Honey: Selected Journals from the Years Away
From Book I: On Divar Island
6.7.16 to 9.7.16: Candolim, Goa, India

 

That night I went over to this place Bob’s Inn that was listed in Lonely Planet; I thought maybe I could get a job there, something more Under the Table than where I’d been looking. I’d brought the new laptop back to the Beach Nest and was in the process of setting it up; so while that was loading I figured I might as well try out the old MacBook Pro. And sure enough when I turned it on the thing sputtered to life, basically devaluing the $400 USD I’d just spent on this HP. But I was so astonished that I just shoved a flash-drive in there and started pulling stuff off it – movies and music and documents, etc. – in this mad-dash to recover my shit; and while I was at it I hooked up my iPod to update that as well; and then I’m realizing I’ve got these two laptops open, surrounded by flash-drives and USB cables and iPods and iPhones, just this total frenzy of electronics: it’s scary how quickly one can just plug themselves right back in. And pitiful, really, because I was sitting on the floor doing all this on the assumption that the ground was cooler for the MacBook Pro. I was thinking about what Swarmi said, about being plugged in; and if I was in fact just plugging myself right back in, not giving way to my animal instinct, as he said, my inner self, as he said.

So after pulling Iron Man off the MacBook, of all movies, I decided to shut it all down; and I cycled off to Bob’s with a newspaper under my arm, to sort of scope the bar out and see if they’d be hiring. Bob’s Inn was this cavernous place, a patio full of plastic furniture and artifacts of unknown origin: African-looking long-faced masks, framed black and white photographs of nameless groups, potted cacti, ornamental rugs hanging from clotheslines; the interior was just this small dim stony room, wrecked with decaying wooden armoires holding CDs and hundreds of dusty liquor bottles – back in the corner was a huge pile of them, broken glass sticking out. The place felt like the hull of some ship that’d been at sea for way too long.

I sat down, and almost immediately another white guy walked in. It was kind of hard to hide my surprise: I hadn’t seen another white person in Candolim since I’d arrived – other than Swarmi, but he didn’t really count. He was young, had this square face, short blonde hair, classic Aryan features. He spotted me and I nodded, and he came over. He said: Mind if I join you? I said: Sure. He sat down. He put a package of cigarettes, a lighter, and a motorcycle key on the table; he was wearing a yellow cotton V-neck and navy blue shorts with whales on them. He was German and his name was Max; he was taking a month to travel around India before university started up, majoring in Business Management. The waiter brought us two 500ml Kingfishers, strong: Max sent his back, saying he wanted a smaller one, and a lager. Then he told the waiter to move the fan behind us so it pointed our way. I said: You only want a small beer? He said: “I will get two small ones instead of one big one. It will stay cold that way.” He winked when he said this for some reason.

The main thing about Max was that he smoked like a chimney, and was constantly blowing a short puff of air up towards his hair – as if trying to move it out of his eyes, even though it wasn’t nearly long enough to warrant that. Also, in response to pretty much everything I said, he made this short farting noise with his mouth. So like when I said I was riding a cycle – fart noise; I was paying Rs. 400/day in rent – fart noise; it’d cost me $900 USD to fly here from America – fart noise. He asked me how I’d gotten my phone, so I told him; he mouth-farted, said he’d filled out no paperwork, just rolled up and gotten a SIM. He asked what my budget was, so I told him – about Rs. 1000/day; he mouth-farted, said: “You’ll never make it.” I couldn’t understand why certain people felt the need to put other travelers down, prove they were better at this. He seemed particularly set on this theory that one should eat only one meal a day, at around 3PM, that consisted of multiple dishes. It wasn’t really a money-saver, as far as I could see, but he was convinced this was the way to go.

So it was pretty clear that Max was an asshole and a know-it-all, but like whatever. Plus he offered me beer, which I accepted; and then cigarettes, which I also accepted. He told a story about how he’d been smoking pot on some rooftop in Varanasi when this guy started having a seizure; so Max had I guess gotten a wooden spoon in the dude’s mouth, or whatever you’re supposed to do for a person having a seizure – and, as Max put it, “saved his life,” and so everybody on the surrounding rooftops started clapping and cheering for Max in this epic sunset ovation. He told a story about how he’d done acid in Australia on this outcropping – he kept using that word: “outcropping.” We got in something of an argument when he became convinced that if you spit on the street in New York or Los Angeles you’d get fined; I told him I’d never heard of that. But he was sure – he told me like four times: He was sure.

He seemed to be one of those business-types who’d had their minds cracked open at some point, and had realized there was no order or meaning to anything – and instead of being scared, like I was, he was enthralled by it, having a laugh. “We’re nothing but bacteria here,” he said at one point. “And we’ll be done (fart noise). The Sun and the Earth are talking. Sun says: ‘Earth, why do you look so down?’ Earth says: ‘I’ve got these humans living on me.’ Sun says: ‘Don’t worry about it, they’ll be gone soon.’” And then he sat back and crossed his arms, as if there was some profound point to what he’d just said.

It turned out he was staying at D’Mellos; we paid and headed out to the street. The rain had let up; the road was slick and white, reflecting the sparse streetlights. I got on my cycle and started riding, and pretty soon Max was alongside me on his scooter, putting a hand on my lower back; he pushed me back at his speed. When we got to our lane, we turned and he did it again. The path was dark, the sand turned muddy – the whole thing was foolishly unsafe, especially after drinking; I remember writing the sentence in my head: “Death seemed, if not imminent, at the very least nearby,” and then repeating it back to myself over and over.

He pushed me back to D’Mellos with him, and it began to rain. We walked through the compound towards his seaside room: he’d gotten one of the good ones with the queen-sized bed and balcony. Inside his clothes were strewn everywhere, backpack open with its guts hanging out, Lonely Planet on the bedside table – I realized he wasn’t much better than me, we were drawing from the same shit. He was actually farting now. He’d gone to Panjim that day as well: “Nothing for me there,” he said.

He pulled two glass tonic bottles from the mini-fridge, removed the Schweppes wrapping – he said he couldn’t handle plastic. That actually made me like him more – it humanized him. He emptied some of the tonic over the balcony and began pouring in Bombay Sapphire. He said, multiple times, that the English used to drink gin and tonics here – that the tonic was a natural mosquito repellant, but since the English couldn’t stand the taste they added gin. He seemed to get a real kick out of this. I didn’t understand what everybody had against tonic. We sat down on the balcony, and he showed me his flask: clear glass, silver finish, cap a shot glass, came in a leather holster. It had belonged to his grandfather. It actually was pretty dope. I wanted to ask if his grandfather had been a Nazi, because that seemed like some shit a Nazi would have; I wanted to know if perhaps his ancestors had killed my ancestors. But I figured Germans were always getting asked about Nazis, and he was probably sick of that.

He pulled out some weed he’d gotten in Mumbai and showed it to me. It smelled exactly like oregano. He rolled a massive joint, lit it, smoked it, passed it to me – I inhaled deep, too deep, and my lungs caught fire, clutching myself, coughing. Usually when this happened I’d say something like: “It’s been a long time,” but I didn’t feel like explaining myself to him. I felt sufficiently drunk and maybe high and wanted to go home. I wasn’t even going to watch Iron Man anymore – fuck that. When the rain let up I took my leave. He asked if I wanted to come with him tomorrow, wherever he was going; I said no, it was a writing day. I’d done a very bad job at Bob’s Inn of convincing him, and myself, that I was indeed a writer. I told him to come by my place when he returned; he said he’d look into getting us some acid. I said alright, and left. I stumbled back through the damp dark foliage, through the jungle, my feet sloppy with mud. I knew – then and when I awoke – that I never wanted to see him again. I fell into bed, the world spinning; I pulled up a Newton’s bag in case I vomited.

When I awoke, a mosquito had gotten me twice on the back of the hand; hives were blooming. I knew it was the same one from the previous night; I knew he was in the room still. I knew we were waging a war, him and I – maybe that was the animal instinct: that one of us must die. I pictured him all bloated from draining me; I pictured killing him, my blood splattering everywhere in great big arcs. I’d have to lure him in with my flesh; it was the only way. But for now I crawled beneath the cocoon of my blanket and fell back asleep.

~~~

Max came by at 4:10PM, knocking on the door and yelling: “Drug Enforcement Agency!” I was naked; I’d been putting on aloe to help with some sunburn from that day; I’d laid out at the beach, in my speedo, without sunscreen, listening to the Avalanches’ Wildflower. At the beach was another guy who didn’t know what to do with himself. First he ran along the shore taking a video of himself, then he tried laying out for a bit; then he went in the water and got knocked over by wave, then spent a while trying to recreate the scenario without getting mowed down. When I got back home I was putting on aloe and feeling quite miserable, and noticing some blotchiness on my shoulder that could only be sun poisoning.

So I let Max in, and he took a look around and said I had a pretty good set-up. He said: Did you forget we were supposed to meet? I said: I thought you were coming here. We chalked it up to simple confusion. So we got on his scooter and headed towards Baga Beach, where he said the people were. He was talking about this techno party on Friday, and how we ought to do drugs and go. He seemed a little confused and even anxious about what types of drugs we ought to do and when. He was very adamant about spending an entire day doing acid, though. In fact when we got to Baga he made me take down this dealer’s number, a guy named Abi who was selling acid for Rs. 900. Max said to Abi: Is it shit though? Abi said the good stuff was Rs. 1300. Max said we’d be in touch.

Down at the beach, tons of Indians were standing around, staring out at the water and overcast sky. Some of them were drunk, falling over; others were picking up handfuls of wet sand and dropping it on their bald friends’ heads. All the men were in various states of undress: underwear, boxer briefs, undershirts – the material clinging to them in unflattering ways, all of them drenched. The women were fully clothed and dry. Max and I found a bar and sat down at a table facing the shore. We were both looking for girls. I asked Max if he liked Indian women, and he said not so much. There was a table of girls in front of us, drinking Miller High Life; two of them looked quite good. Max ordered his small lager and I ordered my big strong. There was a dog roaming around; it had a big black circle around his eye that looked like it’d been burned on. The dog sidled up near us and Max began petting him, waxing on about acid and ecstasy, and I knew if I didn’t stand up for myself I’d end doing it all with him.

Men were walking along the beach, amongst the tables, offering massages – dark, haggard men with beady eyes. Max said he bet they were massaging the dogs and then massaging the people, and then he laughed; I felt like the joke maybe didn’t translate as well as he thought it did. Two of the cute girls wanted massages, so the beady-eyed men got down in the sand and took the girls’ feet on their knees, kneading away. I said: “They should be paying the girls to get to do that.” I was feeling buzzed. One of the girls, wearing large sunglasses and taking a photo of herself, wasn’t getting a massage; I got this bright idea to go over there and offer her one. I told Max about it, tried to get him to dare me – maybe he’d buy me a beer if I did. He said no; he said giving her a massage would be like giving your grandmother one, and then he laughed horribly again.

I was looking over at Max: he was reclined, petting this burnt-eyed dog, staring out at the water with narrowed eyes; later, I’d picture him holding some kind of thin long stick, or riding crop, even though he certainly hadn’t been. He looked like a British conqueror, or colonialist, surveying his land. You could see it all in his eyes, even if you couldn’t define it: some mixture of superiority, disgust, repulsion; but then also something enraptured, fiery – something, like, erotic almost. It was weird. I was feeling buzzed. A dog with three legs hobbled by; I said it made me sad; Max said it didn’t for him. He said they weren’t like the dogs we knew. He said when he was in Australia, he’d gone hunting with only a knife and a pack of dogs; they’d been out there catching and slaughtering pigs. They’d get the babies too, he said. I asked if they ate them. He said no, they were all filled with these gross squirming worms.

We finished our beers, and I told Max I was tired and wanted to go home. So we left. When I got back, I was so emotionally defeated and depressed by the whole thing that I just sat at my desk and ate three bags of chips in quick succession.

~~~

The next day I headed to Mapusa to have a look at the market. There wasn’t much to see: mostly aisles of tarp-covered bamboo stalls selling junk at a mark-up, and then this decaying concrete structure of small shops all packed with the same shiny tin pots and pasta strainers. When I walked in this woman in a turquoise sari fell in line beside me and said I had a very nice face, which was a sweet thing to say. Then she said I looked like an Indian David Beckham, which didn’t make a lot of sense but was sweet as well. Soon, though, it became apparent that I’d been snowed in and she just wanted to get me into her shop. So she followed me at a distance for some time, which was making me rather uncomfortable – and I had to duck through a couple of lanes to lose her. She caught up with me again as I was leaving the market and ushered me towards her shop, which was actually just a duffel bag on a stool outside a closed gate. I said: Well, you’re not even set up here, and I walked away. I immediately felt pretty bad about that, as if I’d meant: Well, if your presentation weren’t such shit maybe I would have actually bought something – when really there’d never been a chance I was going to.

On my way back down the lane towards the Beach Nest I ran into Max, who was on his scooter heading up to Baga again. He mentioned the techno party that night, and I said I was down; I was actually excited at the prospect of it, even willing to spend money – I was viewing it as research for some unknown project. So I said I’d come by his place at 7PM after I’d picked up my laundry. He laughed, like laundry was the funniest thing in the world. Then he said alright, and rode off.

~~~

So I was sitting down by the soccer field, eating bhel and waiting for my laundry to be done. The laundry shop was this little alcove behind the phone hut that offered a reasonably priced wash, dry, and press. There were three guys playing soccer, kicking the ball in ridiculous parabolas around the sun-dipped stadium. I always feel a little self-conscious watching people excel at sports, like I’m back in middle school and my inabilities are on full display. I remember one time in middle school I was in gym class and we were all sitting on the three-point line. Our coach was this lady Mrs. Shaw, this massive caramel-colored mushroom of a woman with blue veins popping out of her exposed calves – she always wore shorts and sneakers and long white socks. So Mrs. Shaw brought three kids up to the free-throw line and had them start shooting baskets, endlessly. One of them was this white kid Alex who rode my bus; Mrs. Shaw was yelling at him: “You’re shooting bricks! You’re shooting bricks!” Alex kept getting the ball passed to him and kept shooting, and Mrs. Shaw kept calling them bricks; Alex was tall, had swept-aside bangs, oily dark skin, a lilt in his voice. I remember being particularly confused as to what shooting bricks actually meant: like if Alex was throwing the ball as he might a brick, with that consistency; or perhaps it meant that he wasn’t putting time or care into the thing, just routinely tossing it off from a pile of bricks. The gym was wide and full of echo and the overhanging caged bulbs made everything look the way stale piss smells. I wasn’t even entirely certain that shooting bricks was a bad thing.

After I’d dropped back my laundry I went over to D’Mellos to get Max. His door was open and he was sitting on the balcony; I could see his blonde head protruding above the wicker chair. It was bizarre to see him there, alone, not animated or wild, just sitting. I knocked and went in. He got some tonics out of the fridge and cut off the plastic. I was holding this aloft as his defining characteristic – it was the only thing that made him in any way human. So he fixed us a drink and started in again on how we ought to do acid. I told him I couldn’t, told him I thought his purpose in my life was to plant this seed and then later I’d do it on my own. He didn’t seem to care about that. He kept saying I was an old man, that I was afraid, that if I gave him three days he could really show me something. I couldn’t understand why everyone was always trying to show me something.

We sat down to drink; Max looked out at the sea and said he’d been thinking that day about what he’d do if there was a tsunami – if he looked out at this exact view and saw a massive wave heading towards him. He said he’d hop on his scooter and ride up to Fort Aguada, the highest point in Bardez; but he’d probably die anyway, and he’d be okay with that. That’s why you had to live every day to the fullest, and otherwise fuck that shit. I was silent, so he asked if I agreed. I said: No, not really. That yes, every day matters, but you’re also answering to something larger – something of yourself in the past and something of yourself in the future. He loaded his pipe and smoked.

For some reason I asked Max what he thought happens when we die. Sometimes I ask people that. He said that nothing happens, and then he mouth-farted. I said but how about when you’re on drugs and can see the Other World? He said you could only see that because you were high. I said: So then is it not real? He said: No, it is. It felt like he was just making shit up at this point.

Max was quite indecisive re: going to the party, talking about money and how he’d driven by earlier and it looked lame – but after smoking and drinking he said fuck it let’s go. We discussed whether to wear pants or shorts. It was dark now, us sprawling forward through his scooter’s headlight towards Calungute and then Baga. Max stopped off for cigarettes.

Pretty soon we were lost, and Max kept having to ask people the way; he’d always start by saying: “Sorry sir,” and it seemed like almost a nervous tic after a while. The problem was that everyone we asked just told us to go straight, or take a right, with no real consensus of an actual direction. This all seemed like some real back-roads shit, like we were riding through this black tunnel of foliage at unforgiving speeds. Max told this story about how he’d been pulled over for not wearing a helmet and not having an international license, and the police had wanted Rs. 1300. So Max had said he’d pay them, no problem, but he’d need a receipt – and that’d really got them, so they’d made him pay just Rs. 100 and let him go. I told him that was actually a pretty smart move on his part. Eventually another guy on a scooter said he’d just take us there, so we followed him until a flashing sign appeared in the darkness that said Café Lilliput. Max said: “Just let me do the talking,” because he was going to try and get us in for free; I said alright. We got to the door and the bouncer said: Rs. 500, which I didn’t think was so bad. Max said he wanted to have a look inside, but the bouncer said no. So Max looked at me and I shrugged; so we got out our wallets and paid and went in.

The place was nearly empty, with a DJ blasting techno from his raised platform and people sitting around in deep booths looking practically comatose. I needed a drink immediately. The club was seemingly built into the cliffside, with all the tables facing out towards the grand dark expanse of the sea. Down at the shore, a girl in a long dress was dancing lazily in the surf, letting her sandals dangle from her hand, backlit by the pink and blue lights. Max and I got a table on the beach beside a group of two blonde girls and a guy. They were all wearing very earthy clothing. I asked Max if he would talk to them, and he said eventually. After a few drinks he yelled: “Hey, fellow white people!” and they laughed and we moved our chairs over to them.

The music was too loud to hear any of their names, other than the guy who was Thomas. I was sitting next to the taller blonde, who’d just graduated from university; she was visiting her sister, the shorter one, who was on a gap year. I was hearing maybe 30% of what she was saying, but I just kept nodding anyway. Max ordered a tower even though no one wanted it. He kept making toasts to “Health and Socialism!” and I was quite embarrassed. I told Taller that I didn’t really know him and he’d just come up to me in a bar. “He’s very German,” she said, which I hadn’t thought about. These three were English: Taller was in the art world, but had realized that a curating job at, say, the Tate Modern, only paid 20,000 quid a year. I said that was unbelievable. I was still going off the idea that $60,000 USD was pretty good, based on what my friend Alexander Hersh had told me his parents made when we were in Kindergarten. At the time I think he’d been bragging, but the number had gotten stuck in my brain so that I was still using it as a measure.

The thing was that with the beach’s incline Taller kind of had the higher ground, and so I was leaning over in a less-than-ideal pose to hear her, and her face was thin and bulgy around the eyes, but she was quite tall and had great legs and reminded me of Maddy Norris; and so I was trying to think of a way to initiate some kind of romance. The current kept rolling up, the tide coming in, splashing all of us; and my shorts were soaked and my flip-flops had drifted away; I’d had this bizarre sensation that I’d lose them that night, I’d told Max before we’d even left. I tried to explain to Taller my vision of Max as a malevolent colonist with his riding crop, but I wasn’t doing a good job. I was realizing that in social situations he was much more of a Hurt than a Help. Shorter said that he was quite drunk, and I said that he was my ride home. Him and Thomas were discussing Max’s socialism toast, and then Max was trying to convince Thomas to do acid with him even though the three of them were leaving the next day. They’d paid nothing to get in, which I think embarrassed Max because he said: “Well, I talked him down from 1000!” which wasn’t even true; it made me wonder what else he’d lied about. “All he wants to do is drink and do drugs,” Shorter said to me. I said it was best not to engage with him. I said to Taller: “Listen, I have to go the bathroom, but I’d really like to keep talking with you. Will you be here when I get back?” I sounded like a talk show host, I think because I’d been watching a lot of The Larry Sanders Show. She said yes, she wouldn’t be going anywhere, where would she go.

So I went to the bathroom. I peed and then leaned against the sink for a very long time. You could hear the desperate thump of the bass, trying unsuccessfully to activate someone, anyone. But the club was just this loud empty chamber.

I sat back down at the table, and the water rushed up and set our chairs afloat; everyone stood; I said to Taller: “Would you maybe like to walk along the beach?” but I don’t know if she heard me because at the same time she was saying that they were leaving. We followed them up the stairs, Max and I taking another table now that the beach had disappeared; Taller asked my name again and said she’d look out for my books, then left. Max and I sat back down together. He was ordering another beer, but I said I was done. I was feeling rather bloated. It was midnight. He was talking about drugs again, and the night, but I said I was tired and wanted to go home. He said I was an old man, and I was wasting my life, and I’d spend six months here and never live or feel or do anything, and I was choosing to be an old man – and I really hated him in that moment, and I thought about just throwing some money down and taking a taxi back, no matter the cost, just to get away from him, because I really hated him, and I could tell he was a bad person; and all the while I was staring out at the water as he hissed into my ear, berating me, like some little goblin trying to exorcise a beast from inside me. So I turned to him and said: “Has it ever occurred to you that I want to go home?” He said: What?” My face felt very red. I said: “Has it ever occurred to you, for one single second, that maybe I just want to go home and go to bed? To not drink anymore, to not do drugs, to not stay here?” As in: it wasn’t some involuntary system forcing me to feel this way, a system I needed prying from; as in: it was a choice. That I wasn’t weak or old – that I wanted this. That I didn’t want him.

But all he did was laugh, and sit back, and said we could still take E and it’d be fun; and we needed to dance a little bit before we left, I owed him that. I said no one was dancing. I said was going to the bathroom again, but really I just walked around to get away from him.

When I came back he was arguing with the waiter. The guy was small and thin and looked somewhat Ladakhi. They were screaming at each other. The conceit being that the waiter wanted to us to pay now – his shift was over, once we started a new tab he could leave – and Max wanted to keep the tab open and pay everything at the end. I could see what he was doing: he was trying to bring our bill down somehow, hoping he could cut a deal – but instead he was just screaming at the guy. The waiter stormed off and Max turned to me: “Okay man, you’re going to have to pay with your credit card, but I got him to take Rs. 200 off.” I said: “(You fucking idiot) Rs. 200 is less than whatever I’m going to get charged for using my card internationally.” Max said he knew that and he’d pay me cash – but I was done, I hated him so much, trying to stiff these people, keeping this guy from his home at fucking midnight; and so when the waiter came back with the card machine I got out my wallet that had been soaked by the tide and handed him Rs. 2000, and he said thank you and walked off. Max was silent for a moment, slumped back in his chair. Then he said: “Fucking Indians, man, always trying to take our money. Fuck that shit.”

I stood up, walked away, found our waiter. He thanked me for cooperating, and I said I was sorry for Max – because I really was, more sorry than I’d ever been, for the whole thing, for how this world had turned out, for this being how it was now – and I gave him Rs. 100, but I wish I’d given him Rs. 500 because although money doesn’t change anything it’s all I had other than my words being broken down by blaring music and blinding lights.

So we left. I didn’t have shoes anymore. Max was maybe drunk, and general logic said not to get on a bike with him. When we were out on the road he tried putting his key in the wrong scooter and got confused, which was a further indication that I shouldn’t get on a bike with him. So we rode off into the night; he was taking back roads, saying he wanted to avoid the police and that the main roads took too long. We slid down the long tunnel, him all the while saying he knew where we were, me all the while thinking I was going to die out here with this person I hated. He kept saying we needed to end the night with a smoke and a drink, end it right, until I yelled that I didn’t want to and he shut up. He said he’d known from the second we sat down with the English group that they weren’t what we were looking for. He said they were ugly; I said I thought Taller was kind of cute. He laughed. He said that Shorter had wanted it so bad, but she was fat – her arms were thicker than his. I was devising a plan in which I took out my pocketknife and stabbed him in the back, or used my weight to throw us off the road. He offered me a cigarette; I took it and watched the embers fly off in the wind.

I lied earlier. When I asked Max about the Other World, and what happens when we die, he hadn’t sounded like he was making shit up. He hadn’t laughed, or talked about drugs. He said: “When you’ve killed as many things as I have, and watched as many things die, you know there’s nothing.” I believed him.