It was less about running from and more about running towards. I was ready to launch my real life, and had a partner to help me. Why wait around? For what?

The unintended outcome of all that is that I have never been alone and fully responsible for myself. OK, almost never. While we were divorcing Dorothy worked at the Ashland Shakespeare Festival for a year while I set up shop in San Francisco. One of the reasons we remarried is because neither of us particularly enjoyed our Wanderjahr, although for very different reasons.

Part of that separation involved figuring out whether the problems we were having were worth overcoming or whether there was greener grass elsewhere. In Dorothy’s case, that manifested as dating one of the actors, who eventually proposed marriage. Faced with a specific A/B choice, rather than a generic ballot, Dorothy decided that fixing what was up with us was the best path.

My journey led to the same destination but took an entirely different path. I, too, was committed to exploring the alternatives and applied myself with gusto. I made a date with a different girl every one of the 52 weeks Dorothy and I were separated. You’ll notice a said “made a date,” not “went on a date.” That’s because I was stood up on every single one of those dates. Every. Single. One.

After a year of that, running back to Dorothy, tail tucked between legs and forelock tugged, was a pretty easy call. I’d have done pretty much anything to avoid the future that year portended. Including admitting that I was a dick and that all of our problems were my fault. An admission made at least slightly easier as a result of it being true.

I’ve thought about that year a lot, and the most plausible explanation I’ve come up with is that the first few cancellations were a coincidence, and then I got the yips. I think I gave off an air of flop sweat and desperation that women sensed. Easier to say yes to my face with no intention of following through than to deal with me directly. I suppose if any credit accrues to me at all in this debacle, and it doesn’t, it’s that I kept at it. Long past the point where it made sense to do so, a recurring theme for those following closely.

Over our several hundred years together, Dorothy and I have established pretty clear spheres of influence. I balance the checkbook, she feeds us. I take care of logistics, she makes sure our lives are beautiful. I ignore things, she obsesses about them. Overall, a pretty decent division of labor.

But the thing about being apart for five months is not only that we’ve lost each other’s companionship, but we’ve also lost each other’s labors. I’d have to feed myself. If Dorothy wanted to visit St. Louis, she’d have to figure out how to get there on her own. On the one hand, all part of the Neuroplasticity Tour. Good for us. Personal growth, y’all. On the other hand, oh, that just doesn’t sound fun.

And it wasn’t!

There’s been an element of the solo travel that’s been liberating. We’ve been an us so long that I sometimes think we’re a single organism with the same desires and needs, but that’s pretty clearly stupid. When we have people join us we’re always aware of the triangulation necessary to make sure everyone’s having fun. But we obviously triangulate with one another, even if we do it so gracefully that we’re not fully aware that we’re even doing it.

So the ability to stand up, put on pants, and walk out the door is pretty cool. It’s a lovely freedom, and very difficult not to enjoy. Is it worth giving up Dorothy’s companionship to get there? Not even close. It’s like the difference between finding a quarter on the street and a $100 bill. No comparison. Although it does calibrate Dorothy specifically as $99.75 of value added. Good to have that calculation in the bag.

And there’s the feeling of accomplishment that comes with being fully autonomous and taking care of myself like a grown-up. Finally, I’m a real boy! But it’s fucking exhausting. I feel like I have to be vigilant and mindful about everything, with no one there to back me up. Am I in the swimming pool when it starts raining and thundering? My call as to whether I should get out. Open wound? My job to figure out how to treat it. Has that meat gone bad? That decision is mine alone. It’s so much work staying alive. It really doesn’t seem like a one-person job.

So the real takeaway from all of this is that the solo travel makes sense and we can both manage fine, but not for five months. That’s way too long. But if we did it for a month or two, at most, I think it’s more than just survivable. I think it’s actually incredibly positive. I’d go so far as to say, smart.

When we’re in Chicago we are able to manage time together and apart. We each have interests there that don’t involve the other. It’s balanced. But when we travel, that balance evaporates. By going places where we don’t speak the language, we are the only people we can talk to, creating this tightly bound, hermetically sealed echo chamber. That’s not the only pressure associated with the travel, but I think it’s the big one.

A month or two apart is a tonic for that, making sure that we have enough solo space so that the completely shared space doesn’t feel so claustrophobic. I think by taking that regular short break we’ll be able to sustain the travel part of the year for a longer, healthier period.

The most salutary side effect of divorcing and remarrying was the context shift around foibles. “That thing you do is really annoying and I’m going to have to tolerate it for the rest of my life” is entirely different from “That thing you do is really annoying and it’s a very small price to pay for all of the amazing things about you.” We came back together not because we’d figured out how to eliminate the things we found annoying about one another, but because we’d decided they didn’t matter. We’d intentionally chosen to accept them as the price to get our tickets punched. And you don’t get to be salty about your own decisions.

This experience has been a lot like that, a welcome reminder after all these years that we’re still making choices. For example, most of you know how very, very observant Dorothy is. Nothing gets past her. But in our 24/7 travel bubble, I have been the subject of that scrutiny in a way I’ve found oppressive. Jesus, just… look away for a minute.

But now that I’ve been fully responsible for myself for five months, I’ve recontextualized that scrutiny as labor-saving. If she’s not staring at me and asking whether that new thing is a skin tag, I have to. I now can’t wait to be under her watchful eye again.

Also, I’ve gained about twelve pounds feeding myself. I’m eating out in restaurants way more than I do when we’re together, traveling or home. And if I’m being honest, I’m also eating for comfort. There’s a Dorothy-sized hole in my life which I’ve been convinced can be filled with cake. Now we know how many doughnut holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall. Enough so that when I was trying on a shirt recently the shopgirl told me that the shirt fit fine, I just needed to lose weight. Ouch.

We were discussing this recently, and Dorothy summed it up in her usual pithy fashion: “I loved you when you left, but I miss you now.” Back atcha.

• Image generated by Google Gemini

The official story is that a monk named Sumanathera had a dream that led him to a location where he found a bone. Given that said bone exhibited magical powers (it glowed, it could vanish, it could move…) it was naturally deemed to be the shoulder bone of none other than Buddha himself.

A local king heard of it and demanded the monk bring it to him. On inspection, the magical bone played possum, and the king, seeing nothing but a random bone, passed. Another, presumably better king got a look, and the bone did its thing. Which thing involved breaking into two pieces. The king enshrined one in Wat Suan Dok, and placed the other, larger chunk of Buddha on the back of his prized white elephant which he set loose in the jungle.

The elephant wandered about, climbed Doi Suthep mountain, then called, appropriately, Doi Aoy Chang (Sugar Elephant Mountain). He looked around, trumpeted three times, and keeled over dead. Thus selecting Doi Suthep as the location to build the temple and the shrine to hold the Holy Shoulder Bone.

Still with me? Good. I knew you could do it. I believe in you.

Before we actually made it to Wat Phra That Doi Suthep, commonly referred to as simply Wat Doi Suthep (Phra That literally means Buddha relic), we had a stop for a pre-prayer. This was a roadside shrine to a famous monk who died in 1939. I offered a lotus flower whose petals I had folded myself into the appropriately respectful shape, a cluster of marigolds, incense, a candle, and a piece of gold leaf that I applied to the monk’s statue. It was quite the kit. Once our monk had been properly propitiated we were safe to move on to the temple itself.

I realize that I’ve failed to introduce our dramatis personae. My guide was Maggie and my driver was Mr. K. Thai names are typically ponderous aggregations, not unlike German portmanteaux, so everyone has chosen Anglicized nicknames. Maggie’s full name on WhatsApp is Margaret Maggie Rose. Sure it is. It’s not liked I asked to see her ID.

But the most salient feature of this tour, which I’d booked on GetYourGuide just the previous evening, is that Maggie and Mr. K were the only personae. I was the sole member of their group tour, and had them all to myself. Which was excellent, as the pacing and focus were 100% to my preference. It was, in all practical senses, a private tour.

The juicy temple bits are aloft, and there are two ways to get to the top of the mountain. A stairway of 309 steps, boasting the longest Naga balustrade in Thailand, or a funicular for an extra 50฿. Happy to walk down 309 steps, but it was the funicular to go up. Maggie was relieved.

Until about 30 years ago, the alternative to the 309 steps was a basket system that involved pulleys and ropes. The funicular was built after that arrangement failed, leading to multiple deaths. If you do make the ascent by steps, you’re rewarded with a statue of the famous white elephant. I saw him at the top of the stairs on the way down, but he’s your greeter if you’re coming up.

While Wat Soi Duthep has all of the expected accoutrements of a Buddhist temple, the highlight, and the reason it’s so famous and revered, is the massive stupa holding the Buddha Bone . It’s the OG stupa, dating all the way back to the construction of 1383, with a fresh coat of gold to keep it looking sharp.

The plaza surrounding the Golden Stupa (which sounds like a prize from a Buddhist Willy Wonka) is just as gilt and spectacular as the stupa itself, home as it is to so very many golden Buddhas. Maggie explained that the aspirationally holy are supposed to make three counterclockwise trips around the plaza, circling the stupa. After a single circuit my eyes were swirly, so we deemed it holy enough.

The plaza with the Golden Stupa was hardly the last word in Wat Doi Suthep’s splendors. This was probably the finest Thai temple I visited, and well worth the trip. Exemplary.

The back end of the day’s tour was a visit to San Kamphaeng, a town known for its high-end craft factories. You can read about that part of the tour here. But before we got there, we stopped for lunch at a restaurant with delightful grounds.

All About Me!

When I was consulting, an Indian colleague and I had a gig that lasted almost two years. So long that it was cheaper to pay for my hotel room by the month than four days every week around weekends at home. It was great. I had the hotel remove furniture I didn’t need. I went to Ikea to decorate. I set up a more robust liquor cabinet than could possibly be arranged for multiple short-term stays. I had my dry cleaning and laundry done there, so all I traveled with was a briefcase and my laptop.

But this idyllic arrangement had one notable downside. The hotel employed a greeter, a woman who patrolled the lobby in order to be helpful to guests. Because we were long-term regulars she knew us. And boy, did we know her. We knew the names and ages of her children, all their salient illnesses and achievements, her political beliefs, and what neighborhood she lived in. It got to the point that we dreaded crossing the lobby.

When we returned to the hotel from work we’d peer around the corner to see if she was occupied so we could cross to the elevator without getting buttonholed. One day we were scoping the lobby and saw her deep in conversation with a fresh victim. My colleague turned to me and said, “It is safe to walk near the tiger if it is already feeding.” So very true.

The thing about most tourists is that they love getting pictures of themselves at whatever monument or landmark they’re visiting. Proof, I suppose. And the thing about tour guides is they know this, so they’re constantly taking pictures of people with their phones. Often, if the spot is Gram-friendly, they’ll line up for their pictures. It’s easy to dance past without getting snared. The tiger is feeding.

In this circumstance, though, on what had become a solo tour, I was all there was for the tiger to feed on. There was no getting around it. Pictures would be taken. And so I offer you, who have so often scolded us for not taking pictures of ourselves, an entire gallery of Me. Under the general rubric of Be careful what you wish for. Especially considering that these are the highlights of almost 100 pictures she took. This is the cream. Sad.

Captain All-Thumbs

I’m Marc-Fucking-Bolan, y’all!

Hey, hey, it’s a monk!

Well, I love that holy water. [Oh Boston, you’re my home.]

My Life In The Ghost Of Bush

As some of you know, and most of you probably don’t, I was, briefly, a pornographer. I’d started a graphic design firm with DC Comics’ Director of Design after leaving DC, but after multiple years it clearly wasn’t going to turn the corner so I moved on. To… nothing? I didn’t really have a post-Brainstorm plan, except that I needed a job.

Back in them days, we found jobs through newspapers, and the Times classifieds offered up an editorial position. I’d been an editor. I could do that. I called and set up an appointment. The ad had mentioned Adult, but I didn’t honestly have a clear conception of what that meant. Editing the next Fanny Hill?

Not quite. It meant picking up the editorial reins at Hawk, the title in High Society‘s stable devoted to the dewiest of legally photographable models. Which was funny, because we had a weekly editorial meeting where the editors of all the different magazines got together to share submissions they’d received from photographers to determine which of the mags, if any, was a fitting home.

We’d pass around one set of photos at a time, and inevitably just as I said, “She’s kinda hot,” someone else chimed in with, “Too old.” The joke was that they should start an over-40 magazine for me, and how sad that I’d been stuck with Hawk.

But Hawk it was, and I’d picked up an issue that was only partially completed when I started, so I had to finish it up. I maintained the previous editor’s nom du porn, as I quickly intuited how much our readers valued continuity. Henceforth, I was professionally known as Alphonse Romano.

I lasted not quite three months, and thus had one issue that had been completely produced under my version of Alphonse. I was very proud of that issue. For those curious, which is asymptotically approaching none of you, my job consisted of picking photo sets, choosing the pictures that we’d use for publication, and writing the copy that went alongside those photos.

The copywriting was my specialty. I couldn’t manufacture erotic prose to save my life, but I was the king of tortured metaphor. Another magazine’s editor came to me once desperate for help. He was on deadline to close his book for press and he had nothing to publish in the Letters to the Editor section. He said he needed one on Topic A, one on Topic B, and another that he didn’t care about. He specified word count and begged me for help.

About fifteen minutes later I gave him three letters. He looked them over with a puzzled expression. “These are all good. I can use all of them. Did you just write these now?” “Is it supposed to take longer?” And that was that. I was unofficial ghostwriter for every magazine in the stable.

I know some of you will be shocked, shocked, to learn that the letters to the editor weren’t from actual readers. I want to assure you that Hawk had higher editorial standards than that. For my one and only issue I had three letters from actual readers, more or less copyedited, as circumstance dictated.

Was I concerned that 100% of Hawk‘s letters to the editor came in envelopes that featured stamps on the outside reading, “The Warden has reviewed the contents of this letter and approved it for release”? Maybe a little, but at least it gave me a clear picture of our market. It did make me wonder, given what I received, what didn’t make the Warden’s cut.

I proudly took the letters to the publisher, who, without reading them, pointed to the longest one and said, “Too long. Cut it in half.” Which I did, of course, albeit grudgingly. But I now had to manufacture a fourth letter from scratch to fill the void, as the three letters I’d chosen were the only ones I’d received that could be massaged into publishable form. It became a parlor game at our house. When we had new friends over I’d hand them my issue of Hawk and ask them to guess which of the letters I’d written. We never had prizes for correct answers, which seems wrong in retrospect.

The copywriting became a push-your-luck game for me. I wanted to find the line they wouldn’t cross, for sport, so I kept pushing the boundaries, writing more and more outlandish nonsense, praying for something to be rejected. Just so I’d know. As it happened, I only ever got one line of copy sent back. There was a feature in Hawk that I, of course, maintained. It was a double-page spread of a brownstone’s windows, alluringly titled Hawk’s Rear Window.

I took promotional stills from porn videos that had been sent to us and dropped them into the window frames, like we were peeking into the windows and watching people have sex. Good times. Nothing mixes better than poor taste and copyright infringement. We rationalized that we were promoting their films, even though there were never credits, and that the photos had been sent to us and we were using them. Wasn’t that the point? No one ever complained, so I guess that was the point.

But the feature wasn’t complete without captions. Funny captions, according to this Alphonse. And that’s what finally got sent back. I used a photo of seven girls kneeling in a row with their butts to the camera. The caption? “This episode of Sesame Street is brought to you by the number Seven.” Curiously, they didn’t care about the highjacking of someone else’s corporate IP for salacious purposes. I had made reference to a children’s show, and any allusion to children, no matter how vague or abstract, was off limits. Which appeared to be their only line. Nothing else ever got sent back, so, question answered.

My reason for this lengthy digression, and if you’ve made it this far you must be boiling with curiosity, is that I can’t write photo captions for the blog slideshows without thinking of Hawk’s Rear Window. It transports me back to those halcyon days spent with a light box and a loupe.

As a coda, as if necessary, when I finally got a real job Dorothy and I discussed the best I’m-outta-here message. I favored “I have to leave while I can still masturbate,” but calmer heads prevailed. “I know my son is only two, but all I can think about is career day at grade school.” Message delivered, message accepted, next chapter commenced.

Defying any sense of narrative structure, as my career did, that next chapter was as the Technology & Operations Director at a Manhattan advertising agency. Because why the hell not.

Spoiler: it ended weird.

Not unlike this blog post.

P.S. I apologize that this section is nothing but text. But trust me. You don’t want pictures from Hawk.

Fine, you pervert. Here’s the cover of the issue that’s mine, all mine. Well, technically it’s Alphonse’s. You are hereby warned.

My path was, surprise!, more circuitous. In the immediate aftermath of Gambit’s implosion I office temped for over a year, until I was able to find a gig that took advantage of my experience in bringing products to market. That gig was Le Zink, launching an Australian Day-Glo colored sunscreen in the US. As it happened, Marvel Comics came onto the market while I was working on Le Zink and I convinced my entrepreneurial boss that we should own a comic book publisher.

There followed a whirlwind year in which I took the point coordinating the teams of accountants and lawyers and investment bankers, digging deep into Marvel’s financials and structuring the offer. We were the last man standing before Ronald Perelman bought Marvel, and I honestly believe our offer was better. We were not, however, Ronald Perelman and MacAndrews & Forbes, and I think that tipped the scales.

Meanwhile, throughout the year I was working on the leveraged buyout of Marvel, Dorothy and I were continuing to hang with two of our best friends in New York, Jenette Kahn and her husband, Mort Fink. Jenette was the President and Publisher of DC Comics, the primary rival of the company I was attempting to purchase. That whole year, all I could say when Jenette and Mort asked what I was up to was that I was working on a very interesting LBO, but that I was under NDA and couldn’t discuss it. Although, to be fair, that was the same answer I had to give everybody.

But how, I can hear you asking, did we become best buds with the President of DC Comics? That takes us back to our hosiery company, Gambit. Jenette was a well-known fashionista, and had fallen in love with Dorothy’s designs. In fact, she purchased so much product she qualified as a wholesale account.

I’m in our San Francisco production office late one evening when the phone rings. I pick it up and Jenette’s on the line, offering me the Wonder Woman license for printed hosiery and requesting a meeting to discuss particulars the next time we were in New York. That’s a pretty easy Yes.

Did we have any interest in making Wonder Woman printed hosiery? We did not. Was Jenette interested in offering the license to us? Clearly not, or someone from DC’s licensing department would have reached out. But when you’re the President of DC Comics and you want to meet someone, you have a lot of options for baiting the hook.

And that’s what Jenette wanted. She loved the work, and wanted to meet the people responsible for it, under the perfectly reasonable assumption that it took interesting people to do interesting work. For our part, why would we not want to meet the President of DC Comics? It’s good to have friends in high places.

As suggested, we met the next time we were in NYC and hit it off like we’d known each other for decades. Thenceforth, every time we were in the city we’d join them for dinner, or a Knicks game, or an excursion of some type, and that carried over when we moved there as Gambit collapsed. Dorothy was even Jenette’s Plus One at an all-girls sleepover for Gloria Steinem’s birthday, every guest snuggled under one of the hostess’s many furs. 20 Feet From Stardom.

I was released from the NDA when Marvel accepted Perelman’s offer, and was now free to talk to Jenette about what I’d learned in the last year, having been elbow deep in Marvel’s operations and financials. I suggested that my deep industry knowledge, coupled with my well-established entrepreneurial chops (I had two successful national product rollouts under my belt, Gambit and Le Zink, and I’d just ticked thirty), qualified me to do something at DC, even if I didn’t have a clue what it might be. I was crystal clear, however, that she should employ me. Somehow.

Although, as a counterfactual, it’s more than entertaining to imagine an outcome where Jenette and I headed DC and Marvel respectively. That’s certainly what I was imagining all that year. What would the industry have looked like with friendly rivals?

At the time Jenette and I sat down for our chat, Art Spiegelman’s Maus was making waves. It was still a few years away from its Pulitzer in 1992, but the first collected volume was published in 1986 and suggested an interesting path forward for the comic book business. Here was proof positive that non-comic book readers would go into a bookstore to buy a graphic novel whose content and themes spoke to them. Jenette had been wrestling with how DC could take advantage of this opportunity, which amounted to a whole new market for comics, when my startup chops walked through the door.

This quickly coalesced into a vision for a new imprint, broadly under the DC imprimatur but with distinct branding, that would focus on the emerging market of non-comic book readers willing to read the right kind of comic books.

There were two immediate, glaring problems with this plan, and both of them were me. First, I had no experience in comic books or publishing of any kind, so Jenette creating a new imprint and handing it off to a noob had the potential to create an uprising among the experienced DC editors who’d been bypassed for such a plum opportunity.

Of course, my inexperience was a feature not a bug, not that DC’s staff would see it that way. The imprint practically required someone who’d never produced comic books in order to make things that weren’t like what DC was already making. In the post on Gambit I discuss the value of Strategic Ignorance and the risks of being an expert. Experts are steeped in the common wisdom of what’s possible in their domain, while an outsider may well imagine solutions that experts cannot. I was exactly the sort of ignorant that this new imprint required, if it was to have a chance of success.

The other thing wrong with me as the potential leader of this new imprint was that I was Jenette’s friend. Although no one at DC knew me at the time, there would be no question, no matter how we kept it on the down low, that my relationship with Jenette would become common knowledge after about five minutes on the clock. Not a good look, and as problematic in its own way as my lack of industry experience.

Jenette’s solution was to stage a competition, open to all. In order to pick a leader for their new, yet-to-be-named imprint, DC solicited proposals for the launch of an imaginary new magazine. Not a comic book of any kind, but a regular newsstand magazine (how quaint), whose focus could be anything: fashion, sports, health, science, travel… You could pick anything, but you had to make the case for why it filled a need not met in the market and how you’d go about executing.

The proposal needed to make the business case for the title, describe the editorial focus, identify the market niche it filled, define the target audience demographics, and explain how it would make money. You know. A business plan. The thing no one with any comic book experience at the time knew how to create.

I know a bunch of people threw their hats in the ring, but a lot of them dropped out once they realized how hard the assignment was. I think at the end of the process there was my proposal and either two or three others from industry insiders. I pitched Manifesto, a men’s magazine with a how-to focus, basically Glamour for men.

Believe it or not, I still have the proposal, which I came across when we unpacked in Chicago and I was sorting through our archives. Ten pages of detailed market analysis, circulation estimates, demographics, competitive analysis, editorial philosophy, and graphic design considerations. Ten more pages of appendices of raw data, a twelve-month editorial calendar, and a sample issue’s full contents. Those poor fuckers never stood a chance.

Did Jenette put her thumb on the scale by creating that particular challenge, suspecting that I’d be the only candidate who could successfully execute it? Maybe. But it’s also true that the skills the assignment was meant to foreground were absolutely critical to successfully launching the imprint, and mine was the only submission that objectively demonstrated those skills. You tell me if that’s “unfair.”

Fair or not, it was now possible to identify me as possessing the unique skill set necessary to launch a new imprint. Did that keep DC’s editors from grumbling about how Jenette’s friend just happened to win? It did not. That dogged me the entire time I worked at DC.

A Rocky Start

I was a fish out of water at DC from Day One. Under the normal chain of command I would have reported to the Executive Editor, Dick Giordano, with the EVP, Paul Levitz, greenlighting projects. Instead, I reported directly to Jenette, who was the only person I had to convince to approve a book. Paul reviewed my budgets and print runs and made sure my numbers made sense. Dick was a resource available to me whenever I had creative questions.

Reflecting the fact that this was meant to be a standalone entity, I had the unwieldy official title, Group Editor and Marketing Manager. I solicited and acquired projects, brokered writer/artist teams when necessary, provided story and copy editing, set production estimates and budgets, prepared the marketing plan and managed the execution of collateral materials, set and managed the publishing calendar, prepared the artwork to be turned into film, checked the film and made corrections before it went to the printer, and even flew to Quebec to our printer, Ronalds, to color correct on press if we had a particularly challenging production. I also attended conventions, spoke on panels, and was responsible for the brand in every way imaginable.

The very first panel I sat on, at the San Diego Comic-Con, was a literal nightmare. I don’t remember who else was on the panel, but it was Art Speigelman and a bunch of other heavy hitters. Piranha had just published its first books, which somehow qualified me to sit with this group. I had never done any public speaking before, and when a question came to me, I opened my mouth, uttered a few words, and went completely blank. After an uncomfortable moment of silence, I muttered something about losing my train of thought and passed to the next contestant.

That’s the nightmare, isn’t it? Leaving the house without pants on, running into the ex and her new boy toy when you haven’t showered in a couple of days, having a mental breakdown in public… But a funny thing happened. I was fine. The worst thing that could have happened in that moment happened, and then it was over and everything was OK. I never had an issue with public speaking after that.

Anyway, all of this action was managed from a home office. I eventually wound up with an official DC office, but for the first two years they wanted me isolated from their day-to-day operations. They didn’t want me infected by the methods they used to produce traditional comic books. DC was, I think, the only employer I’ve ever had that truly understood and valued my ignorance.

A key difference between my role and the other editors was that I was financially responsible for my line, whereas DC’s traditional editors were only responsible for the creative integrity of their books. Not only did Paul Levitz review and approve my budgets, but we always had a post mortem once a book had been published to see if I’d hit my targets or not. Not a one of those other editors wanted bottom line responsibility, a point I was happy to make whenever anyone gave me the stinkeye.

However, none of this happened right away, as I hit more a brick wall than a speed bump on Day One.

The traditional comic book business is built on the work-made-for-hire model, meaning writers and artists are paid to create to the company’s spec and the company owns the creative output. Jenette had done heroic work creating and implementing a royalty structure so that creatives could share in the financial gains their work generated, but the work itself was, still and always, for hire, and owned by DC.

I had been tasked with launching a line of creator-oriented work, inspired by Maus, and it never occurred to me that DC thought that might be possible using a work-made-for-hire contract. Because that would be insane. But that’s what I discovered on Day One. Paul handed me their standard contract and told me to go out and acquire all the goodness Jenette craved.

I asked Jenette if this was real, and she said it was. A huge component of their business model involved dusting off old properties and reimagining them in a new context. Since they never knew what might be valuable in the future, they just owned everything.

I told Jenette we’d never get the properties we’d set our sights on with a work-made-for-hire contract, and she told me to go figure out what we could do instead. As long as that solution didn’t involve DC losing access to potentially valuable properties.

Fuck.

I spent literally my entire first year on staff working with Chantal d’Aulnis, their in-house counsel. We couldn’t announce the line, I couldn’t solicit work, we couldn’t do anything public facing until the contractual issue was resolved. There wasn’t really a new imprint until I figured out how to wrest a creator’s rights contract out of a company that had no interest in any such thing.

Other than work on the contract the one thing I was able to do in that year was name and brand the imprint. I’d been staring at a blank legal pad in the run-up to the meeting with Jenette, and had nothing. I had a list of names so anodyne no one involved in the process can recall them, myself included. As a joke, and without any particular thought or effort, I tossed Piranha Press onto that list, so that at least Jenette and I could enjoy a laugh together while we bemoaned my lack of imagination.

Unexpectedly, it resonated with Jenette and stuck. Henceforth, Piranha Press, Comics With Teeth.

Of course, without a creator’s rights contract to offer, the newly named Piranha Press would die in the cradle. The whole thing just seemed silly. It’s not like Art Spiegelman was raking in the bucks on Maus merch. I was tasked with signing projects that had almost by definition next to zero merchandising value, with a contract that insisted, as a habit, on the value of the merchandising rights.

If there’s a theme to extract from these career retrospectives, it’s that I’m not smart enough to stop when something appears objectively impossible. For a full year I pushed and yielded and pushed some more, probing, searching for a weak spot that I could exploit, a combination of elements no one had thought of before that would unlock the solution. It was an impossible problem I had to solve. I needed the job.

I have accomplished a few things in my career of which I am genuinely proud, things that have left the larger world slightly different because of my efforts. One was figuring out how to print on hosiery. Another was birthing the first creator’s rights contract offered by either of the major comic book publishers. I can’t take all of the credit, as I had willing partners in Jenette and Chantal, although neither, I think, truly believed there was a solution. So I’ll take full credit for the solution.

What finally cut the knot? The contract Piranha offered vested all rights to the property directly with the creator. Creators owned their own work, but licensed back to DC the rights to publish and exploit the materials in any manner and in any medium. They could make posable action figures, t-shirts, movies, games, anything and everything was included in the license. I don’t remember the split, but there was generous profit sharing of such exploitation.

So how was this different than a work-made-for-hire contract? Creative ownership was meaningless if the same rights as existed under the previous arrangement were simply licensed away instead of being forcibly wrested by droit du seigneur. The hook was that in order for DC to retain the rights to exploit a property they would have to keep it in print. If three years lapsed without publication, the contract terminated and all licensed rights reverted to the creator.

What that meant as a practical matter was that as the three year window loomed, DC would have to make a rational cost/benefit analysis about the value of the subsidiary rights. In the past they had never had to make that call, as they owned everything forever.

If a book had been out of print for three years, was it worth the investment in reprinting in order to retain the licensing rights? In most cases, the answer was obviously no, and all rights reverted. On the off chance that Piranha published a blockbuster, DC could retain the rights as long as they wanted. Otherwise, there was no business rationale for absorbing the cost of reprinting in order to retain the licensing rights. I’d left DC by the time the first three-year window came up, but all of those properties reverted to their creators, as intended.

I baked one other innovation into the contract. Since these were properties owned by the creators, DC couldn’t exercise the sort of editorial control to which they were accustomed. So what happened if a story came in and they wanted changes?

They had to ask.

They had to make their case to the creators why the changes were necessary or meaningful. Creators could then accede to the request, reject it, or offer a compromise solution. Which DC could accept or reject. For the most part, this led to exactly the kind of creative compromise and accommodation you’d like to see between publisher and creator. In the event that compromise could not be reached, DC’s only option was nuclear: decline to publish. With the creators keeping any already paid advance.

This actually came up regarding the final issue of a four-issue mini-series, The Score. Jenette requested a change that the creators weren’t comfortable with, but neither was Jenette comfortable failing to publish the final issue. In the end, the creators negotiated a one-off Batman special in exchange for acquiescing to the request. Truthfully, I don’t think the change was that big a deal for them, but I’d handed them leverage and they were happy to use it.

That creator’s rights contract was the one Karen Berger used to launch Vertigo. Trying to take any of the credit for Vertigo would be stupid, as it was Karen’s vision and execution through and through. But it’s a fact that she couldn’t have acquired the properties that made Vertigo so successful without the contract I’d pioneered for Piranha, and that absent my efforts that contract would never have existed.

So… Sandman. You’re welcome.

Congratulations! You Have A Fish!

Now what? I’d solved one problem only to be confronted with another: what was Piranha Press? All I really had was a negative mandate: don’t make traditional superhero comics. That left… a lot.

Of course, this was really two completely different questions: what should the stories be about, and how should they be told? On the first of those questions, content, I made an intentional choice for eclectic, with a side of literary. More than anything, I wanted to publish books that covered the full range of subject matter available to fiction that didn’t have pictures, putting comic books on an equal footing with literature.

The second question, regarding form, was, I thought, even more interesting. Comic books had developed a rigorous graphical language, using panels and word balloons to tell sequential stories. That was fine for the sort of action-oriented superhero fare that was the norm, but I felt like there were more ways than that to combine words and pictures to tell a story.

What I wanted out of form was for each story to combine words and pictures in the way best suited to telling that particular story. If that happened to be a traditional panel and word balloon structure, great. If the story needed something different, let’s figure that out.

That aligned with how I viewed my role as an editor. Having acquired a property, I was endorsing the creators as capable of telling their story and the work as worthy of publishing. My role was to make sure that the final product represented the best articulated version of the story they were telling. Not, “I think this is wrong,” or, “I think this would be better.” More, “I think your intention here is X, and I’m not sure that’s coming across clearly. Is there a better way to express that idea?” I felt like I was standing in for the reader rather than the publisher, saying, “Hold on, I didn’t follow that last bit.”

Also, while I wasn’t against working with talent that came from a comic book background, I had a strong bias towards new voices, people who had, because of the stories they wanted to tell, never considered the comic book industry a likely option. While there were quite a few smaller publishers out there at the time, doing interesting work, I had one thing that creators wanted that the small press didn’t have: money. I was able to pay creators way more than the independent press could offer, which popped loose material that might otherwise have never seen the light of day.

As I’m busy acquiring properties with my brand new contract and my freshly articulated editorial POV, I had to think not only about launch, but also pretty much the entire first year’s production calendar. I could backfill with new acquisitions for Year Two and beyond, but I’d need enough in the pipeline to make sure I could publish that first year without a hiccup.

Part of that process was also settling on what the books would look like. I wanted there to be consistent line branding, but I wanted the finished product to look more like a book than a comic. My benchmark was that I wanted someone on the subway to be comfortable reading a Piranha Press book, knowing that it didn’t brand them as a nerd. Remember, this was way before the nerds won and superheroes went mainstream. Comic books were still considered a cultural backwater.

DC’s Director of Design, Richard Bruning, hooked me up with graphic designer extraordinaire Dean Motter. Dean had done the excellent Piranha logo, and now it was time to tackle full-on branding. Here’s the branding applied to my business card, as well as the front and back covers of the first issue of Beautiful Stories For Ugly Children, one of my three launch titles. We tweaked the design over the life of the project, but the branding stayed recognizable from Day One. In fact, the cover design won more than one (ok, two – that’s more than one) industry design awards.

Those three launch titles were, in effect, my manifesto. They needed to represent the range I was trying to encompass with Piranha, in both the kinds of stories being told and the way they were being told. I was in no small measure outlining the perimeters of an editorial vision for the line. The shape would fill in as I published more titles, but I needed to establish the broad outline on launch.

My three launch titles were:

Beautiful Stories For Ugly Children, a series with a standalone story each month written by Dave Louapre and illustrated by Dan Sweetman. They came to me as a team, with a sheaf of single panel cartoons (which I subsequently published as The Wasteland) and a self-published story called The Rancid Baby. Dave was a writer of surpassing skill, the best writer, from a technical perspective, that I’d work with, and Dan was a master of multiple techniques, all of which he utilized for BSFUC.

BSFUC was everything I’d hoped for with Piranha: dark, funny, high-toned and lowdown. I’d publish thirty issues over the life of Piranha, plus three trade paperbacks. They were my flagship.

Structurally, BSFUC was illustrated fiction: text offset with pictures, although the exact shape of that arrangement varied story to story, as did Dan’s illustration technique. Everything was in service of the story.

Next up was ETC, a science fiction page-turner written by industry vet Tim Conrad. I connected Tim with Michael Davis, an illustrator who was new to the comics and storytelling world. This was a full-color five issue limited series, and the most traditional of my launch titles, in the sense that it was primarily a panel and word balloon presentation, although executed in high style.

The launch was rounded out by Desert Streams, by the delightful Alison Marek. Desert Streams was a quiet first person story of a teenage girl caught in the crossfire of the family drama between her mother and stepfather. Rendered in sensitive pencil, Alison beautifully captures the adolescent search for normalcy.

Structurally, Desert Streams represented yet another approach. The narrative was pictures with text, but in a more orderly, rigorous way than BSFUC. And the shape made everyone batshit insane. It was about half a trade paperback high, a format no had ever used for anything ever. But Alison had finished Desert Streams years earlier, and it was complete when she brought it to me. I didn’t have a single editorial suggestion (I think the only thing we did was typeset the text), and I certainly wasn’t going to demand that she completely redo the book from scratch so it would fit into a predetermined format.

What did this all add up to? I had an ongoing black and white anthology series of illustrated fiction. I had a full-color mini-series set in a science fiction future. And I had a half-sized trade paperback black-and-white kitchen sink drama.

I hoped that what it demonstrated was a commitment to do what was best for each story, and that the focus on story integrity would attract even more excellent work. I hoped that the range on display, of both genre and structure, would demonstrate our devotion to telling stories of any and every kind, attracting even more excellent work.

Or…

It was an incoherent editorial mess without a focus or point of view. I was trying to use three data points to illustrate a larger theme, and that’s only going to work so well. Let’s just say that I had both passionate supporters and passionate detractors, from initial launch all the way through to demise.

Many Unhappy Returns

There was now one last problem to solve in order for Piranha Press to fulfill its destiny. I needed to put the books in bookstores, not just comic book shops. I had been tasked with creating a line of books meant to be attractive to a mainstream, non-comic book readership, and I needed to be where those readers were, which was not in comic book shops.

The flip side of that equation is that by creating an editorial POV focused on attracting non-comic book readers I had, in what appeared to be an intentional act, completely alienated the vast majority of traditional comic book readers. Piranha Press had a devoted readership in comic shops, but it was burdened with both a low floor and a low ceiling. It’s tough to build a successful business on that profile.

That’s when I discovered a quirk of the comic book industry that I somehow had never learned. When bookstores order books they can be returned to the publisher. If you’re old enough to remember used book stores that sold paperbacks with their covers torn off, that’s how it used to be done. Retailers would tear the covers off unsold books and return just the covers to the publishers for credit, proof that a book had been destroyed. Or sold to the secondary market.

But when a comic book shop bought a book, it was forever. Comic books were a non-returnable business, which was an entirely different economic model than bookstores. First I had to convince DC to offer creator’s rights. Now I would have to convince them to sell books on a returnable basis, a thing they had never done before, in order to get my titles in front of the readers for whom they were intended in the first place.

Fuck.

I worked with DC’s marketing department to put together a pilot program in the main Tower Books store in the Village. We brought in an old-fashioned drug store style spinner rack, set it up in the store, and stocked it with both DC and Piranha Press titles. This was long before every bookstore had a dedicated graphic novel section.

All of the metrics from that test pointed to putting my titles into bookstores. I had higher total dollar sales than the DC books, which wasn’t surprising on the one hand, because my books were more expensive. But I also had higher unit sales and higher sell through rates. Those books performed in that setting.

I took those results back to Paul, and he still wasn’t comfortable getting into a returnable business. To be fair, it would have been a non-trivial change, as they had no logistics set up around returns. But still. I’d been hired to create an imprint that would appeal to people who would never go into a comic shop, delivered on that mandate, and proven that I’d done so. It seemed like I’d been set up to fail, and that securing the creator’s rights contract at the beginning just kicked that failure down the road.

Jenette was sympathetic, but unwilling to overrule Paul on what amounted to a core financial decision. What I was told was that the line didn’t have to go into bookstores and build an entirely new audience for DC. They were perfectly comfortable keeping it as an art house project whose benefits were more reputational than financial. They had unquestionably accrued cred for publishing such oddball stuff, and were happy continuing to do so.

I wasn’t, and maybe that was just youth and righteousness speaking. But I’d signed on to create a real business, and babysitting a vanity press didn’t feel right to me. This was my third successful national product launch in the span of about half a dozen years, and there was something about the proposed arrangement that felt like being put out to pasture. Of course, I couldn’t have known at the time that Piranha would be my last product launch.

Feelings aside, I also had the very real practical concern that the long-term commitment to a prestige product would look very different than the commitment to a money-making concern. A profitable imprint justifies its own existence, but a vanity press survives at the whim of its patrons, which I just couldn’t count on.

So I left.

Don’t Let The Domino Hit You On The Way Out

For my last couple of years at DC I’d had an editorial assistant working for me, a bright, talented young woman. When I announced my departure she, naturally, wanted to step into the lead role. She was super competent, but at the time I wasn’t convinced she had the editorial chops to make the transition. I’d given her some top-line editorial tasks, and I felt like her instincts weren’t quite there.

I have no way of knowing if DC would have given her the position if I’d gone to bat for her. But I didn’t. Instead, I made the case that I didn’t think she was quite ready. I failed to account for a number of things in this process. First, how little actual influence I had once I’d lame ducked myself. I felt like I was still collaborating with DC on how to make the line successful after my departure, and they felt that letting me offer opinions didn’t cost them anything.

The other thing I hadn’t accounted for was how much worse the alternatives to my assistant were. They handed the line to Andy Helfer, one of their existing editors. The gap in editorial sensibility between myself and my assistant was a rounding error compared to the gulf that separated Helfer and I.

Andy immediately canceled every project in my pipeline with one exception, Stuck Rubber Baby. Everything else was killed, no matter where it was in the production cycle. Everyone’s rights reverted and they got to keep the money they’d been paid, but none of those projects ever sniffed daylight.

Andy eventually changed the imprint to Paradox Press, for which I was intensely grateful, as one of the only books he published under the Piranha name was a one-off that cast Prince as a superhero.

But that’s what happens when you walk away. It’s not yours any longer.

Obviously, Paradox Press had the same structural headwinds that had caused me to leave Piranha, and sure enough, it was shuttered when it failed to make money. Being put out to pasture with Piranha might have made for a pleasant few years, but I would still have ended up at the glue factory, as I’d predicted.

Next…

About six months before I opted out, DC’s Design Director, Richard Bruning, decided to move on and return to freelancing. He was frustrated by several things. One was that in leading the design department he was spending most days supervising other designers, but never getting much opportunity to create himself. I live with a maker, so I totally understand that. Richard was a crackerjack manager, but it’s the rare maker who actually enjoys managing, and Richard wasn’t one of them.

Richard was even more frustrated by DC’s disinterest in using digital design tools in any part of their workflow. Richard was justifiably concerned that if he stayed at DC the graphic design industry would pass him by as it pivoted to a digital design paradigm, so he and Dean Motter were starting a design studio that was built from the ground up to use digital tools, and did I want to join them?

Richard and I had become work besties over the previous few years. We respected each other’s abilities and collaborated really gracefully together on a number of efforts. If I was going to go into business with anyone it would be Richard. But at the time I was asked, I wasn’t ready. I hadn’t given up on Piranha Press at that point, as I was convinced that I could still make it a success.

When I finally did decide to leave six months later, I took Richard and Dean up on their offer and joined as a partner, responsible for client management and business operations. We were originally Bruning Motter Nevelow, but we gave up that catchy moniker when Dean left. Richard and I embarked on our adventure together as Brainstorm Unlimited.

The Titles

Who’d like a little lowdown on each of the titles I published? No? Well, feel free to stop reading. Although you’ll miss the after-credits outtakes.

The Sinners & Hardcore

Alec Stevens is a writer/artist who brought me The Sinners, an old man’s recounting of his life of sin, torment, and redemption. The story has the feeling of classic literature, while the art is an absolutely gorgeous gloss on German Expressionism, with a side of stained glass. Alec followed that up with Hardcore, the story of a violent skinhead gang, rendered in a similar style.

The Drowned Girl & Nation Of Snitches

One of my best friends in NYC was Jon Hammer, a painter whose work I love to this day. Some of it is still on my walls as we speak. After I got the Piranha gig I casually asked Jon whether he’d ever considered telling a story. He hadn’t, but he went away and came back to me with The Drowned Girl, a fever dream about Dick Shamus, a delusional fellow who thinks he’s a private eye hunting down a clutch of fifth column Nazis bent on world domination. He’s not, but his meaningless exploits are hysterical, and the fact that there’s no real story at the end of the day is audacious. The artwork is spectacular, and the ending is unexpectedly lyrical.

The Drowned Girl wasn’t particularly successful for me financially, not that many of my books were (see above about not selling in bookstores). But I thought it was a roaring success creatively and I published a second Hammer book, A Nation Of Snitches, about, if it can be said to be about anything, a satanic serial killer who murders for Christ. In a twist, both Dorothy and I appear in cameos. The artist photo in The Drowned Girl is of Dorothy dying Jon’s hair, and I have a walk-on in Nation Of Snitches in my urologist’s waiting room.

The Score

Writer Gerard Jones brought me this twisty mystery as a four-part limited series. My recollection is that I connected Gerry with artist Mark Badger, but they might have come as a team. Structurally, The Score is a fairly traditional panel-and-word-balloon presentation, which makes perfect sense for an action story. However, the painterly approach Mark used makes the book look nothing at all like a conventional comic book.

The drama in The Score wasn’t confined to the page. This wasn’t the first project I brought to Jenette that she rejected, but it was the first one I fought her over. She didn’t care for the story’s focus on prostitution, drugs, and violence. I told her she was wrong, that beneath that gritty surface there was a compelling, page-turning mystery with real depth and beautiful art. I kind of insisted. She relented, but in the chilliest manner possible. She looked me in the eye and said, “OK. But you’d better be right.” Ouch!

Spoiler alert: I was right. It turned out beautifully and never came back to bite me. But there was plenty more drama to come. For starters, Jenette scrutinized the scripts and gave notes in a way she didn’t for any of my other projects. From a subject matter perspective, The Score pushed both Jenette’s and DC’s boundaries, and she was vigilant about policing the borders.

Gerry and Mark knew that they were going to get exceptionally close scrutiny, literally down to specific words. This is how I learned that scumbag meant a used condom. I did not know that. That word was excised. In our defense, we did slip in what I’m certain was DC’s first anal sex scene, by way of an artful scene cut. I’m pretty sure Jenette missed it.

My other favorite part of The Score was the development process. The thing about mysteries is that they have to be honest. All of the pieces need to interlock like a clockwork mechanism, and all of the breadcrumbs need to lead to the conclusion. When you’re done reading, all of the clues should be logical and true, even if you didn’t pick up on them at the time.

To achieve that effect I flew Gerry and Mark to New York and put them up for a week. I commandeered a conference room in the office and we hunkered down to plot the story out inch by painstaking inch. We poked holes that needed to be patched, brainstormed solutions, restructured scenes, and tightened that fucker down until it squeaked. I think that’s the most fun I ever had as an editor.

I mentioned earlier that Jenette had demanded a change that almost got the fourth and final issue shitcanned. The cover to issue four featured one of the female characters on the ground being menaced by a man with a knife. Jenette felt that the positioning of the characters suggested a sexual assault, when in fact it was just a good, old-fashioned vanilla assault.

We’d pushed Jenette pretty hard with this project, but this is where she dug her heels in. Still, given that the work was actually owned by Gerry and Mark, her only leverage was refusal to publish. We came up with what I think is an exceptionally clever solution that satisfied all parties, and put a lot of money in Gerry’s and Mark’s pockets, as they negotiated a Batman special as compensation for relenting.

We discussed painting an entirely new cover, but instead we took the rejected cover art, wrapped it in Kraft paper and tape like we were covering up porn, and strategically ripped the wrapper to show enough of the cover underneath to tell the story. We put stamps on the actual artwork and I took the board to the Post Office to get the stamps canceled. It took some convincing before the clerk understood that I didn’t want to mail it, I just wanted the stamps canceled and the art handed back to me.

Honestly, I think it was a better cover because of the changes. But our aggrieved artists would never admit any such thing.

Epicurus The Sage

Bill Messner-Loebs was the writer/artist responsible for one of the towering achievements of the indie comics scene: Journey, The Adventures of Wolverine MacAlistaire. It wasn’t particularly successful, but holy fuck was it good. It told the story of Michigan frontier life in the 19th century, centered on the real Fort Miami. It was a gripping, dramatic, page-turning adventure story built out of the slenderest of elements: weather, personalities, and weather.

I can’t recall now whether I solicited Bill or he solicited me, but his pitch was so oddball I had to say yes. An adventure story/satire about Greek philosophy, featuring Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and our hero, the tolerant, rational Epicurus. Also appearing was Alexander of Macedon as a child, before he was Great. If memory serves, Bill and artist Sam Kieth came to me as a package. Structurally, Epicurus is a traditional panels-and-word-balloons narrative, but Sam’s approach to panel layout experimented with form, using the entire page as a design element. To say nothing of the fact that the artwork is just beautiful.

Epicurus was well received, and I published a second volume. The first was nominated for a Harvey Award for Best Graphic Album.

Gregory

Gregory was the brainchild of writer/artist Marc Hempel, and was an oddball breakout hit for Piranha, nominated for a Harvey and two Eisner awards. It was successful enough that three subsequent volumes came out under the Piranha imprint after I left. Structurally it was panels-and-word-balloons, but with quite a bit more chaos in the page design than that description suggests.

Gregory was the heartwarming story of Gregory, a young boy (lunatic was still on the approved list back then) who lives in a straitjacket in a small cell in an asylum, can barely speak, and has as his only friend a rat named Hermin Vermin, who keeps dying and coming back to life. I’m sure it’s exactly the kind of earnest, personal story Jenette had in mind when she imagined going after the Maus readership.

Despite that description, it is unaccountably charming and utterly original. There’s no way that a few random pages can capture the glory, so I offer up the entirety of A Hello To Arms. You’re welcome.

Why I Hate Saturn

Why I Hate Saturn was a hit for Piranha, winning the Harvey Award for Best Graphic Album of Original Work. Kyle Baker was a gifted writer/artist who had just published his first graphic novel, The Cowboy Wally Show. I don’t remember who approached whom, but Cowboy Wally was hysterical, so it was easy to sign Kyle up for his next book.

Structurally, Saturn is panels and captions, not a word balloon to be found. It’s a screwball comedy with hipster Anne, Anne’s platonic BFF Ricky, and Anne’s sister Laura, who thinks she’s the Queen of the Leather AstroGirls of Saturn. It’s mostly talking heads, but the dialogue has a crisp serve-and-volley rhythm that’s seductive. It is very, very funny.

Saturn was a tricky book to produce. At first blush it looks like a black-and-white book with a gray tint, but it’s actually two-color printing: black and a PMS-match brown for the wash. The brown was a completely separate overlay that was turned into a second plate, so there was no way to see exactly what it looked like until the press was running.

This was one of those occasions where I went up to our printer in Quebec to color correct on press. Piranha’s print runs were always minuscule compared to DC’s, so they always ran afterwards. I’d park myself in their waiting room and pass out until summoned, usually somewhere around two or three in the morning.

At which point I’d have to leap into high-functioning cognition, as I had a tiny window to make corrections. “Bring up the red in the center, tone down the yellow on the right…” The presses were so fast and my runs were so short that if I dithered, the run would be over. If I wanted the books to look good, I had moments to make the corrections. Thank goodness Saturn wasn’t my first press check. That two-color thing was complicated, but I think the final product looked great.

Our rep at Ronalds told me this great story about Frank Miller and his colorist Lynn Varley doing color correction on the first issue of The Dark Knight. They tweaked and adjusted and tweaked again until they were satisfied with the color, and announced that the print run could now commence. But the press had been running the entire time, and the run was actually ending. The last couple of hundred copies that came off the press looked exactly like Frank and Lynn wanted, and the rest got sold anyway. Even with a large run, you want to make press corrections fast.

Actually completing Saturn was a challenge. Kyle always had a ton of side gigs, and was relentless in requesting extensions from me so that he could complete other work. I was generous in granting them until I wasn’t. I had to get Saturn on the production calendar at some point, which meant Kyle had to actually finish the book.

Did I say “You’re running out of friends?” I did, because he was. He was very young, and was developing a reputation for burning editors. That’s not good, and he needed to understand that the juggling he was trying to pull off had consequences. But I wasn’t expecting this, which took up a full page in the September 1991 issue of National Lampoon.

I will confess that I was hurt by it, which was, obviously, the point. I went so far as to discuss it with a lawyer, who thankfully talked me off the ledge. But I am incapable of finding it funny.

Sparrow

Desert Streams was pretty well received, so Alison brought me Sparrow. This one hadn’t been sitting in her drawer and was created from scratch. It utilizes a text-and-illustrations approach similar to Desert Streams, but with a full-sized format and a fresh start Alison had the freedom to experiment more with the relationship between words and pictures, creating a more fluid reading experience. Sparrow tells the story of Jumpy McNabb, an acknowledged bad boy at only five years old, and looks at what it takes to twist a child into that shape.

Mars On Earth

Mars On Earth is a story about a down-on-his-luck bowling hustler, written by Damon Cardwell, a down-on-his-luck bowling hustler. I was familiar with Glenn Barr’s work through, I’m pretty sure, Juxtapoz magazine, and I thought his style would be a good fit for Damon’s story. They were fireworks together. Mars is straight up illustrated fiction, no sequential storytelling at all.

This was one of my favorite books to edit, because I just loved the long calls with Damon going over the latest script. Mars is about 95% autobiographical, and it’s not the 5% you think. Every time I’d say, “OK, that part’s made up,” he’d say, “Nope, that happened.” The thing about the adrenaline shot? True story.

Possibly my single most favorite moment as an editor came near the end of the process. A climactic scene is set in a Vegas strip club Damon identified as The Crazy Horse. I said, “Damon. That strip club you describe isn’t The Crazy Horse. It’s The Crazy Horse II.” There was a pause on the other end of the line, and he finally said, “You’re right. That is The Crazy Horse II. How did you know that?” “I’m an editor, Damon. It’s my job to know shit.”

What If This Were Heaven, Wouldn’t That Be Hell & The Wasteland

I published three trade paperbacks by the BSFUC boys. What If This Were Heaven, Wouldn’t That Be Hell was three original stories: Lester, The Lonesome Druid, Even Bluebirds Go To Hell, and The Night They Missed The Donkey Show. The genesis of this book was, I think, that the stories were either too short or too long to fit the BSFUC format, so we collected them as a volume.

Donkey Show was a largely truthful recounting of the evening I shanghaied a group of my creators (names withheld for obvious reasons) from the San Diego Comic-Con to search for the mythical donkey show in Tijuana. We never found it, thank goodness, but it turned into a great story. Dave made up the part about the inflatable Elvises, but I swear everything else in the story actually happened.

The Wasteland was a collection of their single panel cartoons, which had initially so endeared them to me. And A Cotton Candy Autopsy collected the first two stories about the out of control clowns, Anybody’s Freak from issue #1, Bingo And Addy’s Escape from issue #13, and a brand-new story to close the trilogy, The Resurrection Of Joey Punchinello. I got to quote a Penn & Teller endorsement on the back cover: “As ugly children we found this book extremely beautiful.” Also, from an MTV review, when that was a thing: “Makes Heathers look like Police Academy.” That’s a great quote.

Stuck Rubber Baby

Stuck Rubber Baby is, without question, the book I’m proudest of, even though my name doesn’t appear in it anywhere. It is tender, fierce, and important. It’s the kind of book that makes a difference.

Howard Cruse was the king of independent gay comics. He couldn’t be the king of mainstream gay comics, because there wasn’t any such thing. His strips Wendel and Barefootz were grounded in the post-Stonewall gay community, and the collected editions were a testament to his creative vision.

Howard had begun thinking of a longer form project, but his art style is slow and painstaking, so he didn’t think he’d be able to earn enough from a book to cover the time it took to create it. A friend urged him to reach out to me. I was familiar with his work and more than receptive. I worked with Howard to put together a pitch that would deliver an advance against royalties adequate to cover his estimated time frame of two years for creation of this 201 page behemoth.

Sadly, Howard underestimated the time by a significant factor. It took him four years to complete his two year project. He wound up auctioning off pages of original artwork, before they were actually done, to make ends meet.

Stuck Rubber Baby is a frankly brilliant exploration of a Southern lad coming to grips with being gay during the civil rights movement. It’s the intersection of those two strands, and the way the main character comes to better understand both himself and his place, that’s so effective.

Howard grew up in Birmingham at that time, so SRB was often taken for thinly veiled autobiography, but it wasn’t. It was based on his lived experience, and has some elements in common with his personal history, but the story itself is just that. A story, enriched and deepened by its author’s life. Like “real” fiction.

I loved the editorial process for this book. Howard was telling a complicated story using a denser, more fluid panel narrative than he had in the past, so everything was new to him. Being that outside set of eyes, saying “This is working beautifully, this isn’t coming across, my eye isn’t going where you want it to…,” helping to make the final story the very best it could be, was enormously gratifying. Howard was an open-minded collaborator, always willing to listen to suggestions. And even adopt them, when he agreed. As it should be.

I left Piranha when the book was only about 25% complete, which freaked Howard out. He was not looking for a change in editorial horses midstream. He trusted me, and didn’t want to have to start over with someone who hadn’t been there from the beginning. He knew I worked for both his and the story’s best interests, so as part of my exit from DC we agreed that I’d continue to edit SRB on a freelance basis.

For reasons I don’t recall, that arrangement ended before the book was completely done, and he was handed off to one of Andy’s editors. There wasn’t a lot of risk, as he was probably 80% finished. All the hard work of plotting was completed, and Howard had a firm hand on page layout and design by that point, so the change didn’t really impact the finished product.

What surprised me, on publication, was that I was given zero credit as the editor of the book. I still don’t know what that was about. I have an idea or two, but they fall under the heading of rank speculation. But that’s just me whinging. The book itself was everything I’d hoped for, whether my name was on it or not. It swept the awards the year it was published, deservedly winning for Best Graphic Novel at the Eisners, the Harveys, and the UK Comic Art Awards.

Howard did an exceptionally detailed series of blog posts about the creation of SRB, but his site was taken down after he died in 2019. Given DC’s snub on credits, this was practically the only place where my role was properly acknowledged, although Howard did thank me in the credits of the book itself. Thank goodness for the Wayback Machine, so Howard’s posts are still available.

The Elvis Mandible

The Elvis Mandible gave The Drowned Girl a run for its money as the weirdest thing I published. Writer/artist Douglas Michael uncovers the long buried truth: the jawbone of the King wields enormous power. Hopefully the CIA can keep it away from the commies. This one is more panel-and-caption than panel-and-word balloon, with a delicate gray wash that makes the line art glow. Hilariously, DC’s legal department required the cover disclaimer, so I made it look as much like a joke as I could get away with.

The Laziest Secretary In The World

Jennifer Waters brought this to me as a straight up novella, and I connected her to Gil Ashby, whose work I knew from Denys Cowan. This was pure illustrated fiction, and was, I think, Gil’s first book. The story is about the titular Latoya, who would rather scam than work. Madcap hijinks ensue when she agrees to marry a Korean businessman so he can get American citizenship.

Invaders From Home

John Blair Moore was the writer/artist behind this absurdist, mostly-based-on-a-true-story (I think he made up the talking duck) tale of a man falling apart at the prospect of having a child. Years later when we moved to St. Louis, I learned that John, and the now-grown daughter in question, were residents, and we struck up a renewed relationship. This is theoretically panels-and-word balloons, but with a loose, shambolic approach to page layout that echoes the protagonist’s mental state.

The Hiding Place

The Hiding Place is where the last member of a species facing extinction goes to live out its days. A young boy stumbles on it and discovers an eco-disaster in the making. Charlie Boatner came to me with this story, and I hooked him up with illustrator Steve Parkhouse, whose whimsical, charming style brings the story to life. Steve was an established industry vet, whose Wikipedia page doesn’t even mention The Hiding Place. This was told in a fairly straightforward panel-and-word-balloon structure.

But Wait, There’s More…

I’ll close with a few items that I couldn’t shoehorn into the above. Enjoy.

Real Life Funnies

The Village Voice ran a weekly strip called Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies from the 70s to the 90s. Its tag lines were “100% overheard” and “All dialogue guaranteed verbatim.” I really enjoyed Stan’s work, and reached out to see if he had something in mind more long-form than a weekly strip. He did not, but we hit it off and I enjoyed his company. He was an excellent conversationalist, but I was unaware at the time the extent to which he was listening. Real Life Funnies was reportage, and Stan was a reporter. Always.

He wound up doing two strips about us. One was about the dissolution of Gambit (which I sadly can’t find a copy of), and then there was this, which actually appeared in AdWeek. It doesn’t entirely live up to the “All dialogue guaranteed verbatim” claim, but I understand where creative license makes the strip better.

Phoenix Rising

It was a simpler time. Men watched women take off their clothes, and women paid their way through college. One of the projects that got killed when I left Piranha was a science fiction story whose technical consultant was a graduate physics student by day, stripper by night. We had a story conference one evening at a club where she danced, in between numbers.

So it was not abnormal for our crew to gather at a strip club for drinks and gawks. My oldest friend, Bruce, had been telling me about a gorgeous new dancer at one of the clubs whose nom de peau was Phoenix. After weeks of buildup, I was finally able to join Bruce and our other friends at her club one night.

Phoenix lived up to the hype. She was, as advertised, a goddess. I asked her to join our table after her dance, and she did. The round of introductions involved sharing what we all did for a living. When it was my turn I offered up that I published comic books.

Phoenix said she loved comic books and I asked her what her favorites were. She said that she liked really obscure stuff that I’d probably never heard of. When prompted, she told me that her favorite comic book was Beautiful Stories For Ugly Children. I told her that was one of the books I published, and her eyes got wide.

“Are you Mark Nevelow?”

I swear, I dined out on that story for years.

Weirdly, sometime after that I was at a convention, enjoying the local scene, when another stripper who called herself Phoenix confessed that BSFUC was her favorite comic, although she couldn’t name check me.

I came back to New York confident that I’d surgically identified Piranha’s target market: strippers named Phoenix. Of course, I couldn’t share that insight with corporate without exposing my expense account, so I kept it to myself.

Sir Pranksalot

I am not, temperamentally, a prankster. Too much planning, too much to potentially go south, not enough payoff. But that doesn’t mean, when circumstances demand, that I can’t rise to the occasion.

Paul Levitz had an uncanny knack for spotting the one typo or error whenever one of my books was published. He’d call me into his office to congratulate me on whatever had just come out and open it casually. Invariably to the spread with whatever error might have slipped through.

I was convinced that he got an advance copy air shipped to him from the printer, before the case got to the library*, just so he could pore through it ahead of time and locate the error. He was too consistent and too cheerful for it not to have been intentional.

One day Paul escalates this from a gentle poking to an actual prank. He had the printer bind a Flash cover on one of my books, then called me into his office when the issue hit the library. He let me go for about ten minutes thinking there’d been a bindery error, and that my entire run had shipped with the wrong cover. After watching me hyperventilate for ten minutes, he admitted it was a prank.

Revenge is unquestionably a dish best served cold, so I planned my revenge carefully and took my time putting my plot in motion. The only people who knew what I was planning were Jenette, because I’m not actually stupid, and Richard Bruning, because he was my co-conspirator.

At the time, DC’s most popular book was Legends of the Dark Knight: Gothic, by Grant Morrison and Klaus Janson. The next issue coming up was #6. I don’t recall the exact numbers, but there was a massive print run for this book.

I contacted our printer in Canada and told him to pull the black plate at the end of the run and bind 100 copies. Those were to be cased and shipped to the DC library like they were the actual books. To describe him as reluctant is a massive understatement. I had to swear on a stack of bibles that the prank had been approved by Jenette.

But I couldn’t let the library find the “mistake” and raise the alarm. The library often took multiple days to open cases and distribute them, so the book would have hit the stands by the time the library cracked the case. If there was really a massive printing error, it would have been raised days before the library found it.

I had one of my distributor friends call DC’s Marketing VP, Bruce Bristow, the morning the book hit the street. The call came from outside DC, so it seemed completely legit. Bruce got a call saying “Have you seen Legends #6? How the hell did this leave the printer?”

So Bruce runs down to the library, cracks the case, and finds what appears to be an entire run that’s been printed without the black plate. He grabs a handful and runs to Levitz’s office, and all hell breaks loose. 

It was beautiful, like someone had set a bomb off at HQ. People were running back and forth, production was called in, marketing was called in, and everyone was running around chasing their tails. After an hour, Jenette made me confess, so something useful could be accomplished that day. Who knows how long it would have gone on if I hadn’t pulled the plug?

Jenette, to her credit, denied any knowledge of the prank, claiming I’d gone rogue. Paul, to what should have been his shame, insisted that he hadn’t been fooled and was just playing along. Sore loser.

I took a copy to the next Comic-Con, and as artists stopped by the booth I encouraged them to ink a page for sport.

I still have a stack of those books. They should be valuable in a collectibles-driven market, like the Inverted Jenny upside-down airplane stamp, but no one even knows they exist.

Until now.

Silver

Kotagede has been a silversmithing center for hundreds of years, dating back to the onset of the Mataram empire in the 16th century. They are known, as they have been all along, for incredibly delicate and detailed filigree work. Impossible to count, and no one seems to have made the effort, but the eyeball test suggests easily more than 100 silversmiths just in Kotagede, let alone the rest of Yogyakarta.

Our first stop was Bagus Silver, a little shop we just wandered into at random. It was the first silver we’d seen, and we were quite taken.

Then we found the big kahuna, HS Silver, a shop that has been operating since the 1950s. Part of their manufacturing operations were onsite, which they walked you through, which was pretty entertaining. But the shop was the highlight. The quality of their fine filigree work was head and shoulders above the other shops we visited.

They’re a nearly vertical operation, short of actually owning a silver mine. The raw silver comes from Western Java, but after that HS does everything else. They smelt it themselves, so they can control the mix, adding just 2% copper into the silver. The highest government designation is .925, but HS silver is 98%.

They cast their own silver bars, and extrude it into the thin sheets they use to create fine wire of different gauges. The frames are slightly heavier than the interiors, and they even use silver powder to solder the joins.

It doesn’t seem like human hands should be able to do anything both this precise and tiny.

Another level of precision that seems ever so slightly inhuman.

The massive showroom, unsurprisingly, was the standout. The range and the quality were truly impressive.

As is well documented by scientists, tourism is an extractive process, and we extracted happily and thoroughly.

The Taman Sari Tourist Village

You can enter the Tourist Village from the street, but the heart of it is right off the Taman Sari Water Palace. It’s a residential complex that has some complex relationship to Yogyakarta’s Sultan that we couldn’t quite tease out. Some people seem to live rent free in exchange for using their homes as shops, and the Sultan wanted to take some of it back to create luxury housing but the peasants revolted. All told to us anecdotally in broken English, so details are hard to pin down. Wikipedia was, sadly, of no use.

Regardless, the village has quite a few little shops spread about, all, for the most part, combination workroom and retail. We got to watch people work and then buy things from them. Buying things is what we do best.

Waroeng Loekis

The very first shop after entering from the Water Palace is Waroeng Loekis, full of outrageous paintings and painted t-shirts from a painter and his wife. Really lovely people, and work that’s whatever the superlative of vibrant is. Vibrating? When I came back with Nef she had to get a t-shirt, too. Different art, but we’ll definitely have to avoid wearing them at the same time. Or not.

Voice of Jogja

The shop right next door was also t-shirts and prints, but it couldn’t have been more different. Here, the designer took traditional characters from the Ramayana and did them up as classic comic book superheroes, à la John Buscema or Bernie Wrightson. This is a documented sweet spot for us, the modern twist on traditional techniques and motifs. The artist’s goal was to recontextualize the old stories for a younger generation, to make them relevant and keep them a part of current culture, not just the dusty past. Check!

Of course, I bought a couple of shirts. They heat transfer on premises, so I picked the size and shirt color and they did the transfer while we were there. I picked two that focused on the Punakawan characters the Indonesians inserted into their tellings of both the Ramayana and Mahabharata. They decided the stories wasn’t funny enough, so they added four characters for comic relief. Semar, parent of the other three Punakawan: Gareng, Petruk, and Bagong.

Diva Galleri

Our final stop was a little shop we found by accident. It looked like a coffee shop from the outside, advertising Kopi Luwak, but we’d already done the civet dance, so we were prepared to pass it by. But a peek inside revealed… puppets! And masks! And batik paintings!

We walked away with an absolutely stellar Wayang puppet, Kamajaya, the god of love. He came as part of a matched pair with his wife, Kamaratih, but he was a little expensive so we split the lovers up. He’s made of painted water buffalo leather and his central support is a piece of carved water buffalo horn. The shop proprietor made all of the puppets.

Wayang Kulit Gift Shop

We went to a performance of the shadow puppets, the Wayang Kulit. Or that’s what we thought. As it happened, through a little cross-cultural miscommunication, we saw the Wayang Orang instead, a masked dance. No puppets. But the gift shop at the performance space had the puppets, so we spent quality time there pre-show.

We didn’t understand at first that Sulistyo, the enthusiastic guy showing us around, was actually the master puppet maker. He made all the puppets for the Wayang Kulit and all the puppets in the shop. We thought he was just really into it, but it was great to pick up pieces directly from the creator. I felt better about separating Kamajaya and Kamaratih, knowing that we’d created space for our very own Krishna, the god of protection, compassion, tenderness, and love. That’s two gods of love! In one house! Three, counting me.

Lurik

While batik is the star of the show in Java, there’s a completely separate weaving tradition called lurik, which simply means stripes. There’s a hotbed of it in the Bantul neighborhood, right next to where we’re staying in Kotagede, so we massed the troops for a field trip. The goal: two workshops and a store.

Dibyo Lurik

Our first stop was Dibyo Lurik, a small workshop with a single weaver onsite. They work with other weavers, which they’d have to, as this one poor woman could produce only seven meters of fabric in a full day.

After marinating in batik’s riot of color and pattern, the austere beauty of the lurik felt like a palette cleanser. I wasn’t expecting to be enchanted by subtlety, but there you go. The very definition of travel being broadening.

I checked prices as we were looking through the goods, and reported that the lurik was 350,000 rupiah/meter, about $20. Not an unreasonable cost for artisanal hand-loomed fabric, but a substantial amount regardless. It turns out that I couldn’t process what I’d actually been told, which was 35,000 rupiah/meter, because $2/meter for this fabric was literally incomprehensible. We loaded up.

Tenun Lurik “Kurnia”

Our next stop was what seemed to be the largest lurik producer in Bantul. Where Dibyo Lurik had a single loom and a very tired woman, Tenun Lurik “Kurnia” (tenun means weaving) had several rooms full of active looms.

The work at Kurnia was even more beautiful than what we saw at Dibyo.

Ardjo Lurik

Our final stop was a little shop, Ardjo Lurik. The shopkeeper was napping when we arrived, but got up and opened up for us. She doesn’t weave lurik herself, but uses what’s produced in the neighborhood for her own creations.

Baskets

We’d birddogged a shop called Mercia Natural Baskets, but what we didn’t know was that it was in the center of an entire basket district. We went to visit a store and had fallen into a field trip, all unbeknownst.

The basketry came in all shapes and sizes, but the most spectacular form was, hands down, lampshades. They existed in every combination of refined vs. rough, symmetric vs, asymmetric, organic vs. abstract. The range was dizzying, and the saddest part was that there was not a single piece of a scale that permitted bringing it home. Oh, we discussed it, we strategized, we planned. And while theoretically possible, we abandoned our schemes and settled in to just enjoying them for themselves, and not as potential loot.

Still. We are Olympic-level looters, and it hurts to be thwarted. We are bad at unrequited.

Here’s an overview of the extraordinary range.

And some standout individual pieces.

Glass

Nestled into the basket district was a lone, dusty outpost of the glass arts. We’d seen their specialty before, at a shop in Ubud in Bali. Glass vessels are slumped over natural wood so the two pieces fit together perfectly. It’s a lovely effect, but what we saw in Bali was much more modest in scale, more tumblers-on-coasters than the sculptural pieces on display at Deco Glass.

Parri Genuine Stingray Shagreen

We’d gone to several of the small exhibitions ancillary to ArtJog, Yogya’s annual art show, and this one found us out in the hinterlands at an eco-spa and restaurant called Yabbiekayu. Nef found a table with little stingray leather bracelets, which turned out to be the merch outlet of a real store. It’s not like we had options at that point. We had to go.

First, let it be said that the stingray skins are ethically sourced. They’re not endangered, nor are they harvested for their skin. They are fished for meat, and before the owner/designer had his epiphany to use them for luxury leather, the skins were just trashed. So, recycling. Super green.

Whew! That’s a lot. It’s one of the reasons we’ve found Indonesia so compelling. In our ongoing game of Would You Live Here, Indonesia gets an upvote for its accessible language, it’s ridiculously low cost of living, its friendly folk, it’s delightful beaches, and it’s rich cultural offerings. We’ve loved Indonesia, and we only just scratched its surface.

So I was surprised to learn that betel nut, an addictive, cancer-causing stimulant, was legal. Obviously, I had to try a legal drug. Assuming that I could locate it. I thought there might be the equivalent of hookah bars for tourists interested in walking on the wild side, but that was just a fantasy. I’d have to assemble my own ingredients. Thankfully, my reprobate older sister, Nef, served as my trustworthy wingman. I wouldn’t have to fly alone.

Betel nut is chewed in a home-rolled pouch called a quid, the side effects being euphoria, alertness (which I’m pretty sure is a euphemism for tweaked), red stained teeth, and cancer of the face mouth. Sign us up! Although to be fair, we were in no danger of doing enough betel nut to suffer anything but the alertness and euphoria.

There are three main ingredients to a betel nut quid: the betel nut itself, which is the fruit of the Areca palm, a touch of slaked lime (calcium hydroxide, and if you’re wondering where ancient peoples shopped for their chemistry ingredients, it can be made from seashells), and a betel nut palm leaf to wrap it in.

You remove the nut from the husk and cut it up. Take a pinch of the slaked lime and spread it on the leaf. Before rolling it up, connoisseurs add spices like cardamom, nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves. The slaked lime has a chemical interaction with the betel nut that jacks up the stimulant effects, but the spices are strictly for flavor.

OK, time to shop. We were headed to Pasar Beringharjo, the downtown traditional market, for some other spices, and I bet that we’d be able to find the ingredients. That turned out to be harder than we’d thought. Unlike most of the traditional markets we’ve been in, where everything stocked is displayed, there were shops with backstock in Beringharjo, so the ingredients we were looking for weren’t visible. Not, to be fair, that we were 100% on what our shopping list even looked like.

We found a large spice shop and I whipped out Google Translate. Which rendered betel nut as pinang in Indonesian. Blank expression. After some back and forth, I stumbled on the correct word, which is sirih. She dove under a counter and brought up a multi-kilo bag of dried betel nuts. I asked whether the dried nut would work, and having figured out why I wanted it, she returned with the fresh stuff.

Now I had to somehow ask for slaked lime, but she was on to me, so that part was easier. A baggie of calcium hydroxide appeared, along with a pantomimed rendition of how to prepare it for use. Next stop, betel leaves, or daun sirih, as the locals say. Our spice merchant, however, was not a one-stop-shop, so we set off in search of the fabled leaf. We couldn’t find it in Berinharjo, which is a very big market.

A few days later Nef and I walked over to our neighborhood market, Pasar Kotagede, asked for daun sirih, and found the leaves almost instantly. The hooch vendor offered us a large bundle for 100,000 rupiah, about $6, but when we asked for four leaves she just gave them to us. We’d done it! We had our kit and were ready to go on our first Indonesian drug-fueled bender. It’s what big sisters are for. I think.

To be fair, the betel leaves may just be a convention and not a requirement. They don’t appear to offer anything chemically necessary to the process, and any chewable leaf might have done the trick. But it was nice to know that we had everything the recipe required.

Lacking cardamom and the like, we dressed our first quid with rendang seasoning and honey. It still tasted excrescent. We chewed for about 15-20 seconds and spit it out. I had a medication once that my doctor said would be absorbed more efficiently if I chewed the tablet, and it tasted kind of like that. My doctor was an idiot, by the way. I think he just enjoyed telling me to do stupid shit.

So Nef and I sat around looking at each other, doing that “Do you feel it yet?” thing. We admitted, after a bit, that there was a mild buzz, sort of like a Benadryl. Nothing, though, that you’d risk cancer and addiction for. Not when you could just chop and snort a Benadryl.

Many years ago, early 20s, San Francisco, in our LSD days. We’d gotten a new batch that no one in our group had tried yet, so I agreed to be our first guinea pig. My friend Bob came over to mind me with my roommate Stav, and I took a liberal three hits to start the evening’s festivities.

This was our first experience with windowpane acid, little gel tabs for you whippersnappers. All of our previous experience had been with blotter, little squares of paper infused with psychedelic wonder. You don’t savor blotter. You give it a quick chew and swallow. So that’s what I did with the windowpane. After about 45 minutes I felt myself edge slightly into tripping and then recede.

Obviously pretty weak acid, so I took another two tabs, to see if I could get any action. This time, I left them to melt under my tongue. Which, I later discovered, is what you’re supposed to do with windowpane. Approximately a nanosecond after Round Two dissolved all five hits came on at once, like a freight train straight from the 60s. One minute, standing in the kitchen and talking like a person, the next minute mute and supine.

Bob and Stav sprang into well-trained action, shuffling me off to lie under the covers in my darkened bedroom. Then, realizing that they had a long haul ahead of them, they did the only rational thing: baked marijuana brownies, so they could be really high, too. Side note to my side note, they couldn’t get the oven lit, so they took the tray of brownies to our downstairs neighbors and asked them to bake them for our party, since our oven was broken. Our downstairs neighbors were three lovely Catholic nuns, who I am certain, that evening, we consigned to hell.

Bob and Stav knew better than to leave me fully unattended, but I was enjoying an actual out-of-body experience in my darkened room, so their presence didn’t register at first. When I finally noticed them I articulated the desire to speak to Dorothy, who was deployed to the Ashland Shakespeare Festival during our Gap Year. I think I articulated that desire by croaking “Dorothy” until they dialed her up.

I believe my intention had been to communicate to Dorothy the truly cosmic wonderland I was inhabiting, but the only sounds I could force my mouth to make were “I… can’t…” I repeated that several times before Dorothy, more than a little alarmed, asked me to give the phone back to Stav. I think she told her not to leave me alone for a second, lest I choke on my own tongue and die.

The story has a happy ending, of course. Bob and Stav ate the brownies, and I eventually came back down to earth. Later, we discovered that the acid was unusually strong, 300 micrograms/dose. I had accidentally ingested a gargantuan 1,500 micrograms of prime LSD. And lived to tell the tale. That tremor is just nerves.

My point being, I felt like I had the earned authority when I turned to Nef and said, “Dude. We underdosed.”

Further research, which, I suppose, might have been better executed before attempting our first betel nut experience, indicated that a) we might not have kept the quid in our mouths long enough, and b) we might not have used the ripest nut. Apparently, you’re supposed to chew the quid to start the process and then tuck it between cheek and gum for about five minutes. To really activate the cancer. As opposed to our method, which was to chew the fuck out of the quid for about 15 seconds until it dissolved into a gruesome mouthful of paste that screamed SPIT. ME. OUT. NOW!

We vowed to do better. Next time.

Next Time

As it happened, our next attempt fell on the seventh deathiversary of Nef’s husband Alan. There was a man who knew his way around a third-world bender, so there was something poetic about paying homage to his spirit in an exploit he’d have happily joined.

The interwebs still failed to divulge any meaningful dosage information. I even looked on Reddit. That’s turning over all the rocks. It felt like we needed to hunt down an old toothless, red-gummed man and pay him to be our trip guide. Absent that, we did the next best thing. We guessed. What could possibly go wrong?

This time, like the acid trip, we took a little chew and tucked the quid into our cheek pouches with a timer set for five minutes. After which Nef confessed to a buzz and I felt nothing. To be fair, I usually feel nothing, but I was hoping to feel something. Anything.

After about half an hour Nef suggested that, as I outweighed her by a hefty margin, perhaps I hadn’t had enough. She prepared another quid for me, which I readily agreed to, deeply committed as I am to never learning anything from my previous mistakes. Hey, you make your choices and I’ll make mine.

And… nothing. After all that, not even a Benadryl buzz. For me, at least. Nef: “I feel good.” Me: “My tongue stings.” Dorothy thinks I exist on “such a high plane of Wow” that nothing can get in, but that doesn’t explain my inclination towards my best friends, the opiates. Still, I’m not tempted to smuggle the rest of the betel nuts back to the US, so it’s not like there’s no upside.

And somehow, despite heroic efforts, I avoided fully recreating my acid overdose. Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat the journey, if not the destination.

The Last Laugh

As a coda to this experience, as if it was in need, we had tickets for a traditional dance performance at the Prambanan site the night before Nef’s departure, and had made arrangements with the driver who had taken us to Sadranan beach to get us there and back.

I’d reached out to him prior to see if he knew where to get betel nuts, as drivers are notorious for knowing where the contraband is to be found, and he told me his brother could procure some for us. He got back to us a few days later to say he’d been successful and to find out how many kilos we wanted.

None. We wanted none kilos. We wanted a few nuts to try, not kilos to set up an international operation. I explained this, and got no response for several weeks, when, while checking in to confirm our ride to the performance, he mentioned that he had our betel nuts in hand. And yes, they had been procured and paid for.

The tab came to 35,000 rupiah, about $2, so I obviously agreed to reimburse him even though he’d given us no clue this transaction was even occurring and we’d already had our betel nut experience. I’m certainly not going to grind a guy who was just trying to be helpful, despite his poor communication skills, over $2.

When I shared this saga with Nef, she smacked her hand on the table and said, “And that’s exactly how I got two donkeys in Greece.”

After much searching, we found Amed, a quiet beach community in East Bali known for its accessible snorkeling. It’s one of the few places on the planet where you can walk into the water and swim a reef, perfect for those of us not up to the rigors of, you know, actual swimming.

Technically, I am a NAUI-certified scuba diver. Realistically, I received my certification when I was twelve and haven’t exactly kept up. I have a memory of being competent in the water, but now I can’t quite figure out what prevents drowning. Are you supposed to just naturally float? Tread water the entire time? Swim uphill to keep from sinking? I see people do it, and it’s just baffling.

Bali Fun Facts, or The Parade of Ignorance

Bali is not a country. It’s an island in Indonesia. Bali is not one of the Spice Islands. They are also a part of Indonesia, but you can’t name a single one of them. While Indonesia as a whole is Muslim, hosting the largest Muslim population on the planet, Bali is Hindu and marches to its own offbeat drummer.

While Bali is a single island, the nation of Indonesia is home to… well, nobody knows exactly how many islands. Everyone has agreed to the oddly specific count of 17,508, while also agreeing that the correct number could be anywhere between 13,000 and 25,000. The count of inhabited islands is… about 6,000. Or 922. Or 10,000. Is mystery. Wrapped in rising sea levels.

In an unforeseen plot twist, Bali and Indonesia were not primarily fucked by the French. Say hello to the Dutch East India Company. Although Napoleon did have control of Indonesia for five years, because if there’s one thing the French can’t stand it’s being shut out of fuckery. Not to be overlooked, the US supported an Indonesian dictator because he was anti-communist. Did not see that coming.

In fact, our Southeast Asia tour has been a cavalcade of nations willing to overlook American sins in the service of being gracious to American visitors. I get the self interest of tourism-based economies, but most of the tourists we’ve seen seem to be European or Australian. They could easily shun Americans without tanking their tourism industries. So, points for being nicer than we are.

On the other hand, there’d be no tourist economy anywhere on the planet if they locked out the citizens of countries that had fucked them. Easier just to open their doors and our wallets. It’s like reparations.

I still say they’re nicer than we are, but that’s an admittedly low bar to clear.

Our Homestay

Our homestay in Bali feels like we’re living in a jungle next to a farm. Or farms. I think that’s because we’re living in a jungle next to a farm. Or farms. The grounds here are lush and full of tropical flora as well as a rich ecosystem of birds, bugs, reptiles, and cats. The farm(s) next door is (are) chockablock with chickens, roosters, pigs, geese, cows, and goats. Who all appear to be early risers.

And that thing about roosters crowing at dawn is bullshit. They go off all day and night.

Here’s a panorama of the grounds, with the morning soundtrack. It’s almost like you’re here with us.

Breaking Waves In The Hot Sun

Our homestay is across the street from the beach, a mere five minute walk to the water. The beachfront is littered with resorts with swimming pools and palapas for shade. The closest one to us is the Seamount, which has an outdoor shower for cleaning the black sand from our feet and a ridiculously warm pool.

Our first day here we were good citizens and paid for a day pass to the pool and the lounges, 50,000 rupiah ($3) each. Now we feel like regulars. We walk to the beach, swim, come back through Seamount’s pool area, wash our feet and rinse the salt off. Maybe we take a quick dip in the pool, maybe not. A couple of times we’ve drafted behind a group of guests moving from beach to pool and just blended in. But there are 24 hours in a day, and we did buy a day pass, so we figure we’re good until we’ve used up all 24 hours.

The beach in Amed is blessed with beautiful, volcanic black sand beaches. There isn’t a definitive count of black sand beaches around the world, but it’s a countable number. 20? 40? So it’s our first, and an unexpected treat.

The beach here is known for, aside from the black sands, a few things. First, it’s known for its very, very calm, clear water. The surf here ranges from pacific like a sheet of glass to adorable Shetland breakers with tubes scaled for a Surfer Barbie. Perfect for just bobbing. We’ve found that a morning bob is dramatically enhanced by an afternoon bob. There is no shortcut to this kind of knowledge. You just have to put in the hard work.

The other thing it’s known for, as noted earlier, is how close the coral is to the shore. There are multiple spots right on our beach where you can walk into the water with a mask on and be swimming in the equivalent of an aquarium in short order, no boat necessary. We’d read that about Amed, which is why we landed here, but that scarcely prepares you for the experience.

Unsurprisingly, given the quantity of black volcanic sand on the beach, there is a volcano nearby, Mount Agung, which looms over both beach and town. Its last major eruption started in 2017 and ended in 2019. So, yeah. Active.

Amed is a traditional beach village with a main drag following the shoreline. Officially, Amed is Bali’s second largest city, but they got there by cheating. They added six other adjacent villages to Amed and called it Amed. Right. The Greater Metropolitan Amed Conurbation. But Amed proper, pretty small.

The Neighborhood

Most of the shops along Main Street are dive shops, small restaurants (warungs), spas, and tour providers, with a smattering of minimarts, produce stalls, and retail sarong and authentic! cowrie bracelet shops. The closest thing to a central market is in a village three kilometers away. There’s not much by way of art or handicrafts or culture, which is fine. We’re here for the fresh fish, both as companions and entrées.

There’s plenty of neighborhood just off Main Street. Walking the residential streets provides a beautiful window into daily life here, as well as gorgeous views of the jungle vistas.

One of the things we noticed is that vernacular residential architecture is structured around compounds with multiple, discrete buildings. A kitchen, a common room for dining and gathering, a residence/bedroom for each couple, and a temple for the ancestors.

We obviously weren’t invited into anyone’s home, so the most we were able to see from the street were the temples. Echoing the larger compound, each temple had specific altars for each ancestor. Designs ranged from humble to ornate, but all of them were well cared for and well maintained. The daily connection to the ancestors is a real thing here, and kind of cool. Sam and Ruby are now hereby notified that we expect no less than altars tended daily when we’re gone.

We also learned that they use bamboo for everything here.

Other Things We’ve Seen In The Neighborhood

JFC: Jaya Fried Chicken. It’s really good.

This is a thing we haven’t seen anywhere else. Yet. Manufactured products and snacks are made in a string of connected packages. They’re perforated, so the bottom one gets torn off to sell. The benefit of this arrangement is that you just toss them over a string or a piece of bamboo and they display themselves. They don’t need counter space or a fixture, and it’s easy for customers to see what you have on offer. Very clever merchandising that benefits everyone.

Reggae Bars

For reasons necessarily opaque, Amed is flush with reggae bars. We met a guy in Hội Án who was also on his way for a brief stay in Amed, and he said he had a reggae bar he loved, and maybe we’d see him there. Not even close to enough information to locate him, even if we’d wanted to. Which we didn’t. There are a lot of reggae bars here. OK, not dozens, but way more than should be plausible outside of Jamaica.

Which is more than a little cognitively dissonant, as the Rasta religion forbids alcohol. No problem for the flexible Balinese.

One of these joints, Rasta Bar, is right next to the Seamount, where we swim, and I have to confess that it’s not at all unpleasant to bob in the ocean to the hypnotic reggae rhythm. Perhaps it’s that Bali and Jamaica share a laid back island vibe, but it almost makes sense.

But not the karaoke reggae bar. That’s just wrong.

You can join us for drinks on the beach at Rasta Bar, and enjoy the slinky reggae vibe.

Balinese Hinduism

Hinduism first came to Bali around the 1st century, but it didn’t stay put. Balinese Hinduism adds a soupçon of Buddhism to Indian Hinduism and wraps it around a meaty core of traditional Balinese animist beliefs, arts, and rituals. That was fine for centuries, but then it got weird, thanks to the Indonesian government.

On independence from the Dutch in 1945, the new constitution enshrined freedom of religion as a core right. However, Islamists took control of the Indonesian Ministry of Religion in 1952, and severely restricted what could legitimately be considered a religion that citizens had the right to practice. Aimed specifically at Bali’s Hindu population, the new rules required that a religion must be monotheistic, have a Holy Book and a prophet, and have a codified set of religious laws, among other strictures.

Having none of those things, the Ministry of Religion declared that Balinese Hinduism wasn’t a real religion. To which Balinese Hindus replied, “OK, we have all of those things. Now leave us alone.” So Balinese Hinduism is technically monotheistic and practically polytheistic. This makes Balinese Hinduism, in a roundabout way, much like Santeria, which coated Yoruban beliefs with a thin veneer of Catholicism, so no one got huffy.

I don’t know if the 1952 regulations were ever rescinded, but as a practical matter Balinese are still very much practicing their bespoke brand of Hinduism, seemingly unfettered by the long arm of the state. We spoke to one of our drivers about the differences between Bali and the rest of Indonesia, and he offered up a list of behaviors that would be unacceptable under Muslim law, such as premarital sex and drinking. It’s no wonder, I suppose, that Bali is Indonesia’s party capital.

Canang Sari

Canang sari, set outside of homes and businesses every morning, are a small but lovely manifestation of Balinese Hinduism. From simple to elaborate, they are sometimes tucked into altars, but are often just left on the sidewalk. They are a deeply felt thank you to Sang Hyang Widhi Wasa, the supreme being in Balinese Hinduism (or at least the one they picked to mollify the Muslims), for the gifts of peace, prosperity, and the harmony of the universe, weaving the ineffable into a daily ritual.

Penjor

Penjor flank the entrances to homes and businesses, and line the streets. Like the canang sari, they are devotional pieces dedicated to Sang Hyang Widhi Wasa. Unilke the canang sari, they are not a daily ritual, but are for special occasions and ceremonies, acting as a spiritual conduit connecting the mortal and the divine.

They are made, as a thank you, of the natural products that sustain Balinese life, such as bamboo, coconuts, bananas, and sugarcane. We saw many penjor with sprays of seeds attached all up and down, to also provide sustenance to bird life. While you can have them professionally made, people here take pride in making their own.

This is yet another example of the ways in which a shopping culture, as opposed to a making culture, impoverishes its inhabitants. It’s hard to put your soul into an Amazon cart, and lord knows I’ve tried. But when you make things, you have an incentive to make them well and make them beautiful. And then you’re surrounded not just by beauty, but by meaning. Or you could be surrounded by receipts. That’s OK, too. God loves all his children.

Bedogol

Another visual representation of Balinese Hindu beliefs is the presence of fierce gate guardians at the doorways to temples and homes. These Bedogol, or Dwarapala in Original Hinduism, are always in pairs surrounding the gate. The right hand Bedogol represents active energy and masculinity, while the left hand Bedogol signifies passive energy and femininity. The one is good for strength and protection, and the other provides intuition and gentleness. Together, they keep their charges safe from evil creatures and bad vibes.

I’m sure our Homeowners Association couldn’t possibly object if we put a pair in the hallway around our door. Who doesn’t need evil kept at bay?

Murder Most Fowl

There are a ton of free range chickens and roosters here, but also a surprisingly high population of caged roosters. There are shops that make and sell rooster cages, and then there are all the places with the caged roosters. It’s a thing. A weird thing.

It turns out that cockfighting is an ancient ritual connected to Balinese Hinduism. I told you the Balinese had made up their own brand of Hinduism, but you didn’t believe me, did you?

The roosters are caged because they’ve been trained to fight and aren’t safe wandering loose. And also because they’re super valuable. They start at 1,000,000 rupiah (about $60) and go up from there with pedigree and wins in the arena.

Cockfighting is actually a religious obligation at Balinese festivals and ceremonies. The losing rooster’s blood is meant as an offering to placate evil spirits. Legally, cockfighting is permitted in Bali only as part of religious ceremonies. And, hey! No gambling!

But we saw way more caged roosters than temples on their own could possibly have required. 100% there is non-religious cockfighting and gambling. We are shocked — shocked — to find that gambling is going on in here!

It’s also yet another layer of feigned compliance on the part of the Balinese. “Sure, we’ll be Hindu. We just need to add a few local spices. You need us to be monotheists? No problem, we’ll just pick one of our gods to be the Kahuna. We can only cockfight in the temple? You like our new temple?” Culturally they’re made of jello. Push on it and it seems to give, but the moment you let up it pops back to its original shape. They are Jedi masters of the Okey-Doke.

Roosters!

It’s hard to get a good look at the caged roosters, at least partially because it feels dangerous to get too close, but the loose roosters are spectacular. I know nothing about rooster genealogy, which I’m sure comes as a shock to y’all, but there seems to be a stunning range of rooster morphology on display here.

By The Way…

I got scuba-certified at twelve because my parents, Jackie and Stan, decided they wanted to dive and it became a family affair. It was a ten-week class, mixed between classroom (gas physics) and pool. The first three weeks in the pool were all swimming exercises, but we were permitted to put on scuba gear in week four and just sit underwater in the shallow end, to get used to the equipment.

At which point Stan stood up and tapped out. Give him credit for knowing himself. He found the experience claustrophobic and unsettling, and couldn’t think of a reason to shoulder past that.

Jackie and I continued, but I failed the final swimming exam. I did fine on the classroom test, and Jackie passed everything, but the swimming exam was hard. Among other soul crushing tests, you had to: swim two lengths of an Olympic pool underwater on a single breath; tread water for seven minutes with your arms out of the water, only legs; swim multiple laps, I don’t remember the actual number, in full gear, but only using your snorkel. They weighted you so you had negative buoyancy and had to swim uphill while someone walked at the edge of the pool and randomly poured buckets of water into your snorkel, to simulate all of your failed relationships waves. It was a lot, for a twelve-year-old.

I was technically too young, as thirteen was the NAUI cutoff, so I shouldn’t have been surprised to fail. But I was humiliated. It took me two more tries, but I did finally pass.

When I was thirteen and on our North American wanderjahr, we wound up in Acapulco, where Jackie and I took a dive boat together. We were the only certified divers aboard, so the guide provided training to the others: “OK. Exhale on the way up. Do you know what urchins look like? Great. Don’t touch them.” And off everyone went to enjoy their new skills. It really made me appreciate all the hard work I’d put in.

Then I touched an urchin.

We failed to account for two things. At least. The first was that if we were committed to “traveling until it was no longer fun,” what that really meant is that we were playing a game of chicken with our mental health. Neither of us would want to be the first to admit defeat, so one of us would wind up going way past not fun and straight into meltdown. Not good.

The second thing we’d failed to account for was that we’d be spending every waking moment together, sharing exactly the same experiences, and with no one to talk to except the occasional Zoom friend. That was an entirely more claustrophobic effect than we’d anticipated. Also not good.

That’s why we picked up an apartment in Chicago last year and spent six months in the US settling into it. We figured it would act as an escape valve, allowing us to go home when things got to be too much on the road. Our plan was for nine months of travel and three months in Chicago. What could possibly go wrong?

This lifestyle requires sacrifices but also, obviously, confers benefits. The problem Dorothy and I have had since Day One is that those sacrifices and benefits impact us asymmetrically. Dorothy values more highly what she’s had to give up than I value what I’ve lost, and I value what’s been gained more than she does. So, good for me, but that means that this whole endeavor has been built on the back of Dorothy’s goodwill. Which is almost infinite. But not quite.

The things Dorothy has had to give up, friendship, community, meaningful work, are things she’s no longer comfortable living without. I, on the other hand, deeply miss my weekly board game night. But I’m coping.

We’d said at the beginning that when the pressures of travel became too great that we’d still leave Chicago for three months over winter. We’d have to be physically unable to leave the apartment before fleeing Chicago’s winter was off the table. So that’s what we’re going to do.

Well, that’s what Dorothy’s going to do. We’ll go somewhere together each winter, but I will travel solo for another chunk of the year. I’m not sure how long or on what cadence, but that’s the plan. If I like traveling alone at all. Dorothy and I have been together 50 years, so I’ve never been alone. I may not like it, or it may be a refreshing smack in the face. It will certainly stretch my skills, as I’ve never had to feed myself before. And I probably won’t notice that something is wrong with me until a limb falls off.

I know for a fact that I’ll find solo traveling inferior to traveling with Dorothy. But I also know that I’ll find solo traveling superior to sitting in Chicago nine months of the year, so I’ll take what I can get. Honestly, I think at this point we’ll both benefit from not sharing every moment together. It’s… a lot.

One of the ways we’ve made fifty years as a couple is by being willing to throw everything in the air and start over. Circumstances change, but most people are way too slow to recognize that different circumstances require different responses. Different input, different output. That’s all that’s going on now, so it’s a thing we’re supremely comfortable doing. We’ll figure it out and get it right.

The current plan is to return to the US in September, after Indonesia. Then I’ll leave around the first of the year (two months in Thailand?), and join up with Dorothy and my sister, Nef, in Uzbekistan for a month. They’ll go back and I’ll keep going (Malaysia & Sri Lanka?) for another couple of months. That will reset the calendar for our snowbird cadence, and I’ll know by the following year what I can handle for solo travel.

Or not. Between now and whenever is then, something else may change that forces another pivot. It’s what we do.

So it is with Hạ Long Bay. “Oh, that place. I didn’t know its name.” Well, you do now. Isn’t this educational.

That scraped photo tells the full story of Hạ Long Bay. It’s an iconic UNESCO World Heritage site, known for its unique limestone karst outcroppings, and it is positively acrawl with tourists. In fact, it’s pretty clear that if you were on one of those boats, your primary view would be of other boats.

The problem with iconic, bucket list locales is that they tend to be overrun. That’s why visiting El Jem, the Roman colosseum in Tunisia, obviated the need to ever visit the Colosseum in Rome. We’ve aged out of the mosh pit.

Hạ Long Bay is in the Gulf of Tonkin, helping fill in our American Colonialist World Tour bingo card (box #1 was snorkeling in the Bay of Pigs). As it happens, the Gulf of Tonkin is also home to two other bays, one of which, Lan Ha Bay, abuts Hạ Long Bay and shares its geomorphology. All the half a billion year old limestone karsts, pretty much none of the tourists. It enjoys less tourist infrastructure than Hạ Long Bay, but that’s fine. That’s why there are fewer tourists. It’s not like we’re five-star travelers.

This is the other reason you might recognize Hạ Long Bay. It was used as a location for Kong: Skull Island.

Adding to our Star Wars and Tomb Raider check-ins. Aren’t we the accidental nerds?

Day One

Home base for most Lan Ha Bay tours is Cát Bà Island, and we arranged a four day/three night visit. Actually getting to Cát Bà is a multi-step process. The bus from Hà Nội gets you close, but then you have to catch a ferry to the island and pick up another bus to the hotel. We worked with a local Cát Bà agency that made the arrangements, so we were guided through all of our transfers and changes. Sweet.

Cát Bà Town, the largest city on the island, is in the middle of a pretty furious makeover. The entire waterfront is a construction zone, getting a Green Tourism facelift that won’t be completed until sometime in 2026. Promised amenities include a desalinization plant, rainwater and wastewater processing, green spaces, a new beach, electric cable cars and trams, ecotourism resorts, and a golf course. Because nothing screams sustainability like a golf course.

We arrived to our hotel at about noon and had some time to kick around Cát Bà Town before our evening tour, so we strolled the modest sights.

But the main event for Day One was a twilight tour of the bay, dinner aboard, and then a kayak trip after dark to view the bioluminescent plankton. Yes, please.

As it turns out, I know a little something about both glowy sea bits and kayaks. When I was 13 and traveling the Americas with my parents, one of our stops was in Guadalajara, which boasts shoreline bioluminescent plankton and a long, shallow shelf at the beach. As I recollect you could walk out almost a quarter mile and never get above your knees, while trailing blue-green fairy lights behind you with each step. There aren’t that many places on the planet that feature bioluminescence, so this tour was an. easy decision. It would be a first for Dorothy.

Getting there by kayak, though, not so much. I had been in a kayak, once before in my life, and it ended badly. Any experience that ends in a rescue, I think, counts as ending badly. So I hadn’t been in a kayak in over fifty years, and Dorothy had never been in a kayak. What better way to manage our collective fears than in the dark?

Before that, though, we had a lovely late afternoon cruise to see the Bay’s highlights.

That cued up the whole point of the cruise: them glowy plankton. Of which I have next to no documentation. Here’s the thing about kayaking at night in the middle of an unlit bay: it’s dark. Too-dark-for-pictures dark. Here’s pretty much the only proof I have that this wasn’t a fever dream.

What you can’t see in that photo is that we’re actually tied to the guide’s kayak in front of us. No way to drift away, which, once Dorothy was able to successfully get into the kayak, allayed most of the remaining fears. Let the plankton hunting begin.

But these were not the plankton of my Guadalajaran youth. Those critters had a blue-green color and a slow decay. Once agitated, they’d glow for a few moments before fading out, which is what led to the fairy trails in the water. The Lan Ha plankton glowed white, with a sharp decay, so they were like little lights that came on and blinked right out. You’d agitate them with an oar and they’d flick on for a moment. Which made taking a picture, given the absence of ambient light, impossible.

Thankfully, I was lucky enough to capture them in the boat’s wake on the way back to dock, which turned out to be their most spectacular expression. Way better than the minimal violence that an oar can inflict.

Day Two

Day Two was a full-day, eight hour cruise that left the dock at 8:00 AM. We’d be doing a much more thorough tour of the Bay than our evening cruise, including a kayaking run through caves, monkey hunting, a visit to a fishing research station, a stop for swimming, and lunch.

The Hạ Long/Lan Ha/Cát Bà area was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994. Since then, the government has taken actions to preserve that status, as UNESCO has benchmarks you have to hit in order to keep your listing. In the case of Lan Ha Bay, that meant cleaning up the floating village. Suddenly, good hygiene was in and throwing your trash overboard and shitting in the Bay were out.

The floating villages have been consolidated into one area not far from the dock. It’s pretty much one of the first things you see on the tour. People still live on the water and make their living there, just with more constraints from the government than they had pre-UNESCO. Our guide grew up in the floating village, and his father still lives there.

I have a ginchy new glass lens for my iPhone camera that takes anamorphic photos in something closer to a cinematic aspect ratio. But to truly get a feel for the scope of the Bay, I think this might be better.

The landscape reminded me, in an odd way, of the Lake District in England, which I visited once when working at DC Comics. Steve Parkhouse, who was illustrating The Hiding Place for my Piranha Press imprint, lived in the Lake District and drove me about for a tour. At one point we stopped on the crest of a hill and got out. The vista below was iconic to a fault.

Rolling green hills, ancient stone fences crisscrossing the fields, sheep dotted about in a particularly fetching pattern, and a little stream bubbling out of the ground near us and tumbling down to the valley below. If you close your eyes and think of England, which is how I get through the scary parts, that view will be what you see.

Beatrix Potter and J.R.R. Tolkien had both been Lake District residents, and it all made sense. They suddenly seemed less like fantasists and more like creative documentarians. I’d have been utterly unsurprised to see a hobbit come out from behind a rock or Peter Cottontail bounding across a field. Of course they wrote those stories. What else could they do?

Lan Ha Bay, in a less refined way, elicited a similar response. Neither a swarm of pterodactyls nor a giant ape would have been a surprise in that landscape, which looked decidedly like The Land That Time Forgot. I’d bet money that it wasn’t a case of the filmmakers scouting locations and finding Lan Ha/Hạ Long as it was one of them going there and coming up with the idea for Kong: Skull Island on the spot.

There isn’t a lot of culturally significant commentary to offer about this next slideshow. It’s just nature, at its awesome, atavistic best. Enjoy.

Here’s a little of what the islands feel like up close.

We had been surprised that the clientele for both of our boat tours trended so young. We’d thought of the kind of off-the-beaten-track adventure we were on as more suited economically to the retirement cohort, but we’d overlooked how cheap this kind of travel is, and how very, very active it turned out to be. There was a reason we were the oldest people on the tours: we simply hadn’t done the math.

It all started to make sense when we set off on the putative highlight of the day: the afternoon kayak trip around the Bay and through the caves. We’d managed our first kayak adventure in the dark, so we figured a daylight run would be a piece of cake. But you know that thing where your trainer is all, “Dude, don’t do two arm days in a row.” We did two arm days in a row.

Our nighttime trek had been an hour of paddling, but we didn’t know what exactly we’d agreed to for the following day. It seems we’d signed up for two hours, over three kilometers, and several days of recovery. I believe I documented Dorothy’s quote verbatim: “I never want to work that hard to have fun again.” I second that emotion.

But it was fun. Painful, but fun. It was a beautiful day, the views from the kayak were great, we went through caves, on foot and asea, and we even saw four Cát Bà langur monkeys, which are critically endangered. That’s a considerable fraction of the fewer than 70 specimens still alive. There’s no guarantee they’ll show, so that was a treat.

But how did they get so endangered? If I told you dicks were involved, would you be surprised? Yep, like rhinoceros horn, the Cát Bà langurs have been hunted near to complete extinction because they were the key ingredient in a traditional monkey balm guaranteed to help men supercharge their junk.

Jesus. All this travel has made me hate America (more), hate the French (more), and now, I even hate men and their junk. I am a self-hating junk owner. Is there anything sadder? Sure, I guess. Being the kind of mook who’d rub ground up monkey on their junk in a desperate attempt to feel something, anything. That’s rock fucking bottom.

Halfway through the tour we had to be lashed to our guide’s kayak again, like the previous night. We were falling behind. I don’t think he was literally dragging us, but it was easier to keep pace attached. We dragged ourselves back to the boat for a very welcome, very sedentary, very necessary lunch break.

Next up, motoring to a spot for swimming. We were both excited for this, because we thought we’d be getting dropped off at a beach. Instead, we pulled up adjacent to a beach. Specifically, the beach on Screaming Island, so called by the locals for its obviously screaming face.

Our guide, Ryan, had been poking me since the previous day’s tour, when he tried to get me to jump into the water from the second floor of the boat. I declined, while noting for his benefit that I was immune to peer pressure. Ever since my second rescue from the top of a pyramid, I’d committed to heeding my inside voice whenever it said, “I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t.” More people should try that. You just know, you meet some people and think, “Oh, that person has never once in their lives said ‘Maybe I shouldn’t.'”

So Ryan backflipped into the water from the second floor as if, somehow, that would convince me. It did, in a way.

It convinced me to walk down to the first floor and enter the water from the ladder. For good measure, I donned a life jacket. Sure, we were near a beach, but in water way too deep to stand in.

Which turned out to be a great decision, as that water was way colder than I expected. I jumped in all at once and my heart did that thing it does after an especially thick line of blow. You know. Threatening to burst. I’d had some thought, on entering the water, of swimming to Screaming Island’s beach. Which somehow looked much closer from the boat than it did from the water. I immediately pivoted to my newly hatched Plan B: survive.

To be fair, I was adjusting to the water temperature. Alternatively, I was dying and could no longer feel anything. Not caring to settle that definitively, I paddled the couple of feet back to the ladder and hauled myself to safety. Dorothy was relieved to know that she could skip the swimming experience without regrets. I’m always happy to take one for the team. Especially when I survive.

That left one more stop on our way back to the dock: the fishing research station. This was basically a small floating village that had been converted to research and development. They raised fish there for two purposes. To use them to produce fish eggs, and to try different methods to keep the fish healthy for as long as possible. Their charges were all long-term residents.

The fish eggs were used to make wee fry, which were then distributed to the fishers in the floating villages, who raised them until they were large enough to be salable. The Bay had been overfished, and this was the government’s attempt to reset the balance. I’m sure no one was truly satisfied, as the fishers had been forced to migrate from hunters to ranchers, but there’s not a lot of recourse built into the system.

What it led to, though, was very large fish. Like, really large fish.

Somehow, as an Official Guide, Ryan had permission to feed them.

These guys had a net on the top, as well, as they’d been known to get excited and leap to freedom.

And that was it. Eight hours on the Bay, and sore was the worst thing that happened. We’re winners!

Day Three: A Leg Day!

We wanted this day to be pretty chill, given how intensely physical we’d found the kayaking. Cát Bà had a couple of modest-sized but notable caves not far from Cát Bà Town, so we hired us a driver for a few hours and took off. First stop: Hospital Cave.

The first notable thing about Hospital Cave is that it is at the top of a hill. We think of caves as having a strong down component, so we were surprised to find that up was required. No, it didn’t use our arms, but I think we’d envisioned something more stately and relaxed than what we encountered. Effort would be required. Shit.

It was well worth that effort, as Hospital Cave turned out to be as much human artifact as natural. The Cave part was obviously naturally occurring, but the Hospital part had been built inside it from 1963-1965 as an impregnable retreat for both wounded soldiers and Viet Cong brass. It was in constant use until the end of the war in 1975.

The stairway is new, of course. As designed, access was via a wooden stairway that could be pulled up in case of attack. Which never happened. The facility was so well hidden the Americans never figured out it existed. Stupid Americans.

The complex is an impressive feat of engineering, comprising over 20,000 square feet across three floors, with 17 rooms and a capacity of 100 patients. The facility boasted fresh water, ventilation, and a secondary escape route, in the event of a breach.

The first floor was storerooms, offices, wards, and operatories, all built of concrete. The second floor was a gathering area in a large natural cavern, used for exercise and movies. It even had a small swimming pool. The third floor, which isn’t open to the public, was a bolthole in the event that senior officials needed to go to ground, although I don’t know that it was ever used for that purpose. That floor included its own separate escape route.

Our final stop of the day, and of the visit, was Trung Trang Cave. Unlike Hospital Cave, whose interests were primarily historical, Trung Trang offered the more traditional cave virtues of cool limestone formations. However, like Hospital Cave, it required an ascent to reach. What’s up with all the caves at the top of mountains? Who does that?

This greets you on entry. I think everywhere should have a Code Of Conduct For Civilized Tourism. The US could use one. I especially love the bottom left, which reminds you to Respect Vietnamese culture and custom, and features a mother shielding her daughter from a couple embracing. No one should have to see that.

I’ll confess that I’m kind of a cave slut. You don’t even have to be the most beautiful, most spectacular example of cavedom. I will still spelunk you. Assuming there’s a paved pathway. Jesus, what do you take me for?

I think it all goes back to family car trips in the Southwest. Carlsbad Caverns was always my favorite stop, and I think reading Journey To The Centre Of The Earth at a tender, impressionable age sealed the deal. “How old were you when you first had these feelings?” Indeed.

All of which is to say that Trung Trang is not the prettiest cave at the dance, but I shall happily twirl her about the floor with reckless abandon and extol her manifest virtues to all who will listen. She is a cave, and that is enough.

She was also a lovely, low-key way to wind up the trip. Except for all the ascending.

Bayon

Possibly even more than Angkor Wat, the massive Buddha heads of Bayon are the single most iconic image of Cambodia. Even if you don’t know they’re in Cambodia, you recognize them.

Interestingly, the Angkor-era temples are the only part of Cambodia that the Khmer Rouge didn’t systematically destroy. Rather than seeing them as evidence of moral decay, as they did the arts, or a threat, as they saw the sciences, the temples represented the strength and power of the Cambodian people, the state to which the Khmer Rouge wanted to restore the nation.

So they let them stand, as exemplars of what the Khmer had once achieved and what they should aspire to in the future. Which is just plain weird on its face, as the regime wanted to return Cambodians to an imagined, “pure” agrarian past, but had murdered anyone capable of building monuments to the glory of the proletariat.

But I don’t suppose they took power on the back of the unassailable logic of their arguments. Thanks to that twisted logic, we still have Angkor Wat and Bayon, among many, many others, to appreciate today.

While Bayon has no moat of its own, like Angkor Wat, it sits in the exact center of Angkor Thom (Great City in Khmer), the final capital city of the Angkor empire. And Angkor Thom has a moat. A really big moat, three kilometers on each side. Angkor Wat’s moat encloses a site of about two square kilometers. Angkor Thom: nine square kilometers.

Angkor Thom and its temples, like Angkor Wat, all date from the 12th century, the Golden age of the Khmer Empire.

Also, while Angkor Wat had “Beware of Monkey Attack” signs, we never actually saw any monkeys there. Not so Angkor Thom. The temples had monkeys, the roadside jungle had monkeys. There was no shortage of monkeys on this visit. Besides us.

The Gates

Both Angkor Thom and Bayon are squares oriented to the cardinal directions: North/South/East/West. Bayon has four gates, one on each side, and the city of Angkor Thom has an extra gate, the Victory Gate, on the East side.

Angkor Thom’s gates are impressive structures of their own, irrespective of what’s going on within the city’s walls. We entered the South Gate and got our first glimpse of the imposing giant Buddha heads. Each of the four gates is topped by four Buddhas, each pointing in a cardinal direction. The bridges that lead to them depict the Hindu story of The Churning Of The Sea Of Milk. Because of course they do.

We’ll skip over the plot elements that brought our protagonists to this dilemma, but the gods and the demons needed to collaborate to churn the Sea Of Milk in order to extract the Nectar Of Immortality, which was achieved, somehow, by pulling on the Naga Vasuki, a giant god snake. The gods took the head and the demons took the tail. And they lived happily ever after.

One side of the bridge shows the gods pulling Vasuki from the head and the other side of the bridge shows the demons pulling from the tail. As you traverse the bridge, you travel through the gate that the four-headed Buddha watches over. It’s a pretty monumental passage, and it’s impossible to be unmoved by it. Much like the soaring Catholic churches meant to awe the peasants, the gates to Angkor Thom proclaim to all who pass through them the power and piety of their creators.

The monumental Buddha heads stand watch over each gate.

Magic Happens Here

As built, Bayon had 54 pagodas with four faces each. That’s 216 big Buddha heads. 37 of the pagodas remain. Which is still a lot of Buddha heads.

There’s something weird about seeing in person a thing you’ve seen in pictures over and over. I remember visiting MoMA when we moved to New York and seeing Starry Night for the first time. There was so much depth and detail that the reproductions couldn’t capture, it was disorienting. I simultaneously felt like I knew it well and had never seen it. Same with Monet’s Water Lilies.

And same here. The images of these heads are so iconic, seeing them in person was like seeing two things at once, the photographs in your head like a scrim over the real thing right in front of you. But the scrim fades, and you’re left with only the reality, which is breathtaking. If I was capable of emotions I’d have had some. There were feels all over the place, and I could almost sense them.

Just like Angkor Wat, every surface is pavéd with decoration. It’s not all there now, but it’s clear there was no unadorned surface when it was built.

Some of the friezes are really big. Really, really big.

Ta Prohm

If someone asked you to close your eyes and picture an ancient temple being reclaimed by the jungle, you’d be imagining Ta Prohm. Part of that is because the whole trees-growing-through-temples thing is so iconic on its own, but also because it served as one of the primary locations for the 2001 Tomb Raider movie.

Which makes it similar to some of the Star Wars locations we visited in Tunisia. What made those sites interesting wasn’t that they’d been in the movies. It was that they were so alien in their natural state that they qualified as outer space movie sets. Who doesn’t want to visit a place like that?

So it is with Ta Prohm. I have no more interest in it because it was in a movie than I did in the Star Wars sites (which I didn’t even want to see initially, as I thought they were only of interest as movie trivia). What’s interesting about Ta Prohm is the vibe that motivated the filmmakers to use it as a location. That seemed worth checking out.

The whole thing has a distinctly Tikal ambiance, another place where the boundary between jungle and temples is porous. Here though, it’s not the general encroachment of the jungle, it’s the opportunistic nature of the local spong trees. Ta Prohm was built without mortar, leaving room for the spong trees to take root in the loose stones.

The effect is spectacular.

Preah Khan

We had one more temple on our itinerary, but at this point we had both museum eyes and museum legs. I confess we didn’t spend much time at Preah Khan. It looked like the outbuildings at Bayon or Ta Prohm, not having a distinctive feature of its own, like the big Buddhas or the spong trees.

How jaded are we? But we had put over three miles on Dorothy’s recovering limbs that day, which was enough. There. It’s her fault.

Local Monasteries

In addition to the Angkor-era temple complexes, Siem Reap is blessed with a slew of in-town neighborhood monasteries. Open to the public, the grounds and buildings tend to be both lavish and peaceful. We visited two of them, because what else are we doing, but we could have made them a tour of their own.

Preah Prohm Roath Monastery

A mere five minute walk from the Sturm und Drang of Pub Street sits Preah Prohm Roath, the Disneyland of monasteries. Built in 1915, it’s known for its lavish grounds and an enormous golden Buddah that lives in the main shrine, which is from 1945. The buildings and grounds all still seem shiny and fresh. Especially compared to the Angkor era temples, all at least 900 years old.

Surrounding the Buddha shrine building was a 360 degree gallery of friezes.

The outdoor sculpture garden is amazing. Like a Hindu version of El Castillo de Los Duendes in Oaxaca, but with fewer Keebler elves.

Wat Bo

Wat Bo is a little older than Preah Prohm Roath, having been built in the 18th century. It’s just across the Siem Reap river from Pub Street and the night markets, nestled in a comfortable, active neighborhood. It’s not as elaborate as Preah Prohm Roath, or as goofy, leaning more into its quiet beauty. It’s a lovely afternoon stop.

But every building was over the top in its own way. It’s impossible not to be charmed by an aesthetic built on the concept of More. It spoke to us directly. And loudly. If we had a coat of arms it would read Si Aliquid Est Bonum, Melius Est. If Some Is Good, More Is Better.

Sitting in their cool gardens is a pleasure on a hot day. Which is all of them.

Tikal Walks Into A Sidebar

So this is that thing I do where I find some flimsy excuse to jam in a story from our past that’s tangentially, at best, related to something from our current travels. In this case, I’m using Ta Prohm’s comparison to Tikal to shoehorn in the tale of our 30 minute trip to Tikal, in the year of our youth 1985.

I have to start by confessing that at this moment I have no pictures of our Tikal trip. I thought I’d finished digitizing all of our photos in the run up to launch, but I missed the albums with our Guatemala and Tikal photos. I’ll send them out when we get back to Chicago, but I’m probably 7-8 months away from being able to add pictures to this post.

In our late 20s we were able to cobble together enough shekels for our first real vacation, the kind that can’t be done in a car. Dorothy had a textile book called Guatemala Rainbow, and all of the photos were of people wearing these ridiculously vibrant textiles, rather than just pictures of fabric. We wanted to go where people wandered around dressed up like that. There are worse ways to pick a destination.

We decided to get there by buying a package tour to Cancun. It was cheaper than just buying the airfare, and they let us extend our return date. We blew off the hotel portion of the package, which gave us two weeks to get to Guatemala and back to Cancun for our flight home.

And that was the extent of our planning. We didn’t know how we were going to get to Guatemala, we didn’t have any accommodations arranged, we didn’t even know exactly where we were going once we got there. We’d made a half-hearted attempt to make plans, but this was pre-internet, so making those arrangements long distance was hard. This was why travel agents existed, but we rejected the notion of planning the entire trip to the day. We’d wing it. What could possibly go wrong?

On the eve of our departure I called the State Department hotline for their Guatemala assessment. I’d waited until the last minute on purpose, as I expected we’d dislike the recommendation. We were traveling on the eve of their first putatively free elections, and expected there would be tensions. We were correct.

The hotline told us that we needed to: avoid a list of specific cities, the bulk of which were on our to do list; check in with the consulate the moment we landed to provide our detailed itinerary, which didn’t exist; avoid travel at night, which was the only stricture we could follow; and be prepared to be robbed at gunpoint, although kidnapping was deemed unlikely. But not impossible.

On mature reflection, we decided that if a State Department warning existed for tourists traveling from Iowa to New York City, it would sound about the same. And that as hardened, streetwise New Yorkers, we could handle whatever Guatemala threw at us.

What could possibly go wrong?

So we flew to Cancun, rented a car and drove to Chichén Itzá, where I had to get rescued from the top of the pyramid, kept going to check out Mérida, and decided that we’d get to Guatemala from there, so we ditched the rental car (its own story) and grabbed a flight.

We deplaned in Guatemala City, got the last rental car left, and headed to nearby Antigua, getting lost on the way in the dark. No GPS. We stumbled into Antigua and drove around until we found a nice looking hotel. They had a room for us.

That was our protocol for the whole trip. No plans, play it by ear, everything will be fine. We constantly saw tourists who’d made plans, or thought they had, struggling. The hotel they thought they’d reserved didn’t have a room. The guide they thought they’d arranged never showed up. And here we were, happy idiots, blithely blundering into repeated good fortune. It made stupid look admirable. And also set a lifetime of travel preferences. We still don’t like to overplan. Although we are slightly less intrepid than our 20-something selves.

And that’s how we planned to get to Tikal. The highway through the Peten jungle hadn’t been built yet, so the only way to get there was by plane. We figured we’d spend a couple of days there, get to Belize, spend a few days on one of the cays relaxing, and then get back to Cancun for our flight home. Easy, right?

We tried to figure out how to fly from Flores, the nearest airport to Tikal, to Belize, but what information we found didn’t make any sense, so we reckoned we’d make arrangements in the airport when we landed. Worst possible case we’d take a bus, as it was only about 140 miles. Worst worst possible case, we’d rent a car or take a taxi.

The only information we had was on a gas station style folding map. On the back it had a matrix of cities, showing the distance between them and the driving time. Except our map clearly had an error for Flores-Belize City, as it showed a travel time of twelve hours. No way that could be correct. That was just over ten miles/hour for the whole distance. Impossible.

Dorothy hadn’t had much plane time prior to this trip, so she was a nervous flier. Still is, a little bit. As we’re waiting in the terminal in Guatemala City for our flight to Flores, she’s checking the tarmac, afraid we’re going in something tiny. She’s relieved when we’re finally called to board, as the only plane out there is a big jet. Not so relieved when we hit the tarmac and walked behind that jet to a plane so small it had been completely hidden from view.

But all good, we fly to Flores on our little plane and no one wets themselves. A win is a win. I go to the desk in the terminal when we land to make arrangements to fly to Belize in a couple of days. To be told that there isn’t a flight in a couple of days. There’s one the very next morning and another four days later. The first flight meant we wouldn’t be able to visit Tikal, the entire point of this escapade, and the second one meant we wouldn’t have time in Belize, and if there was any hiccup we’d miss our flight back home from Cancun.

So I asked about buses or taxis, and was told that the twelve hour map estimate was about right, as it was mostly a dirt road. Or would be about right if the road was open. Which it currently was not, having been washed out in the recent rains. I’m a clever boy, so I ask about flying back to Guatemala City and getting to Belize from there. To be told that the flight to Guatemala City from Flores is the return flight from Guatemala City to Flores. Which happens twice a week.

Very reluctantly, we booked a flight to Belize for the next morning. Now all we had to do was find a place to stay, since we hadn’t made any arrangements in advance. We tasked our taxi driver with finding us a hotel, but he’d heard our saga. He told us that if we left at seven in the morning, he could drive us to Tikal, about 90 minutes each way, and get us back to the airport in time for our flight. We’d have about half an hour at Tikal, but that sounded better than missing it completely.

What could possibly go wrong?

The actual town of Flores is an island in Lake Petén Itzá reached over a narrow causeway, just barely above lake level. Our driver navigated us into town and left us at a hotel with rooms. We’d see him in the morning. The hotel was… interesting. We got to the front desk to check in by walking across the cinder blocks on the floor, as the first floor was a little lake all its own. Like a lake fractal. Lake, at every level of magnification.

We were given a room on the fourth floor, walkup, obviously, and assured that the water ran several times a day. How very convenient. It happened to be on right then, so we filled up a couple of buckets so we could flush the toilet.

Dorothy was a little beat up by all of this, so I ventured out into town to find some victuals and return with dinner. When I got back she was shaving her legs in one of the buckets, a fierce, desperate attempt to bring order and civilization to a disordered, uncivilized situation. Perhaps the single most Dorothy moment ever, and the picture of her that will probably flash before my eyes as I’m dying.

Sure as shootin’, our driver picks us up at seven. We leave our luggage safely minded on the first floor cinder blocks and make our way. We get our promised thirty minutes at Tikal, which, on the one hand, awesome, but on the other, sad. We deeply regretted being unable to tour Tikal properly.

OK, we head back to our hotel to pick up our luggage and go to the airport, which is right on the mainland side of the causeway. Except the causeway is blocked by the military, who explain that part of the causeway had collapsed since we left three and a half hours earlier, and no one was allowed on while it was being rebuilt.

I’m not at all sure what our driver said, but we were allowed to pass, and maneuvered delicately around the skiploader, with only the lakeside wheels in the water. We fetch our luggage, inch back across the causeway, and get dropped at the airport with moments to spare. They should have been ready to call boarding.

If our plane had been there.

But it wasn’t. It was late. As it turned out, six hours late. We sat in this tiny provincial airport for six more hours. We could have had a full day at Tikal.

*sigh*

We did get our three days at Ambergris Cay in Belize, in a hut right on the beach, just a few minutes to the reef. That was exactly the tonic we required after the tsurris of our aborted Tikal visit. It was glorious. Although we got to and from the Cay on a de Havilland Otter seaplane, which made Dorothy positively nauseous.

But because we’re apparently incapable of learning, we had one last gasp of stupid before we returned home.

We flew from Belize City to Cancun, and could have done the simple, obvious thing and stayed in Cancun overnight to take our flight the next day. But Cancun is boring, and Tulum, this was long before it got built up like it is today, was only a 90 minute drive south. We rented a car so we could spend the day on the beach at Tulum, overnight there, drive up in the morning and make our flight, no problem.

What could possibly go wrong?

We drove to Tulum, parked at a hotel by the highway, checked in, dropped our luggage off, and got into our rental car to drive the short distance to the beach and the ruins. Which car would not start.

We were able to get locals to push us and got the car started. With no promise that, if we turned it off again that it would restart, or that we could draw enough folks to get a push start. So we returned to the hotel. Dorothy grabbed the luggage while I gunned the engine in neutral.

We drove back to Cancun with my foot never leaving the gas. There wasn’t a lot between Tulum and Cancun in those days, so the car dying on that road would be bad. In the dark, since it was an unlit highway. And, because there was clearly some headroom left for agita, the most driving rainstorm I have ever, to this day, driven in. The rain was coming horizontally.

We made it back to the airport to return the car, where much arguing ensued. All of which I lost. First, I had nicked a bumper on a high curb, making a U-turn to get into the airport without letting off the gas. And of course, when the agent went out to check the car, it started right up, undercutting my entire argument.

Fine. Whatever. We had a cabby take us to the nearest place with an empty room, and we made our flight home without any additional drama, self-inflicted or otherwise.

We’ve been to Guatemala three times now, because we love it so much, but on this adventure I’d rather go to places we’ve never been before. But we just discussed, when we do the South America portion of our travels, stopping off at Tikal on our way back. 30 minutes didn’t do it.

Cambodia has not disappointed. Let’s take a look at the performing arts.

Apsara Dance

When you think of traditional Cambodian dance, and I know you do, Apsara is what you’re picturing: slow, graceful movement with fingers curved backwards, hyperextended elbows, bent knees, arched spine, preternatural balance, and toes flexed upwards. Seriously, they could make sandwiches with those toes. Apsara has a distinctly Small House Of Uncle Thomas vibe.

There are a number of dinner theater establishments offering Apsara performances, but one stands out for both its rigor and its distance from the tourists of Pub Street, the aptly named Apsara Theater.

We were some of the only solo attendees, as two full buses threw up their contents into the theater. I’ll confess to being ambivalent about the big tours. It just feels a little weak to me, to come all this way and then insist on being cocooned for the entire experience, docented from place to place with everything curated for you.

But the alternative is what we’re doing, which I acknowledge is hard. Finding your way around without help, when you don’t know the language and don’t know how things work, is fundamental to the joy we find in our experience, but we’re not wired like other people, and what we’re doing is often exhausting, even to us.

Those busloads of people could have gone to EPCOT Center, but they put themselves out to go somewhere truly foreign to them, and they chose to do so in a way that didn’t induce panic and the sweats. They are, in their slightly different way, fellow intrepid travelers, and good for them for figuring out how to have this experience and enjoy it.

Honestly, I blow hot and cold on whether our approach is arrogant or brave. It’s felt pretty brave so far, as we’ve been able to pick up a modicum of local language wherever we’ve been, which allows us to avoid Ugly American Syndrome and navigate with some grace. Shit, Dorothy even learned to read Arabic when we were in the Maghreb.

But it feels more arrogant here, as neither of us has been able to learn more than a couple of words of Khmer. It’s the hardest language we’ve encountered so far. We learned more French, which is saying something. So we wander around with our English and hope to get by.

Which has absolutely not been a problem so far, and no one’s treated us like parasites. I’m not at all suggesting that you should skip Cambodia if you can’t learn Khmer. English is the second language here, after all. It warms my heart to see the French forced to struggle with a foreign language in one of their former colonies.

But the absence of anything like a basic vocabulary in the local tongue definitely makes it feel like we’re careening about, heedless of the locals and demanding to be met on our terms. We’re headed to Vietnam next, which uses a Latin alphabet, so that helps. But it’s a tonal language, which I’m pretty sure is going to fuck us up. The journey continues.

The Apsara Theater experience required checking our shoes at the door. There was something deliciously illicit about being barefoot in a public space. It felt naughty.

The evening featured traditional Khmer cuisine and dances in three genres: traditional Apsara, village dances, and Reamker dances. Here’s the thing about all three styles. They’re all, for different reasons, ex post facto manufactured culture. They are authentic because Cambodians have all agreed that they are.

But the history of Cambodian dance is the history of Cambodia, with all of its triumphs and tragedies. Let’s start with the Apsara.

Apsara is actually the term used for the divine water nymphs in both Hindu and Buddhist mythology, depicted in statues and carvings throughout the Khmer kingdom. They are usually posed as if captured mid-dance.

In the 1950s, Cambodia’s queen took in a performance at a provincial primary school where the students recreated poses from the Apsaras of Angkor Wat. She decided to create what she imagined the original dances were like, with costumes to match the carvings. Her granddaughter, who started training at five, became the first professional Apsara dancer in modern times.

That’s the reason the dances are so slow. They’re basically choreographed to move from one Apsara pose to another. The dances as originally conceived have become set in stone, like the temple carvings that were their source material, replicated perfectly down to the last precise finger curl.

An entire culturally resonant art form built on grade school children voguing for the queen. You can’t make that shit up.

Our visit to Angkor Wat was after this performance, so we had an excellent context for viewing the wealth of Apsaras that pavé the temple. The dances made so much sense after viewing the actual carvings. Obviously, no one knows the exact shape of the original Apsara dances, but you can certainly see how the modern form plausibly derived from the source material.

The village folk dances performed today are also creations. As the dances died at their source, teachers and professional dancers recreated them in the 60s in order to preserve them. But these dances are an interpretation of the originals, documented and locked down to be unchanging over time. They are not genuine in the sense we usually give to that word. Many of them don’t even qualify as recreations, as they were conceived from whole cloth by city choreographers imagining village life. Even those have become part of the official canon of Cambodian dance.

Finally, the Reamker dances. Reamker is the Cambodian Buddhist take on the Hindu Ramayana story, with different dances representing different parts of the saga. The epic includes giants, monkeys, mermaids, princes, and, of course, princesses.

As a dance, the Reamker dates back to the 13th century. Has it been executed in an unbroken chain since then? Probably not, although I can’t find anything definitive about it being recreated, like the village folk dances. Unlike the Apsara dances, though, which are truly sui generis, the Reamker is a real dance with a lineage centuries old.

The Reamker stories are like the rest of the Hindu narrative canon: stuffed full. They read like they were written by a coked up middle schooler. “*sniff* OK, so this shapeshifting demon he’s got like, ten heads, and he falls in love with a pretty human princess and abducts her. *sniff* And then, and then, this monkey god, who has, like powers, comes to help with his army of monkeys *sniff* but he’s met by like an army of mermaids, so the monkeys and the mermaids have a war, *sniff* but then the monkey god and the mermaid queen fall in love. *sniff* They rescue the pretty human princess, but the prince thinks she did it with the demon, but she didn’t. *sniff* He’s just a dick. *sniff* And there’s a giant. *sniff*”

Which is the actual plot of the Reamker. And is hardly special to the Hindus and Buddhists. Hand a coked up middle schooler the Bible and see what you get. Everyone’s creation myths are… logically suspect. Don’t even get me started on Turtle Island.

Whether imagined from stone carvings, created by modern choreographers, or established as legitimate court art, all of the Cambodian dance forms share something in common. They were destroyed by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge in 1975. All forms of pre-revolutionary art were banned, including and explicitly traditional dance. 80-90% of the entire Cambodian population of writers, artists, and dancers died in the first three years of the regime, either by starvation or execution.

Cambodian dance today is a shadow of a shadow, recreated forms that had to be painstakingly recreated again, by the few dancers who survived the regime. It’s a funny cultural patrimony, making up in a stubborn insistence on its relevance what it lacks in authenticity. Maybe it’s made up, but they’re claiming it as their own and fuck you if you have a problem with that.

I do not. The beauty of Cambodian dance isn’t in its historical accuracy, but in the fierce commitment of Cambodians to, finally, speak for themselves.

Shadow Puppets

Guess what? Traditional Cambodian shadow puppet theater was also destroyed by the Khmer Rouge and manually recreated by the few surviving practitioners after the regime fell. So it enjoys the same “authenticity” issues as the dances, or, honestly, every other fucking art form here, all of which the Khmer Rouge methodically burnt to the ground.

Of course, as is the case all over the world, “traditional” art forms don’t have to be murdered. They can die of natural causes. Even before the execution, shadow puppet theater was declining in Cambodia, as a natural byproduct of the distractions and allure of creeping modernity. New is shinier and better than old.

But I think we make a category error when we fetishize authenticity. Culture is a living organism, and while we are right to preserve what UNESCO refers to as Intangible Cultural Heritage, we are wrong to insist that it be preserved in amber. Cultural change is a form of agency, permitting peoples to decide for themselves what matters and what doesn’t.

There’s no question that pre-revolutionary shadow puppet shows enjoyed a wide range of content, but the version we have today, recreated by the few shattered puppeteers who survived the purge, is limited to retellings of the stories in the Reamker. I suspect that’s because those were the puppets that made it through the civil war intact, either through random dumb luck or a concerted effort to prioritize the safety of the Reamker puppets.

There are two styles of shadow puppet theater, both done with puppets made of punched leather. There’s Sbek Thom, which uses large static leather sheets manipulated with sticks, and Sbek Touch, which uses smaller, articulated puppets with movable limbs and changeable facial expressions.

These days, no one does the full Reamker story, which historically played out in villages over seven or more nights by traveling puppeteer troupes. We get excerpts now, which is fine. As tourists go, we have a pretty substantial attention span, but not like that.

An Australian And A Malaysian Walk Into Cambodia

There are several established shadow puppet troupes in Cambodia, two in Siem Reap and one in Phnom Penh, but none of them have regular venues. They mostly tour. While there are multiple dinner theaters offering Apsara dances in Siem Reap, there is only one venue for shadow puppets, the Bambu Stage, which offers a couple of shows a week and has their own troupe of puppeteers they’ve trained themselves.

We got there early and had a long chat with the proprietress, who shared their history. Her husband is a Malaysian event planner who worked with an Australian theatrical producer and museum exhibition designer. They had worked together for some years in Australia, gotten bored, and were looking for something fresh.

They thought there was opportunity in Southeast Asia and picked Cambodia seemingly at random. They bought a restaurant and converted it into a shadow puppet theater for tourists, and then hired and trained puppeteers to perform.

But here’s the kicker. They then wrote their own shadow puppet plays.

Before the performance I asked our hostess about the Reamker plays, and she said they didn’t do those. They did a little twirling about with the large Sbek Thom puppets at the very beginning, but then switched to the smaller Sbek Touch puppets for the full performance. I asked what the source material was for the play, and the answer was village stories.

This turned out to be a village story like the ones from the Apsara dance performance: completely made up. But worse in this case, because it was made up by an Australian and a Malaysian.

It’s hard to know which was worse. The cultural appropriation that rendered the performance an unmistakable act of minstrelsy, the participation of actual Cambodians in said act, or the fact that it was aggressively, irredeemably bad.

The plot of this village story, which could have had some origins in the villages, although the shadow puppet version we saw was from whole cloth, was thus: A shrewish wife orders her husband to take their buffalo to the rice paddies for water. On the way he meets a drunk who also has a buffalo. They share drink and wager about whose buffalo is stronger. The drunk puts up his rice paddy. The other man puts up his wife. The buffalos fight, and the drunk’s buffalo kills the other buffalo. They return to the village so the drunk can claim the shrewish wife as his own, and she beats both men until they run away.

This was framed to us before it began as a feminist parable about the strength of women in the household. Sure. But that wasn’t its worst sin. There was ten, maybe fifteen minutes of story that had been padded out to almost an hour. I didn’t know it was possible to be both limp and overstuffed at the same time. I mean as a person, sure. I’ve been in that condition repeatedly. But I’m not used to culture shaped that way.

The puppets were fine and the puppeteers did what they could with the material. But we felt a little dirty afterwards. Even the most careful of travelers can be tourist trapped.

Afterwards they let us play with the puppets, which was fun. Sadly, that’s about as far as the fun went for this experience.