an alley to administer him with a beating to ensure his cooperation. The cops took everything of value that he had. His money, passport, camera, watch and graduation ring.

In the couple of weeks that it took Idiot-san to get a new passport and funds sent to him, he made the acquaintance and friendship with Ron. With a new passport and money, Idiot-san and Ron flew to Vietnam (this was all during the during the war) for two weeks of whoreing and dope smoking in Saigon. When they came back from Saigon, Ron proudly showed me the scabs on his knees, caused by the non-stop shagging that he and Idiot-san had been wallowing in.

Both Ron and Idiot-san left Phnom Penh after a few more weeks and I didn’t see them again until I bumped into them in Manila when I was on my way to Japan. When Idiot-san, heard that I was going to Japan, he gave me his address in Takamatsu on the island of Shikoku and said that Ron would be staying with him when he got back and that I should look them both up when I was there.

When I got to Tokyo, I was so low on funds I had to look for work straight away and I got a few little jobs teaching English.  Because of the way how the Japanese were giving out visas at the time I had to go to Korea to get a new visa after six months. Since I was hitchhiking from Tokyo across the island of Honshu to Shimonoseki to catch the ferry, I thought I should take a detour to visit Ron in Takamatsu.

I hadn’t been given a telephone number to ring first and warn Ron and Idiot-san that I was coming, so I just lobbed up to the address that I had been given. I found the address easily enough and Ron and Idiot-san’s occupancy of the apartment was confirmed by their names on the mailbox. Rang the buzzer, but no one was home, so I asked some of the neighbours in my frightfully crippled Japanese if they knew where they were, and as best as I could understand, I was told they had gone away.

In Japan everybody’s whereabouts is registered with the police so I knew that if I went to the police station they would be probably able to give me a forwarding address. The consternation I caused in the police station when I asked about Ron and Idiot-san gave me quite a surprise. The policeman at the desk called over two shabbily dressed and rough looking detectives and excitedly jabbered away to them as he was gesturing at me. The two detectives took an immediate interest in me and marched me to their desk in the middle of the station. They then bombarded me with questions about Ron and Idiot-san.

Why was I looking for them?

What was my relationship with them? 

Why was I in Japan?

The grilling just went on and on. The detectives were so serious and steamed up. It just wasn’t making sense to me as all I wanted was the new address of my friend and his idiot friend.

When I tried to put a halt to the proceedings with a few questions like “why are you asking me so many questions?” “Are you ever going to give me the addresses of my friends?” I was subjected to a further barrage of rapid-fire questions.

“So, they are your friends!”

“How long have you known them?”

” Why have you come all the way to Takamatsu to see them?”

“What is your real reason for being in Japan?”

On and on it went. Without explanation, I was asked question after question and I answered them as quickly and truthfully as I could, but the detectives still wouldn’t tell me anything or answer any of my questions.  This went on for about two hours (I’m not kidding) and I was starting to get a bit worried, as it was obvious that they weren’t going to let me go.

I guess after so long, the detectives realised they weren’t really getting anywhere with me.  Which didn’t surprise me because I told them everything that I knew, which was nothing.

So they tried a new tactic.  One of the detectives barked something at a uniformed policeman.  The policeman quickly walked down the stairs in the middle of the office with another officer. I sat there for a few minutes wondering what the heck was going on. I was absolutely stunned and horrified at what I saw next.

Back up the stairs returned the two uniformed policeman, each holding on to the upper arms of a semiconscious, blood splattered and badly beaten Japanese man that they had just dragged (he could hardly stand on his own) up the stairs. Things were starting to turn into a nightmare.  It was all just so intensely shocking. The two policemen dragged the poor unfortunate bastard closer to me and snapped his limp sagging head upwards by the hair, so I could see a face that had been beaten to a pulp. His eyes were so swollen that he could hardly open them. His lips were split and his nose looked broken.

The two detectives then said to me, “do you know this man?” To which I answered, “no”. Then they barked the same question to the punching bag, to which he just whimpered a negative. The two policemen then let go of his hair and his head flopped forward. The poor guy was spent and I’m sure he would have told them anything they wanted to hear if he thought it could get him out of his predicament. From the look of things, he was in very deep shit indeed.

I was starting to get a bit frightened by this point, and I was beginning to wonder if I was going to be subjected to such “aggressive interrogation” as well.

I needn’t have worried because as soon as they took the punching bag downstairs, the older of the detectives he took me by the arm to his car. He said, without any further explanation ”get in”. I did as I was told, and he drove me towards the ferry terminal.  During the drive, I tried to ask a few questions about what was going on, only to be ignored.  The detective didn’t say one thing to me until we got to the ferry terminal and that was, ” get out and don’t come back”. I left the island of Shimonoseki with no idea of why, what had just happened, happened.

Fast forward several more years to my conversation at the beginning of this post, with the Canadian carney. As I exchanged anecdotes about Ron with the carney, I said that I would love to know what had happened in Japan with Ron, to which the carney replied that he had Ron’s parent’s address in Pensacola, Florida and that we should visit him.

This was starting to get really freaky.

We had just finished the Arizona State Fair in Phoenix, and we were on our way to San Juan in Puerto Rico to do the first really big fair than they’ve ever had down there and we would be passing through Pensacola.

When we got to Pensacola, we found that Ron was living with his parents. Ron still had a long frizzy strawberry blonde hair, but he put on quite a bit of weight, and it was obvious that his mother was feeding him well. After smoking a few joints from Ron’s pillowcase sized stash, he suggested that we go to a local air force watering hole, known as Trader Vic’s.

Trader Vic’s was the perfect context for Ron because it was so crazy in a Vietnam war sort of way. There was camouflage netting hanging from the ceiling, and various military souvenirs all over the corrugated iron walls. All the waitresses seemed to be Vietnamese ex-prostitutes who would take their orders, while kneeling on the knees between the seated men who openly groped them. It was as though I was in a movie about Americans in Vietnam that was being directed by Fellini. It was surreal.

After a few drinks, Ron told us what happened in Japan. Apparently Idiot-san was the younger brother of a minor Yakuza and he suggested that he and Ron could make a lot of money if they took guns and marijuana into Japan. Back in the early 70s Cambodia was awash with firearms and Japan has very strict laws about firearm possession so Ron and Idiot-san bought a number of Chinese pistols when they were in Phnom Penh. Then they bought a bunch of marijuana when they were in the Philippines. Surprisingly, they were able to successfully smuggle the contraband into Japan, but they both got busted in Takamatsu when they were trying to offload it.

Ron and Idiot-san both received three years jail, and the punching bag that I met in the police station at Takamatsu was Idiot-san’s Yakuza brother.

I was reading an article about losing passports on a blog called “I Am The Cheese” today and it got me thinking about my relationship with my passports and dealing with immigration in the various countries I have visited. 

I was 16 years old when I got my first passport, and I can remember being so thrilled when I received it.  I looked at all the blank pages and dreamt of filling them up with stamps from exotic destinations. 

I’ve had a total of five passports.  I filled up two of them, destroyed one in the wash, had one expire without filling it up, and I’m currently working on filling up a new fairly new one.

• 1st photo was taken in 1973 when I was 16

• 2nd in 1975 after two bouts of malaria and starving in Cambodia

• 3rd in 1990

• 4th in 2002 and it’s proof that you shouldn’t have passport photos taken after a big night out and with a killer hang-over.

The old passports were easy to fill up because back in the early 1970s, when I started travelling, the stamps in passports tended to be big, elaborate and colourful affairs. 

I used to love it when I’d get a nice big new visa stamp in my passport.  It was as though my passport was a gun and each new visa stamp was like a notch on the barrel, marking off each new kill.  This might sound crazy, but I used to love crossing borders and filling out the immigration forms.  The more questions on the forms for me to fill out the happier I was.

Although I liked getting the visa stamps in my passport and filling out the all the forms I didn’t have that much respect for the whole concept of authority. I used to bristle at the thought that my stays in various countries would be limited by how much time was allowed by the stamps in my passport.

The first time, this attitude got me into trouble was in the second country that I visited, Indonesia in 1974. Back then, you could only get a one-month visa, and if you wanted to extend it used to cost $25 US for another 30 days. This extra charge struck me as being outrageous, because at that time, I was making about $80 a week, and it seemed like a huge amount of money to pay.  Thanks to my bad attitude, I decided that I wasn’t going to pay the $25 extra and that I was going to sneak out of the country on a fishing boat or something when I felt like leaving, instead of getting the proper extension. So I took my time as I dawdled through the Indonesia from West Timor to Bali and then on to Java and Sumatra.

By the time I got to Sumatra I started to realise it wasn’t going to be so easy to leave illegally, and it would probably cost me way more than the $25 extra charge I was trying to save. Plus there was the problem of arriving in another country illegally. I’m not a very good chess player.

Okay, okay, so I’m as a sharp as a bowling ball! I know, I know!

By the time I’d gotten to the small town of Djambi in the southern part of Sumatra I had already overstayed my visa so I went to the local immigration office to sort things out.  Rumour had it that all officials in Indonesia were extremely corrupt.  So I hit upon a cunning plan.

I got all of my money, with the exception of about $10 worth of local currency and hid it in my shoes, and then I went into the immigration office and ask to speak to the boss.  Amazingly, I was taken straight in to see a General of Immigration (there’s a general for everything over there).  I walked straight up to him and shook his hand and then explained to him as best I could in broken Indonesian, that not only had I overstayed my visa, but I only had $10 to bribe him with to fix things up.

The general looked incredulous and embarrassed, as I, a long red haired teenage idiot offered him a pittance to compromise himself and break the law.  As a condition to entering Indonesia, I had to have an onward ticket out of the country, and the cheapest ticket out of Indonesia that could be bought overseas was a 15 minute air Malaysia flight from Medan, Sumatra to Penang in Malaysia.  The general asked to see my onward ticket so I showed it to him and then he asked to see my passport.  The general then stamped my passport and wrote in my passport that I had 10 days to get out of the country.  He then told me that if I didn’t leave by that time that I would go to jail, and that it was basically a deportation order.

Whoo! Hoo! My first sort of deportation! Awright! I was special, and I had special stuff written in my passport.  I couldn’t have been happier. I showed every other traveller I met over the next couple of months.

The next time I got into trouble with immigration was in Cambodia.  By the time I had arrived in Cambodia (about six months after I’d left home) I was starting to run out of money so I had to look for some work. One of the beauties of being a native English speaker is that one can always teach English in non English-speaking countries, with dodgy governments. The fact that I wasn’t qualified didn’t even enter my mind and it wasn’t very long before I found a bit of work here and there pretending to teach people how to speak English.  The matter that I was on a 30 day tourist visa, and I wasn’t supposed to work didn’t even appear as a blip on tje outer edges of my radar. 

Who ever said “ignorance is bliss”, sure knew their stuff, when it came to my attitude towards governments and their rights to control the movement and the employment of foreigners within their borders. I just didn’t give a shit.

Cambodia during my stay was in the midst of a civil war, and as such, the government was a shambolic free for all.  It was pretty easy at the time to get extensions to the visas, but it was much more problematic to get permission to work.  I had gone into the immigration Department to explain that I wanted to change my tourist visa to a work visa, and I was told that they would think about it.  That evening two immigration officers turned up at my place, and just hung around for about an hour or so, making small talk.  I was so clueless at the time, I thought they were just being sociable and I didn’t realise that I was supposed to pay them some money to sort my visa status out.  When it was obvious that they were wasting their time with me, they left, and my visa wasn’t extended or changed. 

To be honest, at the time I didn’t care. That is until I got a letter from the Australian Embassy, telling me to leave because the Khmer Rouge were about to take the city, and I had to leave in a hurry.  When I went to buy my air ticket out, I was informed that I had to get permission to leave the country, because my papers were no longer in order.

I went back to the immigration Department to try and set the matter straight.  I was kept waiting in a stuffy hot office for about two hours, and during that time a long haired American traveller who was there before me, totally lost his cool and started yelling and screaming at the immigration staff. He had been waiting for so long and it was the second time he had been through the long waiting rigmarole thing. Apoplectic with rage, his face turned a bright red as he spluttered invective at a seemingly imperturbable desk clerk. The American could see he was getting nowhere, and that the immigration staff were beginning to enjoy his little rant so he just “tossed his plaits” and stormed off.

A short while later I was shown in to the office of the man in charge, Su Sonn the Controleur de Police.  He was one of those greasy arrogant and horrible people, who made their way in the world by squeezing money out of everybody he came into contact with. I had seen him around town before, riding around on a big Harley Davidson dressed in a khaki safari suit and he used to wear a side arm in a holster around his waist. He parted his hair in the middle and slicked it back with a greasy pomade.  To complete the slime-bag image that he was cultivating, he was smoking a cigarette in a tortoise shell cigarette holder and wore aviator Ray Bans.

Su Sonn sat behind his desk, slumped in his chair as he gave my passport a cursory look. With a grunt he flicked it casually back at me, making sure it fell on the floor and said to “me come back tomorrow”.

I was starting to see why the American had lost it.  As I picked up the passport off the floor I remembered that the next day was a public holiday so as I stood up, I flicked the passport back across the table towards him, so it landed in his lap and I said to him “tomorrow is a public holiday, I’ll be back in a couple of weeks”.

It’s never a good idea to lose one’s temper in Asia with officials because they see it as a sign of weakness and lack of control. It only causes them to despise you even more.  I knew that Su Sonn scumbag was counting on me caring about whether or not I could get my exit permit. 

The thing was though, I didn’t care. 

I figured that if the guy was going to mess me around and then try and get some kind of huge bribe from me, I might as well, just say that my passport had been stolen and get another one. To hell with him! I was naive, brainless, 10 foot tall and bullet-proof.

I went back several days later and picked up the passport without any problems.

Whoo! Hoo! Awright! I was extra special now, and I had extra special stuff written in my passport.  I couldn’t have been happier. It was the first time I ever had to get permission to leave a country!

The next time I got into trouble with immigration was about a year later, in Japan.  Again, I had gone into the country on a tourist visa, with the intention of teaching English.  The Japanese at the time, where giving visas valid for multiple visits for two months over a six month period, that could be each be extended for another month. 

So in practice what one had to do was go to Korea after three months and then come back for another three months and then go out of the country again to get another Visa. Which I did, but the only problem was that when I tied to return to Japan, the Immigration officials at Smimonseki looked at my previous visa, and figured that I’d already stayed six months and that was long enough considering that I didn’t have enough money to support a tourist visit. 

They knew I was working, and I got to see side of the Japanese character that most Australians hadn’t seen since the Second World War.  All I can say is that it is the Japanese make the best of friends, but the absolute worst of enemies. Thanks to my wilful disrespect of Japanese immigration laws I got to see the nasty side of Japanese culture. They started to threaten me with ” we put you in monkey house”. “You no go home long time”. I could see that they are enjoying watching me to twist in the wind and the belligerent taunting went on for what seemed like hours.

I was getting desperate, and I finally blurted out that I had to get back to Tokyo, because my Japanese fiancé was waiting for me.  That threw a real wrench in their works, and they were full of consternation at what to do. After much heated debate in raised voices, they decided to ask me what my fiancé’s phone number was. I gave them my girlfriend’s phone number, and they called her and asked if it was true, I was her fiancé.  It was the first time Akemi had heard any such thing but luckily for me, she played along and gave the immigration guys assurances that we were in fact going to be married very soon. Incredibly, I was given a three-month stay and allowed to carry on back to Tokyo. Un-freaking-believable!

So I went back to Tokyo and continued teaching, but the three months went by awfully quickly, so I decided to hell with this, and overstayed my visa again.

In Japan foreigners have to register with the police, and they receive what is known as a gaijin (foreigner) card that they have to carry on their persons at all times. The gaijin card has to be updated by the police every couple of months.  Everything was going really well until I went to get my gaijin card updated and an unusually thorough policeman asked to look at my passport to check my details (it was the first time that it happened) and he noticed that I had overstayed my visa.  I was told I was in serious trouble and I had to go to the immigration Department immediately. 

Strangely enough, the immigration Department wasn’t very happy with me, and after reading me the “riot act”, they made me write out a personal apology to the emperor of Japan for breaking his laws (I’m not kidding) and then they told me I had a week to get my affairs in order and get out of the country or as I going to jail for three years.

Bummer!

When it came time for me to check in at the airport, the counter staff waved over two the huge beefy Japanese plainclothes policeman, who came over to me and without a word, each held me underneath an arm and kept a hold of me until the plane came.  When it came time to board, with hundreds of other passengers watching, the plainclothes policeman frog-marched me onto the aeroplane. I didn’t feel so it elated about having a real deportation happen. It was shameful and embarrassing, plus I was not allowed back into Japan for at least another five years. I loved Japan and the Japanese.

Double bummer!

As it turned out, I didn’t return to Japan for another 29 years.

My how things have changed, or should I say how I’ve changed.  I wouldn’t dream of trying any of that nonsense on nowadays.  I like my border crossings to be trouble-free, and I go out of my way to keep my nose clean when I travel.  These days I have, itineraries, rental cars, travel insurance and obey the laws of the countries that I go into without giving it a second thought.

The trouble is, when one does the right thing, it doesn’t lead to any experiences that are worth the telling.  Now when I come back from overseas trips, and anybody asks me about my trip, I can sum it all up with the following statement, ” I had a really great time, and everything went well”.

Nowadays it’s much harder to fill up a passport with stamps as they’re now these dinky little anticlimactic things.

One can assume, the more sophisticated the country, the smaller and more insignificant their entry and exit stamps are.  It would seem that it’s only Third World countries with Byzantine bureaucracies have nice big colourful stamps (more like bank notes really) any more.

In the comment section of a previous post, I was asked by MtBrooks “And how did you employ the “batshit crazy foreigner” tactic to get of other trouble?”

Here is the story of just one of the places where I had to employ tactics that I had learned from a Belgian guy called Beet that I met in the southern part of Thailand, on how to deal with threatening situations.

Every now and again in my life, I’ve come across people who are almost Christ-like in their beaming warm countenance, trusting nature and overwhelming desire to be martyred.

Back in 1982, when I was in Chaouen, Morocco, I met one of those “not long for this earth” saints that I was referring to.  He was a mousy blonde, shoulder-length-haired and bearded elf of a man from Montreal.  Sort of like a neo-hippy Gelfling with a French accent. 

I first came across the Gelfling in the cheap hotel that we were both staying at.  The first indication I had that the Gelfling would be seen as the new white meat in town, was as soon as we stepped out of the hotel to go to the markets together.  As is usually the case in Morocco, there were a couple of local guys hanging around the entrance ready to pounce on any hotel guests and offer their services as guides, with the ubiquitous chant of “gid! gid! gid!” 

Finding your way around in Morocco isn’t all that difficult, most of the time.  The towns are usually fairly small with the poorer neighbourhoods at the top of the hill, and the markets and commercial areas at the bottom of the hill.  I’ve never felt the need to have any guidance when I’ve travelled so I just walked right by the guys who were offering their dubious services.  I had taken about five or six paces when I realised the Gelfling was no longer with me, so I turned around, only to see him bailed up by the so-called guides. 

There he was, patiently listening politely to the hustler’s banter.  Deciding that he probably didn’t have the assertiveness to extract himself, I walked up to him and asked him if he really wanted those two guys to be following him around all day and expecting to get some kind of kickback from whatever he buys from the shopkeepers, and then have to pay out a “tip” for the honour at the end of the day?  I could see that the Gelfling was conflicted about what kind of answer he should give me in front of the two “guides. As he dithered and struggled to come up with an answer that would please all parties without causing offence, I just said to him.  “I’ll meet you up the markets” and walked off on my own.

I didn’t see the Gelfling for the rest of the day and when I was heading back to the hotel in the afternoon, I passed by a tea shop, where the two hustlers from the morning was sitting with a few of their friends drinking mint tea.  One of them noticed me and nudged his friend who said something to his other friends (I’d bet it was something like, “watch this”)  as they both got up and made their way towards me.  One of the so-called guides stuck up his hand and barred my way, as he said to me,

“Why you say you no want gid?”

“It is our job!”

“In other country they keel you!” As he made a slashing gesture across his throat with his hand. 

He then took a step forward and stuck his face right up to mine and with as much menace as he could muster, threatened me with, “we keel you!”

Without even thinking, I stepped onto one of his feet and pushed him over with my left hand displaying as much contempt as I could.  I then spat on him and told him he was a dog in Arabic (wah-enta kelp!), and that I would kill him if I ever saw him again.  They both knew I was serious, and they couldn’t get away from me fast enough.

The next morning as I walked out of the hotel with the Gelfling in tow, the two so-called guides were outside waiting, but as soon as they saw me, they made themselves scarce, quick smart. We had decided to walk out of the town to an old ruined mosque. 

 When we got to the very outskirts of town, the juxtaposition of the whitewashed houses with their blue doors against the deep green hills in the background made for quite the picturesque scene. The Gelfling got his camera out and took a photograph.  As soon as the shot was taken and we got ready to move on, out of the blue this speck comes running to us from far off down the road.  As this speck grew larger as it neared us, we could hear that it was yelling something at us.  Within seconds, we had a Moroccan guy in our faces yelling and screaming at us.

“You take photo of my grandfather!”

To which the Gelfling, in his saint like manner, tried to explain that he was taking a photograph of the scenery and the Moroccan guy was so far away that he wasn’t even in the viewfinder when he took the photograph.  The Gelfling then held out his camera so the Moroccan guy could see through the viewfinder thereby demonstrating the truth of what the Gelfling had said.  The guy wasn’t interested in looking through the viewfinder and he just pushed it dismissively out of the way.

“You take photo of my grandfather!”

“The Koran say you not make picture of people!”

“You make picture my grandfather!”

“Give me film!”

All the hullabaloo was starting to attract a crowd, and I could see that the situation was going to get ugly very quickly so I grabbed the Gelfling by his shirt and tried to pull him away.  The Gelfling being a good ambassador of western humanitarianism and decency pulled himself free from my grip and said, “no, no, I want to explain to him”.

Again, the Gelfling lifted up his camera and offered the Moroccan a chance to look through the viewfinder.  This time, the Moroccan knocked the camera out of the way with such force that if it hadn’t been attached to the Gelfling’s neck by its strap it would have hit the ground.  Once again, I grabbed the shirt of the Gelfling said “come on, let’s go, this is going to get real bad, very quickly.”

Unfortunately, the Gelfling seemed hell-bent on martyrdom and he continued to try and get the Moroccan to see reason.  The Moroccan continued on ranting the same thing over and over again.

“You take photo of my grandfather!” “The Koran say you not make picture of people!” “You make picture my grandfather!” “Give me film!”

“You take photo of my grandfather!” “The Koran say you not make picture of people!” “You make picture my grandfather!” “Give me film!”

The little crowd of onlookers were starting to turn into a mob.  Some of the members of the mob started shaking their fists and yelling at us and it wasn’t very long before they started hemming us in and jostling us.  With an increasing sense of urgency, I kept on saying to the Gelfling, “COME ON, LET”S GO!” but he just persisted on trying to convince the Moroccan guy that he hadn’t taken a photograph of his grandfather.  Which was the obvious truth.

The Moroccan guy just kept on ranting his mantra of,

“You take photo of my grandfather!” “The Koran say you not make picture of people!” “You make picture my grandfather!” “Give me film!”

By this time, the mob was about ten people deep all around us and some of them started pushing and jostling us even more.

Then all of a sudden, the Moroccan guy changed his mantra to, “you must pay money!”

“You must pay money!”

“I was only taking a picture of the mountain!”

“You take photo of my grandfather!” “The Koran say you not make picture of people!” “You make picture my grandfather!” “You must pay money!”

“You take photo of my grandfather!” “The Koran say you not make picture of people!” “You make picture my grandfather!” “You must pay money!”

It was at about this time that I noticed that some of the guys in the crowd were starting to pick up large rocks and I’d heard about foreigners being stoned (in the bad way that is) by mobs in Morocco before, so I decided to take the rapidly deteriorating and very dangerous situation into my own hands.

I just grabbed the mewling Gelfling by the scruff of his shirt and shoved him behind me, as I told him to ”SHUT THE FUCK UP!” Then with as much force as I could, I pushed the Moroccan into the rest of the crowd and he fell over backwards onto the ground. I then leant forward and drew a line in the dirt after which I drew my hand across my throat in a slashing motion and said to him, “if you cross the line I’LL KILL YOU!”  I then grabbed a hold of the Gelfling and threw him into the crowd, which knocked about three or four of the guys in the mob out of the way.

The mob instinctively shrank away from us as I continued to shove the Gelfling through the crowd like a battering ram before he could regain his balance. By now, the mob had got the idea that I wasn’t going to be putting up with of any more shit from them and I was quite serious about hurting them.

Hell, I had just roughed up one of one of my own kind, what was I going to do to them?

Amazingly, we just walked away from the situation without a single rock or word being tossed in our direction.

I’ve noticed, more than several times, when I’ve been in the Third World that there seems to be the perception amongst some of the locals that people from countries with Western liberal traditions can be manipulated by their need to do the right thing and to be liked.

Unfortunately, sometimes, it’s useful to get in touch with one’s inner batshit crazy self and channel a little dormant aggression. I guess the question one has to ask oneself in such situations is, do I feel like being a victim today?

As for me,

I’d rather be a sparrow than a snail
Yes I would, if I could, I surely would
I’d rather be a hammer than a nail
Yes I would, if I only could, I surely would

Except my interpretation would sound more like this.

If there is one thing that I’ve learnt from my travels, it’s to pay attention to the subconscious messages that my senses send to my brain.  Every time I’ve been really sick with diarrhoea, I can remember the moment that I decided to eat the food that my “spidey sense” tried to tell me was dodgy.  As a matter of fact, when I think about all the times in my life that I have ignored that little voice inside of my head warning me of danger, I’ve ignored myself into some real character building situations.

When I was staying in Tarrazout, the deluded thought crossed my mind that it would be a good idea to try and hook up with some Tauregs and get on one their caravans to Timbuktu.  So I decided to catch a bus from Agadir to Goulimine.  As I was waiting for my bus, I went to get something to eat at one of those suspect roadside stalls.  I can remember looking at the filthy hands (people in that part of the world wipe their backsides with their bare left hands and there is not really enough water around to wash properly) of the food vendor and being repulsed, but I thought “what the heck, I am hungry” and I ate what I was given to me anyway.

The buses in Morocco at that time, were very similar to the school buses used in North America.  Very basic affairs, with no air conditioning or on-board toilets.  The trip from Agadir to Goulimine by bus was a long one and took about 24 hours during which time my bowels reminded me that I should listen to that little voice in my head next time I buy some food.  About eight hours into the trip I got the sensation that I was about to overcome the surly bonds of gravity due to the force of an explosion that was about to happen in my pants.  I was sitting in the back of the bus and as quick as a shot, I flew over the various pieces of luggage, chickens and goats to beg the driver of the bus in my broken French to stop and let me off.

The bus driver wasn’t having any of that and he just waved me away.  I tried conveying my sense of urgency as best as I could but he just wouldn’t listen. 

It wasn’t a merely call of nature I had to answer, it was more like a subpoena from the supreme court of all creation!

I was getting insanely desperate. My shame had already gotten off and I was left with no other option than to start taking my pants down to re-decorate the stairwell with a palette of earthy tones. As soon as I started to undo my pants and pull them down the bus driver just jammed on the brakes, and we skidded to a halt as the doors were flung open.  I ran as fast as I could to behind the back of the bus.

There is nothing to compare with the relief that one has in such situations when the levee breaks and the floodwaters are free to travel their natural course.

As soon as my immediate needs were met, it suddenly occurred to me, that I was out in the open on a flat treeless plain with my pants around my ankles. About 50 yards away was a young shepherd boy with his flock, who just stood there staring at me, as disgusted motorists zoomed past me.  Then, like some cosmic joke, I realised I didn’t have any toilet paper.  You know you’ve reached rock bottom when you’re wiping your backside with a bare left hand full of roadside dust as an audience watches.

To all you mothers out there, I think that I have come into contact with the slightest inkling of what it’s like to have people looking up your clacker as you helplessly convulse, giving birth. 

As the day wore on, we occasionally stopped in small towns, and I was able to get a modicum of relief in some very disgusting Third World latrines.  Night-time seemed to amplify my discomfort as there was no scenery to distract me from thinking about my stomach pains, or by being terrorised by my now spastic peristaltic bowel movements.

Shortly after dawn, we arrived in the fog shrouded town of Tiznit.  I was feeling so exhausted, dehydrated and disorientated that when I stepped off the bus, it was like I had landed on the moon.  I felt so disassociated from everything around me, and it was as though I was seeing everything for the very first time.  In the half hour I was in Tiznit, I took some of the best photographs of ever taken in my life.  Usually when I take a roll of film I only get about one picture per roll that I’d bother keeping.  The half roll of film that I shot that morning, were all keepers.

There have been a few times in my life where bodily discomfort has led me to new heights. 

Another time was when I used to rock climb. I had been to a big and very crazy “cocktail” party. The following morning, with a killer hangover and a few friends, I went climbing.  

There was one climb in particular, a classic called “Eternity“, that I always had a bit of trouble with because it scared me a bit.  It was not uncommon for me to put in up to about 10 pieces of protection (removable devices placed into faults in the rock, to hold the rope as a safety measure) whenever I led (climbed up first trailing the rope below me) Eternity. My friends used to rag on me because it was exhausting for them to take out so much protection on the way up after me. 

On the morning of my hangover, I did the whole climb with only two pieces of protection.  My hangover was so bad that I thought my head was going to explode, and I just wanted to be sick.  I was in so much discomfort as I was climbing, that I didn’t think about the danger that much at all, and it was the best I climbing that I ever did.

The photograph below was taken in 1991 and it is of me at a camp fire with some friends firebreathing.

Ever since I was a little child, I have had a fascination with fire.  I suspect that my love affair with fire started before I was even old enough to talk.  One of my earliest memories is of my grandmother, lighting her wood-burning stove on a cold morning to get breakfast ready.  I can still see the image in my mind of the small flames growing as the kindle caught alight. Magic!

All through my childhood, I used to play with matches, and it was a constant worry to my mother.  One time, when I was about six she caught me early one morning, setting fire to toilet paper and tossing it out my third story window and watching it fall burning to the ground.  What made my mother particularly angry was that my sister was sleeping in the same room, and there was evidence that I had been lighting fires inside of the room as well. Mum was justifiably furious.

That day, when I went to school, my mother gave me an envelope with instructions not to open it and she said that I had to give it to my teacher and that it had to be signed by my teacher and brought back home that afternoon.  When I got to school I handed over the letter as I been told, and it came as quite a surprise to me when the teacher read out a description of what I’d been doing that morning, lighting fires in the bedroom while my sister was still asleep. I’m not sure but I think it was the first time my life that I was ever embarrassed.

My mother has had the school system here in Australia, punish me on other occasions as well.  One time she took me to my headmaster and told him that I had been truant and had him cane me (struck over the open palm with a cane several times).  We used to have corporal punishment in schools, here in Australia, up until the mid-70s.

Near where I used to live (from when I was 6 until about 8 years of age) was a bamboo grove and my friends and I used to make bows and arrows out of the bamboo.  We used to tear off large banana leaves and tuck them into our shorts and pretend we were Africans.  My friends and I used to hunt each other with our bows and arrows in the long grass of a big empty block of land (it was big enough for about 10 or more houses) close by.  

To make the arrows sharper, we used to melt hard plastic and wind it around the shaft tips, while it was still molten to make pointy arrow heads.

One day my sister, a few other friends and I were on the block and getting ready for another day’s safari by melting plastic for arrow heads over a small fire I had made.  One of the neighbours to the block of land saw what we were doing and started yelling at us and chased us off.  Unfortunately, our now untended fire got a bit out of control.  The spreading fire wasn’t that big when the neighbour noticed it spreading.  He ran back into his backyard and got his garden hose and tried to put it out.  The trouble was that the hose wasn’t long enough, the hot wind was blowing and there wasn’t much he could do before the whole block was up in flames. 

By the time the fire brigade turned up a few of the adjoining properties fences were well and truly on fire.  It’s true, criminals do return to the scene of the crime, and our little band stood on the sidewalk nearby, enjoying the show.  We were close enough to hear one of the policeman ask the sooty neighbour how the fire started.  He just pointed at us and said “those little bastards!”  We ran for our lives before anybody could get their hands on us.

Up until my midteens my pyromania was moderately slaked by fireworks.  When I was about six or seven (back in the early 60s), there used to be very large fireworks called “tuppenny bungers” that were like little sticks of dynamite.  Each year there would be stories in the paper how children had blown off fingers playing with tuppeny bungers.

In my childish eyes a tuppenny bunger was a thing of wonder. They were so versatile.  They easily blew up letterboxes, and if you put one in a metal garbage can and then put the lid on it, the resulting explosion would blow the lid over the telephone wires. They were awesome.  I can remember how angry and disappointed I was when the government eventually banned them.  As a kid, I just couldn’t understand it.

By the time I got to the eighth grade in high school, I didn’t need to buy fireworks as I could make my own.  As a matter of fact, I used to hang out with a bunch of guys who are also interested in very similar things. I was particularly interested in rockets, and I used to make little rocket powered cars.  

I used make my primitive homemade rocket engines by mixing my own solid fuel and packaging it into glass pill bottles that had a small hole in the plastic cap.  The little pill bottles were then strapped to a balsa wood car, and then ignited.  With a WHOOOOSH my little cars used to streak down the road.  Now when I look back on what I used to do, it’s amazing, I never had one of those glass pill bottles blow up in my face.

One day I was in the front yard at home, experimenting with my rocket fuel mixture.  I had a small metal plate, that I used to ignite my mixtures on to see how fast they would burn.  I noticed that a mixture that I had concocted made my metal plate extremely hot, and when I poured a little bit more mixture onto it,  it would ignite.  As I experimenting, a friend of mine passed my front yard and I yelled out to him “hey John watch this!” and I poured a small medicine glass of my rocket fuel onto the red hot metal. 

FWOOOP! 

A blinding flash, accompanied by a miniature mushroom cloud was the result. 

My hand was in the mushroom cloud, and as I instinctively pulled it out I saw that all the skin from my wrist to my fingertips was a saggy white bag hanging loosely off my hand and all my fingernails were totally burnt. 

Then the pain came.  To this day, I will ask any woman who says the childbirth is the most painful thing there is, why many women have more than one child.  There is no reason on earth, why I would willingly go through the kind of pain, I experienced on that day, ever again. 

I was kept waiting at the hospital for two hours screaming in agony before I was given a painkiller.  Nothing worked.  I was begging them to just put me to sleep.  Eventually some brainiac figured out that it would be a good idea to stick my hand in some ice cold water (which is the very first thing one should do). 

I had first, second and third degree burns plus I’d burnt my fingernails completely off. I spent three days in hospital, there was talk of cutting off my thumb and it was over a year before I could use my hand properly again.  All the new skin was tight, without wrinkles and I couldn’t close my hand. Because I develop keloid scars I had trouble using my thumb without tearing what little was left of the web between my thumb and index finger.  The trouble with my dexterity was overcome somewhat by plastic surgery performed on my hand about two years later.  The web of my hand was still cracking and splitting 20 years later. My fingernails did eventually grow back.

That year, some of my friends that shared a few of my interests had some pretty horrifying accidents.

Solly Voron opened up a  jar of caesium (which ignites on contact with the air) and it exploded in his face burning his corneas and setting his bedroom on fire. Luckily, Solly got his sight back. 

Alan Ritter, was making some rocket fuel when he blew up and badly burnt his upper arm and elbow.

Bernard Hegg (like all the rest of the group) had made a very powerful and extreamly unstable explosive called nitrogen triiodide. When it is wet it won’t explode, but when it’s dry, all one has to do is blow on it and it will explode. Bernard and I used to take the stuff to school and paint it on door knobs and seats so that it would make small explosions when the items were touched after they dried.  As long as the solution was dry it was safe. Unfortunately for Bernard he made a pill bottle of the compound and put it away in a wardrobe to forget about it. About a year later, he noticed the bottle and picked it up. The slight movement caused the bottle to blow up in his hand and the glass passed straight through his flesh like there was nothing there. He was so lucky not to lose loose his life, never mind the use of his hand. He came out of the experience with scars that were indentical on both sides of his hand.

Finally there was, our guru, Michael Biber (he was one of those guys who had a full beard in the 12th grade) who pretended to be a doctor and went into the local hospital and checked out some radium from one of the x-ray machines and had to be treated for radiation sickness.

So as you can see I’m a bit of a slow learner when it comes to fire. Even though I’ve been badly burnt, I still love being around fires. So much so, that in the summer I barbecue over burning charcoal about once or twice a week and in the colder months about once every two weeks. I actually enjoy the colder months, because I’m able to light up our chiminea. A perfect Sunday morning for me is to sit outside on a cold day with my wife as we read the papers while the chiminea keeps us warm.

Heaven.

My mother sent me the following E-mail as a comment to this post.

When you blew up your hand, I heard you screaming, so I and ran out and you were running around the front yard holding on to your hand. One of the other tenants rang a taxi, but I just ran into the road and flagged one and we went straight to the emergency (The cabbie didn’t even charge me!) I just sat quietly in the cab and held your arm out, away from any contact with anything.

They took you immediately and I filled in the forms. When I was taken to you, you were being wheeled, in a wheelchair with your hand in a bowl of ice water as doctor was asking you what chemicals you had mixed together. As you were telling him, he looked at me and laughingly said, “you’ve got quite a handful haven’t you?….But he will be alright and so will his hand.”

 Poor old mum and the things she had to put up with when I was a kid, and this wasn’t the half of it.