Remembering Whiteness
Equatorial sun bright, dazzling, burning down on the glass-fibre 4x4 cabin, listening to Quicksilver Messenger Service squeezed into MP3 in my wannabee Jeep, travelling the same roads his father must have taken back then, back in the year he was born, the identical roads he would have travelled many years later to visit the grave of his father left dying in that year, gunned down by insurgents in the Emergency, a bullet finding its mark leaving him fatherless to grow, rebel, drag me into Mann’s Music listening to "The Fool" in the booth, the music sending me into paroxysms of ecstasy, hitting highs I would only know later through sex or chemicals.
Leaving college at sixteen he was clued in, street wise, a pioneer, the cool dude who showed me the way to UFO, Middle Earth, being hold up in jail over night only added to the mystique of this Highway Chile, he was on the road again, he was Canned Heat, Kerouac slipping away leaving me wondering, reappearing as some amphetamine fueled guru drinking Smirnoff’s Red Label vodka and puking nights away.
It was not as if we were Batman and Robin, Simon and Garfunkel, Lennon and McCartney dressed in our Sgt Pepper bandsman uniforms parading through the old Roman town, sometimes pink desert jacket, black trilby adorned with chrysanthemum, tight flower-power trousers telling residents how different, but how the same we still were, riding in the back of the Land Rover, knocking the tail light to fool inquisitive police. We were Abbot and Costello, Pete and Dud, helpless, hapless comedians caught up in the folly of life’s little joke pretending to be children of flowers and chasing the love that we all need.
Over time we were both to come here, not together, we had lost the habit of doing things together somewhere in those halcyon days, road tripping, hitch-hiking, acid dropping, Ginsberg and Sid Rawl days we had stopped doing things together. I say that with a modicum of sadness for the youth I was, the bond we had, the bells, beads, flowers and all the naiveté exuding from me – enough to fill a world with. But some-when the need to be together, the need to experience the world through each other’s eyes ceased to be and distance grew ever greater between us until together or apart was the same thing, lost to each other in the growing.
Once as a young dog before white hair and belly hanging to kick his waistband he traveled the breath of America down to Mexico, Spain, Poland, Japan and ended up equatorially, orientally here, not here directly but in the old tin city tupping young Chinese girls and manipulating his language to gain cash for accommodation and Fugs’ CDs.
That’s when I missed him he being in Japan holidaying with saki and sushi as I touched down at the airport seeking him out in the Indian area around Brickfields and him not being there because as I said we were never here together at the same time, it was always separate, apart, the irony being that we were both here with his father, he being laid to rest and unable to move, so we were both here, independently, with his father but never he and I together and unable to recapture the closeness we once had chasing girls in the streets and never getting off with them because of the lack of a car in that old Roman town the place where he now resides and I have long since left from to be here amidst the mountains and jungles of South East Asia now calmed from the murderous 50s.
I follow in his footsteps even though I was here first twenty-nine years ago but didn’t know where his father was buried until I came to stay six years this month and still the resonances shape the present as my father-in-law is discovered to be his father’s jungle scout leading the way through mining pool areas, jungle, hills dark mysterious places where insurgents would lay traps for colonial police but not now, now serving sweet tea from behind his wooden counter with memories occasionally jerked back to life from the twinge in his leg’s metal plate with his former lieutenant dead these past fifty-nine years.
Yes it would have been good to see him metamorphose into an owl once more, eyes static growing larger resembling Glass Box plates like some Grimm story due to the drug fog both in the room and in our minds when we were reaching towards our twenties but these days though both crave thosa I eschew those phantasms for reality and he favouring other worlds with mushrooms leads to irreparable culture clash and I remain here burnt by the sun turning browner and he there swept by snow and rain remembering his whiteness.
Yusuf Martin was born in London, lived briefly in India and has finally retired and settled in rural Malaysia. He can be seen on NTV7 Malaysian national television and heard on BFM Radio. He has written several short stories published in collections in Malaysia including The Best of Southeast Asian Erotica (2010); Silverfish New Writing 5 (2006); Silverfish New Writing 7 (2008); Urban Odysseys (2009); and an essay for New Malaysian Essays 2 (Mata Hari, 2009). Yusuf is currently putting the finishing touches to a book of short stories about kampong life in Malaysia (Kampong Tales) and writing two novels one based upon his social work experiences (The Unsocial Worker), the other about a bomoh called Melvyn. He has post-graduate degrees in Art History & Theory and Gallery Studies. His blogs can be found at http://fatmankampung.blogspot.com, http://correspondences-martin.blogspot.com/ and http://mondaymelvyn.blogspot.com/.
Equatorial sun bright, dazzling, burning down on the glass-fibre 4x4 cabin, listening to Quicksilver Messenger Service squeezed into MP3 in my wannabee Jeep, travelling the same roads his father must have taken back then, back in the year he was born, the identical roads he would have travelled many years later to visit the grave of his father left dying in that year, gunned down by insurgents in the Emergency, a bullet finding its mark leaving him fatherless to grow, rebel, drag me into Mann’s Music listening to "The Fool" in the booth, the music sending me into paroxysms of ecstasy, hitting highs I would only know later through sex or chemicals.
Leaving college at sixteen he was clued in, street wise, a pioneer, the cool dude who showed me the way to UFO, Middle Earth, being hold up in jail over night only added to the mystique of this Highway Chile, he was on the road again, he was Canned Heat, Kerouac slipping away leaving me wondering, reappearing as some amphetamine fueled guru drinking Smirnoff’s Red Label vodka and puking nights away.
It was not as if we were Batman and Robin, Simon and Garfunkel, Lennon and McCartney dressed in our Sgt Pepper bandsman uniforms parading through the old Roman town, sometimes pink desert jacket, black trilby adorned with chrysanthemum, tight flower-power trousers telling residents how different, but how the same we still were, riding in the back of the Land Rover, knocking the tail light to fool inquisitive police. We were Abbot and Costello, Pete and Dud, helpless, hapless comedians caught up in the folly of life’s little joke pretending to be children of flowers and chasing the love that we all need.
Over time we were both to come here, not together, we had lost the habit of doing things together somewhere in those halcyon days, road tripping, hitch-hiking, acid dropping, Ginsberg and Sid Rawl days we had stopped doing things together. I say that with a modicum of sadness for the youth I was, the bond we had, the bells, beads, flowers and all the naiveté exuding from me – enough to fill a world with. But some-when the need to be together, the need to experience the world through each other’s eyes ceased to be and distance grew ever greater between us until together or apart was the same thing, lost to each other in the growing.
Once as a young dog before white hair and belly hanging to kick his waistband he traveled the breath of America down to Mexico, Spain, Poland, Japan and ended up equatorially, orientally here, not here directly but in the old tin city tupping young Chinese girls and manipulating his language to gain cash for accommodation and Fugs’ CDs.
That’s when I missed him he being in Japan holidaying with saki and sushi as I touched down at the airport seeking him out in the Indian area around Brickfields and him not being there because as I said we were never here together at the same time, it was always separate, apart, the irony being that we were both here with his father, he being laid to rest and unable to move, so we were both here, independently, with his father but never he and I together and unable to recapture the closeness we once had chasing girls in the streets and never getting off with them because of the lack of a car in that old Roman town the place where he now resides and I have long since left from to be here amidst the mountains and jungles of South East Asia now calmed from the murderous 50s.
I follow in his footsteps even though I was here first twenty-nine years ago but didn’t know where his father was buried until I came to stay six years this month and still the resonances shape the present as my father-in-law is discovered to be his father’s jungle scout leading the way through mining pool areas, jungle, hills dark mysterious places where insurgents would lay traps for colonial police but not now, now serving sweet tea from behind his wooden counter with memories occasionally jerked back to life from the twinge in his leg’s metal plate with his former lieutenant dead these past fifty-nine years.
Yes it would have been good to see him metamorphose into an owl once more, eyes static growing larger resembling Glass Box plates like some Grimm story due to the drug fog both in the room and in our minds when we were reaching towards our twenties but these days though both crave thosa I eschew those phantasms for reality and he favouring other worlds with mushrooms leads to irreparable culture clash and I remain here burnt by the sun turning browner and he there swept by snow and rain remembering his whiteness.
Yusuf Martin was born in London, lived briefly in India and has finally retired and settled in rural Malaysia. He can be seen on NTV7 Malaysian national television and heard on BFM Radio. He has written several short stories published in collections in Malaysia including The Best of Southeast Asian Erotica (2010); Silverfish New Writing 5 (2006); Silverfish New Writing 7 (2008); Urban Odysseys (2009); and an essay for New Malaysian Essays 2 (Mata Hari, 2009). Yusuf is currently putting the finishing touches to a book of short stories about kampong life in Malaysia (Kampong Tales) and writing two novels one based upon his social work experiences (The Unsocial Worker), the other about a bomoh called Melvyn. He has post-graduate degrees in Art History & Theory and Gallery Studies. His blogs can be found at http://fatmankampung.blogspot.com, http://correspondences-martin.blogspot.com/ and http://mondaymelvyn.blogspot.com/.
