Adventures in the Pacific's Backwater Bars: Colette

At the intersection of pastel panorama and expat entertainment, Club Cupid occupied a special place among Pohnpei's evening entertainment options. 

Club Cupid, August 1999.  Photo:  S.Jacques Stratton

Though travelers seeking a true immersion in Micronesian culture considered "touristy" any drinking establishment other than a sakau bar, Club Cupid had a special allure, and often played host to lively gatherings of ex-pats and locals alike.  Here, on the first weekend of my life as an ex-pat English teacher, I met Colette, whose unconventional pool tactics provided memorable source material for Chapter 3 of my travel memoir, Islands on the Fringe, a section of which I excerpt below:

I edge close to the pool table, where the party atmosphere carries overtones of spectator sport, as onlookers watch a slinky brunette in her fifties sink one difficult shot after another.  Wearing a low-cut blouse that opens to overly-tanned cleavage, she confidently leans into her final shot and knocks the 8-ball home with a double carom.  In a raspy smoker’s voice, she asks “who’s the queen?” “Colette’s the queen!” her onlookers reply, while her defeated opponent rests his cue on the table and returns to the gallery of previously-chastened challengers. 

     “Anybody else?” the brunette inquires, casually rubbing chalk on the end of her cue.

Seeing nobody immediately respond, I step forward.

     As I rack the balls, the woman looks me over.  “Where you been hiding, Honey?”  she asks.  “I thought I knew all the guys around here.”

     I introduce myself and I explain I’d flown in just a few days before.

    “Nice to meet you, Jacques,” she says.

     As the standing winner, Colette elects to break, and spears the cue ball in a freewheeling style that shows little regard for shot sequencing.  The break comes up dry; balls scatter but none drop, and based on the carom action, I recognize the pool table as one known in pool parlance as “wet,” its cloth and cushions rendered sluggish by humidity.  “So, Jacques,” Colette says as I survey the table, “I guess you got tired of drinking with Barton and his gang?”

     “I guess so,” I say, surprised to find my prior whereabouts in the bar a matter of scrutiny.       With a soft shot, I sink a striped ball into a corner pocket, get a lucky roll from the cue ball, and go on a two-ball run before a bad leave places me in a blockade of Colette’s solids.

     “So, does that mean you aren’t interested in ruining your reputation?” she asks.  With a crisp smack she sends a solid into a corner pocket.

     The question carries overtones of innuendo, and I seek a suitably coy response.  “Maybe not just yet,” I say. 

    Colette knocks down another solid, and then unaccountably dogs an easy 1/4 ball hit that results in a scratch to the middle pocket.

   “I see,” she says.  Retrieving the cue ball, she comes close, places it in my palm, and lets her fingers linger on my hand.  A smell of cigarettes permeates her breath and helps dispel a façade that had influenced my earlier perception.  While glossed with a sultry allure in the dimly lighted bar, up close Collette’s face reflects the haggard sadness of a woman hopelessly clinging to the vestiges of lost youth.  “Well, you look like a guy who knows how to treat a lady right,” she whispers, bringing her lips close to my ear.  “Now, take your shot.”

     The sultry intimations act like pixie dust, and I proceed to run the table, sinking the remaining four stripes in succession.  As I ponder how to best knock down the 8-ball, the on-lookers—including Sally, who, still fuming over the unwelcome lesson in pronunciation, flashes a particularly uncomplimentary glance--crowd close, curious if Colette’s defeat might finally be at hand.  Colette, showing little apprehension, casually chalks her cue, and sidles to the end rail opposite me, placing her cleavage in my line of sight.  She gives me a wink.

     “8-ball, far corner,” I announce, calling the shot per standard billiard protocol.  Feeling the eyes of the spectators, I address the ball and draw back my cue.  Recognizing the shot as one with high scratch potential, I decide to slightly cheat the pocket as I set my aiming line. 

     Just as I take the shot, Colette leans low against the table, her blouse dangled so I see both the profile of her breasts and the fact that she doesn’t wear a bra.  The distraction sends the cue ball off-course, to carom off the side and into the sewer of the opposite corner pocket.  The scratch costs me the game.  Accompanied by gasps and laughs from the spectators, I lay the cue on the table and join the ranks of the defeated.

    “Who’s the queen?” Colette asks.

    “Colette’s the queen,” I reluctantly voice.  My triumphant adversary blows me a kiss and rests her cue against the wall.  Instead of awaiting the challenge of the next contestant, she pats my shoulder and leads me away from the table.

    “Care to join me for a smoke?” she asks.

    “I don’t smoke,” I say, in a once-bitten, twice-shy tone that indicates my displeasure with Colette’s Machiavellian tactics

    “Well, maybe you need some fresh air then.”

    The mention of fresh air makes me perceive just how stifling the bar had grown, and I notice the dampness of perspiration on my shirt.

    “Fresh air sounds good,” I agree.

    We amble out of the bar and across the grassy plateau to the parking area.  From the glove box of a beat-up sedan, Colette obtains a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.  Meanwhile, as my eyes adjust to the night, I gasp in sudden wonder.  A thousand fireflies appear congregated among the grass and upon the metal surfaces of the parked cars.  Then, my perception shifts, and I recognize the fireflies as dew drops that gleam diamond with reflected starlight—diamond, but also emerald and sapphire, as beads of yellow and green sparkle among the white.  When I turn my gaze upward, the source of the lightshow spreads across the night:  the Milky Way like a burst of spray paint, Sirius outshining its neighbors, and a hint of the Southern Cross low on the horizon.  The stars of Micronesia dance as though plugged in to a celestial current.  Disregarding the dew and an occasional buzzing mosquito, I lean my back against Colette’s car and try to remember if I’ve ever seen a night as stunning as the one that now envelopes my gaze.

    “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Colette says.  Her cigarette brightens and dims as she drags and exhales. 

    “Beautiful and beyond,” I say.  “I’ve never seen anything like it.” 

    For a while, in silence, we watch the stars.  Colette sits with her leg against mine, and the soft warmth almost, but not quite, draws me to her.  Her coquettish smile suggests a spirited lass eager for a kiss, but her eyes pool with the sadness of a haggard woman tormented by time.  Feeling awkward, I move away slightly, and fill the gap with conversation. “So, what’s with all the Colette’s-the-queen stuff?” I ask.  “Does anybody else get similar accolades?”

     Colette sighs but indulges my interrogation.

    “In my younger days I competed in beauty contests,” she says.  “I actually made runner-up for Miss Texas.”  Sucking her cigarette, she assesses the impact of this information.  “You don’t believe me?” she asks accusingly.

    Opening the car door, she rummages through the glove box and produces a postcard-size photo for scrutiny.  “That’s me on Galveston Beach,” she says.  Illumined by the car’s interior light, a bikini-clad brunette stares back from the picture.

    “Miss Texas, huh?” I ponder.

    “Runner up,” she clarifies. “But the girl who beat me cheated.  She was having an affair with one of the judges.  Really, I should have won.”

    “Colette the beauty queen,” I muse. “So, how did you end up here?

    “How does anybody end up anywhere?” she sighs, after a long pause in which she returns her attention to the stars.

    The question dangles, rhetorically ripe, a doorway to philosophical inquiry where simple questions invoke complex answers.

    Collette laughs the half-amused, half-bitter laugh of the jaded.  “We don’t control the circumstances of our lives.  One day I woke up and found I was nothing special.  So, I cling to that little place where confidence still resides—sometimes that’s a pool table at Club Cupid.”

In Praise of ROUGHING IT by Mark Twain

Who among us, in a moment of traffic temper or status-quo stress, hasn't just wanted to chuck it all and "light out for the territories?"  I ask the question rhetorically, knowing the craving of the American psyche for open roads and uncluttered horizons that promise possibility.  Even in today's point-and-click world, where people increasingly prefer screen-mediated reality to actual experience, the allure of the frontier (or at least the little bit that remains) still resonates, as indicated by the popularity of television shows like "Yukon Gold," "Life Below Zero," and that voyeuristic survival thriller, "Naked and Afraid."  Even today, though we get our adventure from a screen, we prefer it in a setting of rugged individualism.
     In 1861 when Mark Twain boarded a stagecoach for the mining country of the Sierra Nevada, the frontier had little patience for dilettante dreamers.  As Twain  writes, the lawless land attracted "a driving, vigorous restless population. . .not simpering, dainty, kid-gloved weaklings, but stalwart, muscular, dauntless young braves, brimful of push and energy. . .the very pick and choice of the world's glorious ones."  Twain sums up the pagan temperament of this population with a loving indictment:  "They fairly reveled in gold, whiskey, fights, and fandangos, and were unspeakably happy."  Twain found the hopeful epicenter of this energy in Virginia City, where riches flowed from the silver spigot of the Comstock Lode.  Roughing It, with its descriptions of a boom town caught in the grips of speculative frenzy, creates the impression that Twain found romance not in the thrill of getting rich (or for that matter, the risk of going bust) but in simply staking a claim.  Of course, Twain did hope to get rich, but thankfully for the literary world, he discovered that he had more talent with a pen than a pick-axe.  Twain's foray through mining country provided the seed from which sprouted some greatest short stories in American literature.
     William Wordsworth, that lyrical sage of the Romantic period, saw literary force in the experience of emotion recollected in tranquility.  By the time Twain penned Roughing It, he'd traded frontier adventure for pursuits that, if not exactly tranquil (speaking now of the heartbreaks that beset Twain's personal life), entailed a more settled domestic routine.  Residing first in New York State and later in Connecticut, he must have felt light years removed from the frontier and its vigorous vagabonds.  One pictures him comfortably passing a New England winter, warmed by the fireplace as snowflakes coat the window pane,  drawing on a wellspring of memory to depict the landscape of his Western wanderings.  Perhaps channeling Wordsworth, Roughing It verges, at times, on the poetic, as exemplified by Twain's descriptions of Hawaii, for whose shores he departed as correspondent for the Sacramento Union journal after tiring of the Sierra.  Having climbed Haleakala to view the sunrise, Twain writes of the magical sight that draws tourists even today:

Presently vagrant white clouds came drifting along, high over the sea and valley; then they came in couples and groups, then in imposing squadrons; gradually joining their forces, they banked themselves together, a thousand feet under us, and totally shut out land and ocean. . .Clear to the horizon, league on league, with shallow creases between, and with haze and other stately piles of wispy architecture lifting themselves aloft out of the common plane. . .there was little conversation, for the impressive scene overawed speech.  I felt like the last man, neglected of the judgement, and left pinnacled in mid-Heaven, a forgotten relic of a vanished world. . .while the hush yet brooded, the messengers of the coming resurrection appeared in the east.  A growing warmth suffused the horizon, and soon the sun emerged and looked out over the cloud waste, flinging bars of ruddy light across it, staining its folds and billow caps with blushes, purpling the shaded troughs between, and glorifying the massy vapor palaces and cathedrals with a wasteful splendor of all blendings and combinations of rich color.

It was the sublimest spectacle I ever witnessed, and I think the memory of it will remain with me always.

     In December 1993, atop Haleakala for my own communion with the dawn, I witnessed a similar scene.  Somewhere, stashed away in a box of relics, a photo of it yet resides (although, taken with a disposable camera purchased from a supermarket--I had quite a limited budget in those days--it depicts mostly a grainy blur).  But perhaps I don't need the photo.  In the manner of Wordsworth, filled with the power of emotion recollected in tranquility, I think I remember the moment.  And, I realize that I experienced somewhat differently than Twain.  The sunrise I recall resembled less the splendor of resurrection than a poached egg atop a bed of mashed potatoes.  In confessing this, I no doubt risk a condemnation of both my character and my literary sense.  For a Haleakala sunrise to inspire in me only thoughts of food, while a proper writer like Twain perceived its sublime dimensions, surely bodes ill for my travel writing ambitions.
    In my defense, I offer the following excuse:  our hotel had a nice breakfast buffet, and I blame my fixation on matters more mundane than sublime on my desire to partake of its pleasures before the kitchen stopped service.
     Somehow I think Twain, the sage humorist of American literature, would have found that funny.

Book Blurb: HEART OF A TRAVELER by Ari Marsh

The "Edge," as psychological cliff and geographic boundary, provides a unifying motif for the sketches, vignettes, and poetry that comprise The Heart of a Traveler: Reflections from the Fathomless Edge of the World (PhantaSea Books, 2017), an eclectic travel memoir by California-bred author Ari Marsh.  To Marsh, the Edge has an unfathomable quality, for it signifies a transition zone between conventional reality and sublime perception.  As a surfer in search of waves and a seeker on a spiritual quest, Marsh takes the reader on a journey through this borderland realm, evoking landscapes that beckon with mystery.  We sense the solitude of desert campsites, and shield our eyes when the sunrise sparkles upon the otherworld terrain of Baja California's Crystal Fields.  We find an old relic of a surfboard in an isolated Balinese village, and discover that it offers a portal to another era.  We juxtapose the sacred waters of the Ganges with the incensed atmosphere of Tibetan temples, and indulge our curiosity about humanity's age-old quest for communion and meaning.

     Repeatedly, The Heart of a Traveler reminds readers that mystery and intrigue awaits those who probe the world's magical margins, as indicated by the following excerpt:

     India continues to stretch my ideas of reality.  I've had tea and shared meals with Buddhist monks curious about this Western visitor.  We've had engaging conversations about the world, spirituality, and the affairs of nations.  I visited the stunning Gyuto Monastery and Tantric University in the nearby mountains, home to the 17th Karmapa.  There, I shared rice with senior monks and attended their afternoon puja (fire) ceremony.  I also hiked to the base of a huge waterfall outside a small mountain village called Bhagsu Nag and baptized myself in the pure, high altitude waters. . .

     On the way back from the falls, I came upon a very old, semi-dilapidated Hindu Shiva temple frequented by a small group of local, rural Hindu villagers.  Three sadhus (Indian holy men) with long dreadlocks run the place and live in an adjacent brick cave.  I sat and meditated with these guys on the dirt floor of their house-cave for a while.  Suddenly, somebody began ringing the temple bell and the sadhus joined in with gongs and drums.  I grabbed a pair of large hand cymbals and we were off on a twenty-minute, instrumental, musical jam session followed by chanting.  Again, this wasn't a neat, cozy temple with shiny instruments, but a dark cave with incense burning, a small fire cooking an old pot of rice, piles of ragged blankets lying around, and occasional scurrying mice!  Yes, these saddhus live in a cave in virtual silence with very little food and almost no possessions.  Date and time dissolve amidst  this stuff. . . .

     Admittedly, Marsh confronts more than mysticism on the travel trail.  Returning home, he remains sensitive to the feelings of alienation faced by those whose passion for travel means adopting an unconventional lifestyle. Reflecting on the social values of his American homeland, he recognizes that a culture which links identity to material success will inevitably subject him to suit-and-tie stereotypes judgemental of his wanderlust:

For far too many years, I have followed a different path, responded to a different calling, and sought rhythm and harmony with the sea.  but there is a price for a life such as mine. . .the price may be loneliness, on occasion. . .or a lack of stability, or security. . .for mine is a simplicity that many would deem inadequate.  We all have choices to make. . .  

     What have I to show from riding countless thousands of waves. . .for immersing myself in the ocean for literally years of my life. . .for pursuing a dream. . .an intangible connection to nature, to ocean to Source. . .

     Like the Tibetan Buddhists who, with great patience and peacefulness, create elaborate mandalas out of colored gains of sand, only to scatter them into nothingness upon completion--an act of symbolizing the impermanent and ever changing nature of our lives--so have I created my own temporary , sacred mandalas upon the smooth blue ocean through dozens of years of riding waves amidst the gleaming Southern California sunlight.  Each movement upon the water is a prayer from my heart, a celebration of joy, or a soft cry of suffering amidst this life struggle. . .

     Where abides a non-conformist's life, such as mine, upon the spectrum of success, happiness, and achievement?

Success, happiness, and achievement. . .in some parts of the world, all that really matters is one's ability to climb for coconuts!  Sumatra 2014. . .Photo:  S. Jacques Stratton

     Ultimately, however, Marsh finds that behind the judgement of his peers lies an element of envy:

     Several years back, a neighbor was having a party for his son's tenth birthday.  I was informed, in advance, that those attending would consist primarily of his son's friends and their parents.  "You may not want to come," he had told me, since I was, at the time, both single and childless.  It was an interesting period in my life.  I had just resigned from a tenured position teaching elementary school and was soon to turn forty.  I had recently sold a house that I had once owned with my now ex-wife, and had made a personal vow to "buy my life back."  At the party, I began conversing with a guy nearly my age.  He told me that he was there with his wife and two children, both of whom were friends with the birthday boy.

     A series of questions followed, and thus I, somewhat hesitantly, began to explain my situation.  I shared with him that I was not only divorced, but I had just sold my house, quit my job, broken up with a recent girlfriend, and was about to depart on a six-week journey all over California, surfing, hiking, writing, and camping in my truck.  

     "Wait, let me get this straight," he said in bewilderment, "you don't have any kids, you're not married, and you don't even have a job?. . .Damn, you're so lucky!"

A Postcard from the Edge. . .untrammeled coastlines and meditative reflections await those who embrace the transitional psychology of travel.  Pavones, Costa Rica, 1994.  Photo:  S. Jacques Stratton

     My own experience with The Edge leads me to conclude that the true benefit of travel occurs in the moments of dislocation that force us to confront our sense of identity.  As such, travel represents a transition of the mind as much as movement through geographic space.  I lived this transition as an expat, teaching English in Micronesia, an adventure recollected in my travel memoir Islands on the Fringe.  I encountered it as a veteran of numerous surf trips, probing untrammeled coastlines where surf perfection channeled meditative reflection.  In the manner of good literature, the lyrical meditations that comprise The Heart of a Traveler helped me appreciate these experiences in their spiritual and psychological context.