Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

Poor S. He’s just googled the name of his bar, the BAD MONKEY, and found a blog entry all about him by some western traveller which calls him ‘an Essex boy with waist length dreads’ (true) and ‘a poster boy for the wasted’ (a bit unfair). The bar itself is excitably described as a ‘modern day opium den’.

S used to test games for Sega in the day and in the evening worked for Howard Marks (the, er, author). I tell him that I’d normally expect to see his type in India, and he gives me a succinct summing up for why not to bother with the place: ‘I like eating meat and being able to fool around with the native girls and anyway the smell of shit makes me puke’. (Not that all of India smells of shit, but I know what he means).

His present headache is trying to get rid of his sort of Mexican girlfriend before his sort of Japanese girlfriend gets back – that’s the problem with running a bar, all your girlfriends can come and hang out where you work.

Then it’s co-owner C’s turn to get annoyed, as he finds an internet review of the bar which claims he and S are on the run from the Thai authorities and relates an incident where a girl pissed through the wooden floor upstairs onto the customers below. I tell C I’m writing a book, and he says, ‘we should do that, it’d be huge, with your stories and my spelling’. He so closely resembles and sounds like the Camberwell carrot guy off ‘Withnail and I’ that he gets exasperated with people noticing it. They’re very entertaining, like a stoner Derek and Clive.

I’m impressed that two English hippies started a bar here on their own – conventional wisdom holds that it can only be done with a Chinese business partner. They sleep above the place, like the Chinese do. They’re proud of being the first bar in Dali with an inside toilet and the first to import beer from Laos, far superior to the local brew. Half the clientele is the foreign counter cultural element and the rest is locals picking up bad habits.

I usually go there with C. He wrote a guidebook to Tibet, and now is here to write a novel about a guidebook writer who has a breakdown while writing a guidebook to, er, Tibet.

I don’t tell him I had the same idea when I was in Tibet – because if a guidebook writer was going to have a breakdown, then that would be the place it would happen. It’s the harsh grandeur of the landscape and the bewildering paganism of the culture. You meet some guy who’s just, say, hopped 108 times round a chorten, or walked a thousand kilometres to pay homage at some shrine, and reviewing hotels and restaurants starts to look pointless and prosaic. I bet anyone who’s spent any time in Tibet has at some point wished to ride off on a horse and go and live in a tent. Especially when the alternative is trying to think of more adjectives to describe monasteries.

He’s very kind and clued up. He took me to this tiny bar where the urban literati hang out when they come here. There was a Beijing rock band skulking in the corner and a Shanghai novelist at the bar. I wish I could say that I spent the evening hob nobbing with the Chinese literati, but what actually happened was a man who I was introduced to as an ‘underground poet’ took it upon himself to play harmonica like a dog gnawing on a bone and – entirely unasked – declaim his underground poetry at the top of his voice. And instead of telling him to shut up or hitting him on the head the other bohemians gave him face by clapping politely when he finished bellowing one ditty so he would immediately start another. It was purely a bullying demonstration of the esteem with which he was held.

So we went down the road to the LAZY LIZARD, run by CK. He has a real lizard, I think it’s a kind of gecko, in a tank. It’s got a spiked collar and he takes it out for walks. And he has a tattoo of a lizard on the back of his neck.

To drum up custom he has a laser pointed up the street, not far above head height, like a taut green rope. Great marketing ploy, I first found the place by following, out of curiosity, the line of the laser, from several hundred metres away.

R was there. He’s an ex cabbie who speaks Chinese with such a San Francisco drawl that no Chinese can actually understand him. He’s sixty two and teaches yoga. When I see him at night I think, brilliant, I hope I’m hanging about being droll around cute chicks at four am when I’m sixty two – but when I see him in the daytime…

Dali is a quaint town between a lake and a mountain. Bits of it are quite touristy, like I’m writing this in a café and a tour group of Australians have sat loudly down. I find it telling that the only Chinese they seem to have picked up is ‘bing’, cold, as in ‘put it back in the fridge, it’s not bing enough, I’m not drinking warm beer, bing it, bing it.’

This is on what the locals call ‘barbarian street’ to each other and ‘foreigner street’ when they realise you can understand them. It’s all boutiques and cafes and Chinese tour groups. It annoys me that the tour guides are all dressed in Bai traditional dress but they’re Han Chinese. About the only real Bai people you see on barbarian street are the middle aged women who walk up and down whispering ‘smoke ganja, smoke ganja?’ at the barbarians.

I’m staying out by the lake at a new place. The rooms are really nice, if eccentric. The shower is a cubicle like an orgone accumulator right by my bed with a radio and a back massager inside and everyone on the road outside can see into it. Yesterday you couldn’t go in the hotel DVD room cause the staff were drying the ganja harvest on the floor.

So yeah it’s great here but I have to get this novel finished. I do wonder if perhaps I shouldn’t have stayed up the mountain. Mind, I have averaged more than a thousand words of clean copy a day which I think is pretty good considering I have yet to get up before midday. Tomorrow a rather more harsh regime begins.