From My Notebooks In 1976: Smack Alley in Penang

On my way back to the Choong Thean hotel.

June 19th

I didn’t mean to get to the border [between Thailand and Malaysia] so soon, but I’m loath to start any new adventures. How tepid – and here I am at the frontier. Another set of forms in quintuplet, and a pink one, and yet another, all laboriously filled out by the same young man with the pot belly, wide swarthy face and wearing the same shirt. Halfway through he reaches into his shirt, over his stomach and pulls out a pistol and dumps it in a drawer. Another thirty baht for stamps, and 50 baht for overtime. Saturday is a holiday. I must pay £3 to take the bike in and out.

At the Malaysian checkpoint I ask the customs officer whether he charges overtime as well. With all the smug understatement of a British official at a channel port he says, “This is Malaysia, not Thailand.”

On the new film, just changed fortunately, was a woman planting rice. Well there must be plenty of them about. Also my only picture of those strange outcrops of rock with tufts of veg on top. Would have also liked the long wooden two-storey houses – a full block in length – with shops below: fore-runners of the brick ones in Penang. But these are not colonnaded.

A telegram awaits me at the Choong Thean, telling me not to worry about the crankshaft. Strange. [I wasn’t worried, and had no idea where this came from.]

I’m obsessed by absence of word from Jo.

[I was in thrall to two women, Carol and Jo. All of this will have to be explained, another time.]

Bloat myself on a two-course meal at the Tai Tong restaurant in Cintra street, on corner of Campbell. Only decent restaurant I’ve found in Penang – thanks to Carol. And where is she now? And what does it mean to me? Once again, the sense of sliding away.

At the Kedai Kopi [coffee shop] on Rope Walk. Calendar on the wall. Idiot blond racing driver (Formula 2) wearing laurels and smoking Rothmans. “When you know what you’re doing ….“

Another shows idiot boat designer and client, both European of course, burning up State Express, the successful man’s cigarette.

And another from Lee Yean Lum, shows a woman on a collapsable divan.

Opposite me there’s a skinny brown fellow impatiently filling an empty Benson & Hedges Gold pack with cheap cigarettes. Tosses the empty packets on the floor. The manager screams, and he picks up the refuse. His trishaw waits outside. No, not his. He has only an enormous sack and a huge wicker basket which he carries and drags off down the road. The trishaw belongs to the other man with the fixed crook in his neck who’s always here going through the Chinese papers at night.

The other news at the hotel is that Th’an has got the sack. He looks at me imploringly as he returns my five dollars – which I return to him. But he might be slyer than I think.

Sunday 20th June

Last night slept in the Boss’s room. Surprisingly cool, and quiet once the mahjong players give up after midnight. Today moved back to room 6 – which should have a bronze plaque attached to honour me. Decide to send home everything I can spare. Don’t want my loose bits and pieces around to fall off and disappear. Think a lot depends on keeping a ‘tight ship’ for a while.

That’s a strange metaphor. Seems quite gross and inapt. But it’s a matter of control and outline. Just as any living cell may be composed of exactly the same ingredients as the surrounding environment but still must retain its individuality within a membrane to exist at all. Its form may fluctuate constantly and it is in permanent exchange with its environment. But the order on which it depends must be protected.

The thief ruptures my membrane, but only because it is strained and weak in certain places.

Things to do:
Pack extra things in box and post. $15
Buy ladles and fan
Buy Padlock
Make lense case
Buy gallon of oil

Postage rates: 1 Kg 11.60; 3 15.20; 5 19.30: 10 26.10

Send 9 kg parcel to mother. Contents: Carol’s boots, sweater, Jacket, Helmet. Club, 3 fans, 3 ladles, 2 baskets, maps and papers, sponge bag.

Last days in Penang

Met New Zealander, Jack, in room No. 7. He has inherited the trishaw driver, Jimmy who seems to go with the room. He has already tried opium and shames me. Together we visit Aik Seng bazaar (Smack Alley) and go to a den, one of several board shacks that line the alley. A plump man in pyjama trousers (with pocket) and small glasses squeezed onto a fat face, waits. Two double bunks at right angles fill one half of the room. A table in opposite corner. Bottom bunk is covered with line. Is very wide so that a man can lie on it crosswise. He takes the opium out of a shoe – little packets made from a leaf folded across once then folded again at the sides. Inside a dark brown tarry substance. The pipe is almost like a flute, dark polished wood hollowed and open at one end with a hole pierced in the side near the other end. Into the whole, and glued there by gum, fits the bowl. With a long needle he scrapes some of the resin off the leaf and holds it over a flame from a candle which burns inside a glass. The glass seems very thick, and has been cracked at some time, and patched up. We lie facing each other on the lino, on our sides.

My head is on a wooden block. He twirls the needled over the flame and the resin melts and bubbles out, making fantastic shapes as he rolls the needle to prevent the resin from falling off. The in its warm, pliable state he tamps it down and thrusts the needle into the bowl, first shaping it into a plug then twisting so that it remains in the small aperture with a fine channel for air left by the needle. The bowl is then inverted over the flame, and the art is to draw the pipe, long and slow, until all the opium has been exhausted, in one lungful. I got three lungfuls from a packet but was probably short changed since four or more are usual. When I’d mastered it (not difficult) he made approving noises – “Good, good.” – but instead of staying there to appreciate the effect we were ushered out into the street. All I felt was a prolonged haziness, no tension, which lasted till bedtime but much diminished. Following morning felt a slight undertone of apathy but not enough to stop me from doing my business. The main pleasure and interest was in the ritual and the conspiratorial intimacy of the atmosphere in that small, candle-lit box of cream and brown highlights and shadows.

Th’an, usually dressed in yellow, short sleeved vest and baggy cotton trousers. Usually seated, he flopped a little to the left with the shirt askew at the neckline. His feet protruded as dark and rather scaly objects in sandals. Iron grey hair in a real short-back-and-sides. Mouth usually open in an O shape, with the tongue tied back behind it.

“To go around the world you must have, I think so, five thousand dollars. Only then can you have enough, because I am too old. If I can go into the jungle or the desert I will die. “

As he expressed a sad thought, even though it is a purely hypothetical abstraction his face shows deep melancholy for that moment. It is in fact one of the great faces of my life. My Quasimodo.

I don’t know about you, but it feels very strange to be writing, gardening, cooking, drinking and laughing while the world around us seems to be rushing to a confluence of disastrous outcomes. It reminds me of when I was locked up in Brazil, with a not unreasonable expectation that they might “disappear” me. I found that I could only be really afraid for a few minutes, that you can only sustain it for so long before you start thinking of more enjoyable things. So I can easily imagine us all going laughing into the apocalypse. Right now I’m scared, but soon it’ll be time for dinner.