Salon Wanderlust | Fear, drugs, and soccer in Asia, page 3

T A B L E_T A L K
What is it about Paris that makes is so je ne sais quoi? Theorize and romanticize in Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y
I got it online, part 2
By Jenn Shreve
Comparing the pros and cons of four Internet travel services
(02/02/98)
I got it online, part 1
By Jenn Shreve
There really are advantages to making your travel plans on the Web
(01/30/98)
America, grow up!
By David Downie
The French and Italians decry the Clinton brouhaha
(01/29/98)
Passages
By Ralph McCarthy
Four views of the expat's life in Japan
(01/28/98)
Paradise found
By Tracy Johnston
An unspoiled oasis in the Egyptian desert
(01/27/98)

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Fear, drugs and soccer in Asia +| page 3 of 3

Despite considerable pre-game whining that the match would not be up to the high standards they were used to back in London and boasting about who would score more goals, Trev and Derrek turned out to be below-average players who were plainly not up to the Lumpini level of play. And part of the fun of this particular game was that I participated in the humiliation of Trev and Derrek.
Unlike most English players, who are dependable and intelligent if unflashy ball handlers, Trev and Derrek were lousy footballers. I have so often struggled in athletic endeavor and known the feeling of being derided for my on-the-field mistakes that I never thought I would be one of those players who vociferously berates other players. Yet I could not help myself. There was something compelling about watching Trev and Derrek come up short on the athletic field, about observing boys who simply were not up to the level of competition and whose every attempt to rectify their inadequacies only compounded their failure.
Pass the fucking ball, I shouted at them, try passing the fucking ball to your own team.
I knew a couple of the other players. There were the Nigerians Akemi and Godfrey; Dane, a wire service reporter and veteran of Stanford I-A soccer; and Paolo, a wonderful Italian midfielder. I had played with the Nigerians in Tokyo, at a pitch next to a hospital atop Hiroo Gardens. Paolo and Dane I knew from this game.
"Don't these guys suck?" I shook my head and said to Paolo during a lull in the action. He looked at me strangely, as if he didn't understand what I said, and shrugged.
"Everybody sometimes sucks," he said in his Neapolitan accent, and made a run across the bald patch of earth that was the middle of the penalty area.
During the next break, Paolo grabbed my shirt when I was telling Trev to get his ass back onside: "Hey, you are talking too much. Just play."
It was then that I realized I had neglected to pray before the game began, to meditate and ask God or Shiva or Bhudda or my higher power or whoever to help me enjoy this game, to help me play honestly and authentically within myself, to allow me to be the best player I could be. And that's when I noticed the same metallic-haired player who had totally knocked me off my game back in Kathmandu. I was not terribly surprised: Hundreds of people flew between Bangkok and Kathmandu every day, but still, I found his presence disquieting. As soon as I saw him at the far end of the pitch, limbering up and running in place, I lost my concentration.
He stood silhouetted next to the coconut tree that served as the western goal. Clad in the same black jersey, shorts and black socks he had worn back in Kathmandu, he appeared to be staring at me, his mouth turned down in a slight smirk. Or was I imagining the smirk? Was he just another player of pick-up games, a fellow traveler? Was he as surprised to see me as I was to see him? Did he even notice me?
But from the moment he entered the game, I was consumed by self-doubt. Not just about soccer, but about my whole life. Thoughts of the story I had been sent to write returned: I was running out of time and over budget. There was still so much more I wanted to put into the story of The Circuit: the whole decadent culture of these rich kids, the gritty jadedness, the hipper-than-thou vibe. And there were the little details: the relentless backgammon hustling on the circuit, the way the girls were pretty and young and blond and tattooed in all the right places, the silver Indian bracelets they were all wearing, the camouflage shirts the boys preferred. But I wanted to get something else across; that out here, miles from home in exotic Asian lands, nothing counted. The girls and boys could do what they wanted to whom they wanted and with whom they wanted, and because it all happened so far from home, it was somehow off the record. Anything went because no one from home was bearing witness.
But, if that reasoning made sense, then why shouldn't I dabble in some artificial mood-enhancing myself? Here I was in Bangkok, home to some of the most liberal pharmacies, best pills and powders in the world. Why couldn't I partake of the same lax morality that pervaded The Circuit? No one was bearing witness. My wife was thousands of miles away. My family was in Los Angeles. None of this counted. So what if I had put together 12 sober months, had stayed off drugs for 365 long days. What I did out here on The Circuit could stay out here on The Circuit. No one back home would ever know.
By then I had fallen totally out of the game. The metallic-haired stranger was dominating as usual, gracefully passing to Trev and Derrek, building up a triangular attack and making those two fay Englishmen seem like brilliant players. My perfunctory attempts to break up this new, efficient attack were falling short. And when I received the ball I second-guessed myself instead of doing what came naturally. I was overthinking and then panicking. I was playing in fear.
The player with the metallic hair and black jersey came trotting by me several times. Each time I noticed his smirk had grown wider, as if he had realized some fundamental weakness about my game and my character. It was as if he saw through to some essential defect deep within me, could determine my vulnerabilities and knew how to exploit them, on the pitch and in real life. Here, on this Bangkok soccer field, while traffic whirred by 50 meters away on busy Sukhomvit Soi III, while we played between coconut trees serving as goal posts, I felt that I had been unmasked as a fraud. I was a bad soccer player. I was a bad writer. I was a drug addict. I had traveled to escape those shortcomings, those flaws, and for a time, out here in Asia, I had been able to fend off those feelings. After all, why do we travel? We travel, in part, to remake ourselves, to reinvent new, better versions of the defective personalities we have become back home. Out here, on The Circuit, we can pretend we are anything we like.
"You're nothing," I thought I heard the metallic-haired player whisper beneath his breath as he ran past me, "nothing at all."

John Travolta and Uma Thurman were twisting away up on the projection television. The soundtrack was muted and Jimi Hendrix's "Machine Gun" was turned way up so the two stars improvised to the lefty's caterwauling guitar. The bar, a wood-paneled tavern across from Privilege on the illustriously grubby Kao San Road, was crowded with eager-to-get-fucked-up, man-it's-awesome-being-in-Bangkok tourists who hadn't flown thousands of miles on crowded, discount Air Pakistan flights to watch a bootlegged "Pulp Fiction" video. The vibe in a Kao San Road bar on Friday night is just about the same as it is any other night of the week. It's all about getting as much as you can as soon as you can and then hoping you don't throw up and then doing it all over again every day for the whole two weeks of your holiday before you are due back in Hamburg or Newcastle.
The only reason the gang of swell punks I had been hanging with were here was they were supposed to meet a German DJ, Manfred, who had a box of DAT tapes that Derrek needed to DJ a rave at Baddam beach in Goa next week. But Manfred had not showed up and the old Thai lady at his guest house said that she had last seen him two weeks ago.
Trev and Derrek had ducked into this bar to stew over the missing DAT tapes of London acetate pressings that would enable Derrek to get over as the DJ he claimed to be. Clad in Versace camouflage shirts, Oakley sunglasses, white Pepe jeans and green, glow-in-the-dark necklaces, they sullenly drank Mekong and Cokes and cursed Manfred for being unreliable. He had assured them at the Breakfast Club back in Tokyo that he would be here, and now where the fuck was he?
As I listened to Trev and Derrek hatch plans and formulate strategy, discuss possible sources for substitute DATs, other raves where the music had been slamming, other venues on The Circuit where the vibes had been trippy, I realized that I had already grown tired of Trev and Derrek and the rest of the gang of glamorous expats I had been following. It wasn't that Trev and Derrek were boring, it was that I simply wasn't interested anymore. Their concerns seemed trivial. Some DJ, another rave, a great beach, the flash new spot. None of it seemed to matter anymore. Despite my earnest attempts to rejoin their world, a world I had once known, I was an interloper now, a journalist sent from the outside to steal a little of their energy, fun and good time. I was five years older than Trev and Derrek; The Circuit was their scene now. It was time to say goodbye to my own decadent past. It was time to leave Thailand, to leave Asia, and return home, to my family and friends, to where I felt safe.
But I was here tonight for Dina, to see her one last time before I got away. She now had Balinese warrior tattoos running up her fleshy, fuzzy arms, a pierced nose, and her left ear jangled with an array of silver bangles and gold bobbles that she fingered as she sipped Mekong and Coke. In her right ear was a diamond stud, a gaudy rock as big as a dry-roasted peanut. Dina was a rich kid, a refugee from London nightclubs and New York lofts. In her mid-20s, poshly accented and coolly intelligent, she lent the evening and this crowd of travelers what class they had. Compared to Dina, Trev and Derrek were parvenus, name-droppers and social climbers. Their good looks and connections to swinging London had only gained them toeholds onto the sort of life that Dina had come from and took for granted. Dina did not leave her country to find a better or more thrilling life out here on The Circuit. Instead she possessed the charm and allure of having turned her back on precisely the lifestyle everybody else was seeking; decadent, narcoticized freedom was her birthright. Trev and Derrek and the rest of them treated her with appropriate deference. She had drifted in and out of the rest of our lives. She flew off to Hong Kong fortnightly to see classmates from Cambridge who had been posted there. Or she took off to Tokyo or Delhi, to visit any of a long list of acquaintances, friends and associates. One had the feeling as she undertook these voyages that she was some sort of Mother Teresa of the e-generation, bringing solace and relief to mind-blown ravers throughout the Far East.
I tried to talk to her whenever she was around because she had a way of seeing through to the heart of things, of telling me the truth. And she was beautiful. I told her I was leaving. I was done with my trip. I had enough for my story. I was worried if I stayed in Bangkok, in Asia, I would use drugs again. I told her of the metallic-haired soccer player who was following me. I wanted to go home.
I reached down and felt the scar from the motorcycle accident on my calf. It had long ago healed and was now just a rough patch of skin. Did she remember that time on the beach, years ago, the season I met her, when she had found me laid up in the sand after the motorcycle wreck?
She nodded. "Are you still frightened?"
I was.

New York 1997
It is a brisk autumn afternoon, the oak trees around the Columbia University campus have turned a feverish red; leaves litter the trodden pathways linking venerable old buildings. I am going to school again, studying under the auspices of a journalism fellowship. I play soccer with the Columbia Business School team. Today, we are practicing on campus, on the narrow lawns before imposing, gray Butler Library. I jog across the pitch, gasping for breath, running to take a crossing pass from a Dutch teammate.
The metallic-haired player is nowhere in sight. I have not seen him since I returned from Bangkok. And, for the first time in years, I am not afraid.
SALON | Feb. 3, 1998
Karl Taro Greenfeld has written for Wanderlust about Ibiza, Tokyo and Thailand.


T A B L E_T A L K What is it about Paris that makes is so je ne sais quoi? Theorize and romanticize in Table Talk R E C E N T L Y I got it online, part 2 By Jenn Shreve Comparing the pros and cons of four Internet travel services (02/02/98) I got it online, part 1 By Jenn Shreve There really are advantages to making your travel plans on the Web (01/30/98) America, grow up! By David Downie The French and Italians decry the Clinton brouhaha (01/29/98) Passages By Ralph McCarthy Four views of the expat's life in Japan (01/28/98) Paradise found By Tracy Johnston An unspoiled oasis in the Egyptian desert (01/27/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Your virtual travel agency - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Road warrior archives		Fear, drugs and soccer in Asia +\| page 3 of 3 Despite considerable pre-game whining that the match would not be up to the high standards they were used to back in London and boasting about who would score more goals, Trev and Derrek turned out to be below-average players who were plainly not up to the Lumpini level of play. And part of the fun of this particular game was that I participated in the humiliation of Trev and Derrek. Unlike most English players, who are dependable and intelligent if unflashy ball handlers, Trev and Derrek were lousy footballers. I have so often struggled in athletic endeavor and known the feeling of being derided for my on-the-field mistakes that I never thought I would be one of those players who vociferously berates other players. Yet I could not help myself. There was something compelling about watching Trev and Derrek come up short on the athletic field, about observing boys who simply were not up to the level of competition and whose every attempt to rectify their inadequacies only compounded their failure. Pass the fucking ball, I shouted at them, try passing the fucking ball to your own team. I knew a couple of the other players. There were the Nigerians Akemi and Godfrey; Dane, a wire service reporter and veteran of Stanford I-A soccer; and Paolo, a wonderful Italian midfielder. I had played with the Nigerians in Tokyo, at a pitch next to a hospital atop Hiroo Gardens. Paolo and Dane I knew from this game. "Don't these guys suck?" I shook my head and said to Paolo during a lull in the action. He looked at me strangely, as if he didn't understand what I said, and shrugged. "Everybody sometimes sucks," he said in his Neapolitan accent, and made a run across the bald patch of earth that was the middle of the penalty area. During the next break, Paolo grabbed my shirt when I was telling Trev to get his ass back onside: "Hey, you are talking too much. Just play." It was then that I realized I had neglected to pray before the game began, to meditate and ask God or Shiva or Bhudda or my higher power or whoever to help me enjoy this game, to help me play honestly and authentically within myself, to allow me to be the best player I could be. And that's when I noticed the same metallic-haired player who had totally knocked me off my game back in Kathmandu. I was not terribly surprised: Hundreds of people flew between Bangkok and Kathmandu every day, but still, I found his presence disquieting. As soon as I saw him at the far end of the pitch, limbering up and running in place, I lost my concentration. He stood silhouetted next to the coconut tree that served as the western goal. Clad in the same black jersey, shorts and black socks he had worn back in Kathmandu, he appeared to be staring at me, his mouth turned down in a slight smirk. Or was I imagining the smirk? Was he just another player of pick-up games, a fellow traveler? Was he as surprised to see me as I was to see him? Did he even notice me? But from the moment he entered the game, I was consumed by self-doubt. Not just about soccer, but about my whole life. Thoughts of the story I had been sent to write returned: I was running out of time and over budget. There was still so much more I wanted to put into the story of The Circuit: the whole decadent culture of these rich kids, the gritty jadedness, the hipper-than-thou vibe. And there were the little details: the relentless backgammon hustling on the circuit, the way the girls were pretty and young and blond and tattooed in all the right places, the silver Indian bracelets they were all wearing, the camouflage shirts the boys preferred. But I wanted to get something else across; that out here, miles from home in exotic Asian lands, nothing counted. The girls and boys could do what they wanted to whom they wanted and with whom they wanted, and because it all happened so far from home, it was somehow off the record. Anything went because no one from home was bearing witness. But, if that reasoning made sense, then why shouldn't I dabble in some artificial mood-enhancing myself? Here I was in Bangkok, home to some of the most liberal pharmacies, best pills and powders in the world. Why couldn't I partake of the same lax morality that pervaded The Circuit? No one was bearing witness. My wife was thousands of miles away. My family was in Los Angeles. None of this counted. So what if I had put together 12 sober months, had stayed off drugs for 365 long days. What I did out here on The Circuit could stay out here on The Circuit. No one back home would ever know. By then I had fallen totally out of the game. The metallic-haired stranger was dominating as usual, gracefully passing to Trev and Derrek, building up a triangular attack and making those two fay Englishmen seem like brilliant players. My perfunctory attempts to break up this new, efficient attack were falling short. And when I received the ball I second-guessed myself instead of doing what came naturally. I was overthinking and then panicking. I was playing in fear. The player with the metallic hair and black jersey came trotting by me several times. Each time I noticed his smirk had grown wider, as if he had realized some fundamental weakness about my game and my character. It was as if he saw through to some essential defect deep within me, could determine my vulnerabilities and knew how to exploit them, on the pitch and in real life. Here, on this Bangkok soccer field, while traffic whirred by 50 meters away on busy Sukhomvit Soi III, while we played between coconut trees serving as goal posts, I felt that I had been unmasked as a fraud. I was a bad soccer player. I was a bad writer. I was a drug addict. I had traveled to escape those shortcomings, those flaws, and for a time, out here in Asia, I had been able to fend off those feelings. After all, why do we travel? We travel, in part, to remake ourselves, to reinvent new, better versions of the defective personalities we have become back home. Out here, on The Circuit, we can pretend we are anything we like. "You're nothing," I thought I heard the metallic-haired player whisper beneath his breath as he ran past me, "nothing at all." John Travolta and Uma Thurman were twisting away up on the projection television. The soundtrack was muted and Jimi Hendrix's "Machine Gun" was turned way up so the two stars improvised to the lefty's caterwauling guitar. The bar, a wood-paneled tavern across from Privilege on the illustriously grubby Kao San Road, was crowded with eager-to-get-fucked-up, man-it's-awesome-being-in-Bangkok tourists who hadn't flown thousands of miles on crowded, discount Air Pakistan flights to watch a bootlegged "Pulp Fiction" video. The vibe in a Kao San Road bar on Friday night is just about the same as it is any other night of the week. It's all about getting as much as you can as soon as you can and then hoping you don't throw up and then doing it all over again every day for the whole two weeks of your holiday before you are due back in Hamburg or Newcastle. The only reason the gang of swell punks I had been hanging with were here was they were supposed to meet a German DJ, Manfred, who had a box of DAT tapes that Derrek needed to DJ a rave at Baddam beach in Goa next week. But Manfred had not showed up and the old Thai lady at his guest house said that she had last seen him two weeks ago. Trev and Derrek had ducked into this bar to stew over the missing DAT tapes of London acetate pressings that would enable Derrek to get over as the DJ he claimed to be. Clad in Versace camouflage shirts, Oakley sunglasses, white Pepe jeans and green, glow-in-the-dark necklaces, they sullenly drank Mekong and Cokes and cursed Manfred for being unreliable. He had assured them at the Breakfast Club back in Tokyo that he would be here, and now where the fuck was he? As I listened to Trev and Derrek hatch plans and formulate strategy, discuss possible sources for substitute DATs, other raves where the music had been slamming, other venues on The Circuit where the vibes had been trippy, I realized that I had already grown tired of Trev and Derrek and the rest of the gang of glamorous expats I had been following. It wasn't that Trev and Derrek were boring, it was that I simply wasn't interested anymore. Their concerns seemed trivial. Some DJ, another rave, a great beach, the flash new spot. None of it seemed to matter anymore. Despite my earnest attempts to rejoin their world, a world I had once known, I was an interloper now, a journalist sent from the outside to steal a little of their energy, fun and good time. I was five years older than Trev and Derrek; The Circuit was their scene now. It was time to say goodbye to my own decadent past. It was time to leave Thailand, to leave Asia, and return home, to my family and friends, to where I felt safe. But I was here tonight for Dina, to see her one last time before I got away. She now had Balinese warrior tattoos running up her fleshy, fuzzy arms, a pierced nose, and her left ear jangled with an array of silver bangles and gold bobbles that she fingered as she sipped Mekong and Coke. In her right ear was a diamond stud, a gaudy rock as big as a dry-roasted peanut. Dina was a rich kid, a refugee from London nightclubs and New York lofts. In her mid-20s, poshly accented and coolly intelligent, she lent the evening and this crowd of travelers what class they had. Compared to Dina, Trev and Derrek were parvenus, name-droppers and social climbers. Their good looks and connections to swinging London had only gained them toeholds onto the sort of life that Dina had come from and took for granted. Dina did not leave her country to find a better or more thrilling life out here on The Circuit. Instead she possessed the charm and allure of having turned her back on precisely the lifestyle everybody else was seeking; decadent, narcoticized freedom was her birthright. Trev and Derrek and the rest of them treated her with appropriate deference. She had drifted in and out of the rest of our lives. She flew off to Hong Kong fortnightly to see classmates from Cambridge who had been posted there. Or she took off to Tokyo or Delhi, to visit any of a long list of acquaintances, friends and associates. One had the feeling as she undertook these voyages that she was some sort of Mother Teresa of the e-generation, bringing solace and relief to mind-blown ravers throughout the Far East. I tried to talk to her whenever she was around because she had a way of seeing through to the heart of things, of telling me the truth. And she was beautiful. I told her I was leaving. I was done with my trip. I had enough for my story. I was worried if I stayed in Bangkok, in Asia, I would use drugs again. I told her of the metallic-haired soccer player who was following me. I wanted to go home. I reached down and felt the scar from the motorcycle accident on my calf. It had long ago healed and was now just a rough patch of skin. Did she remember that time on the beach, years ago, the season I met her, when she had found me laid up in the sand after the motorcycle wreck? She nodded. "Are you still frightened?" I was. New York 1997 It is a brisk autumn afternoon, the oak trees around the Columbia University campus have turned a feverish red; leaves litter the trodden pathways linking venerable old buildings. I am going to school again, studying under the auspices of a journalism fellowship. I play soccer with the Columbia Business School team. Today, we are practicing on campus, on the narrow lawns before imposing, gray Butler Library. I jog across the pitch, gasping for breath, running to take a crossing pass from a Dutch teammate. The metallic-haired player is nowhere in sight. I have not seen him since I returned from Bangkok. And, for the first time in years, I am not afraid. SALON \| Feb. 3, 1998 Karl Taro Greenfeld has written for Wanderlust about Ibiza, Tokyo and Thailand.