Room Service (6 page)

Hi Chief. As you might have guessed, I'm hanging out in Sausalito with some lapsed radicals from the 1960s – the hometown of the California Hot-tub world, Sausalito in Marin County overlooks foggy San Francisco bay. Marin has every sort of fulfilment therapy including heavy drinking.

My first experience of Marin County fulfilment therapy was Tracy, a cocktail waitress at No Names Bar where I hang out when I'm in Marin. Tracy understands the restless soul. In Marin they have a style of talking that is very mellow and a vocabulary that has no edges to it.

Tracy isn't really a cocktail waitress: she's a student seriously into deep-tissue massage therapy. She has been doing political science but moved across to physical therapy. In New York I found that the whores called themselves therapists; here in Marin the nice girls are into deep-tissue massage therapy (and all it can suggest).

‘You are relating in a hands-on way to people and at least you see two years of tension roll away and people get up from the table smiling,' she said.

‘With political science it's all verbalising and you never know whether you're doing good or bad.'

Later we tooled up to Bolinas in her Mustang to Smiley's Bar, which is an old hippy hangout.

When I walked into the bar I felt I'd walked back 10 years – more. It is the place where all the hippies and flower children came to die.

Now they play Space Invaders and pool.

The vegetarian cafe opposite Smiley's showed an uncharacteristic sense of humour for a vegetarian cafe and named itself Scowleys.

When I said to Tracy, ‘My God, this is it – this is the bar where all the hippies and flower children come to die,' she became very upset.

‘My step-father is an old hippy,' she said, ‘and he's a very mellow kind of guy.'

‘Don't get me wrong,' I said, ‘I'm an old hippy myself. I wouldn't mind coming here to Bolinas and Smiley's bar to die.'

I said that we old hippies didn't seem to have left much of a mark on the world.

‘I disagree strongly,' Tracy said, ‘and it's all going to come back (please no!) and this time it is really going to be a revolution 'cause all the old hippies are in power places and things like that and they'll respond to new hippies.'

Well, maybe.

Tracy told me that Bolinas was where the ‘whale thing began', where the Friends of the Earth headquarters were, and where Brautigan blew his brains out.

The dogs all have a dreadful flea problem and scratch themselves against buildings and on gravel
roads because the people of Bolinas don't use flea wash or flea spray and rely instead on organic collars soaked in herbs. The dogs say it doesn't work.

There are no drug stores in Bolinas (in the accepted meaning of the word ‘drug').

Marin has two great beach villages – Bolinas and Stinson Beach. Stinson beach is more chic.

‘Actually,' Tracy said, ‘you should start your drinking at Stinson Beach – at the Sand Dollar bar – and finish the night at Smiley's – you have your first ten cocktails at the Sand Dollar and your second ten at Smiley's.

‘You know what a cocktail dress is?' Tracy asked. ‘Well, I'll tell you – it's a dress you need five cocktails before you are mellow enough to wear it.'

In the Sand Dollar we saw this really unhappy chic lady with her arm in a sling and both eyes black – really black – she seemed to have been in a bar brawl.

The cocktail waitress at the Sand Dollar told us the story.

This lady's husband had gone away for a week on business and for the first time in her life the lady decided to go to Bolinas and pick up a guy for the night. She had her ten cocktails at the Sand Dollar and tooled up to Smiley's in her BMW where she picked up an ex-hippy flower-power boy and took him home for the night. At home he bashed her up, set fire to the luxury beachside house, stole her BMW car and crashed it into the sea, where it still was.

The chic lady with her arm in the sling clutching her Tequila Mary heard the waitress telling us the story and
called out – in the saddest voice I've heard – ‘even here in Marin there will be some explaining to do when my man gets home tomorrow. Oh boy.'

Next day Tracy and I went over to the Berkeley campus where all the radicalism of the 1960s began and the inspiration of much that happened in radicalism in Australia. I explained to Tracy that we were part of it – even in Sydney – we knew all about the Free Speech movement and Mario Savio and the underground newspapers. She said that although she was too young to have been in it her stepfather had told her all about it.

I told her that in Sydney we pronounced it – ‘Barkley' (as in ‘Berkeley Square' in England) because we'd read about the Berkeley campus, but none of us had been there.

I didn't tell her that I'd also been a beatnik, which also started in San Francisco – before she was born.

The Berkeley campus seems more into parachuting and windsurfing these days.

The
Berkeley Barb
newspaper no longer exists, but the campus newspaper,
The Daily Californian
, had a stale obligatory article by Noam Chomsky on plans he thought Israel had for controlling Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and South Africa. But the big story in
The Daily Californian
was on the ‘mellowing of rock and roll'. The page-one story was a round up of the rock scene and especially the all-woman group the Go-Gos. ‘Their music is fun (like Disneyland) and safe (like Suburbia).'

Just off campus Tracy took me to the People's Mural, which is painted along the building near the People's Park – the scene of many historic radical gatherings. The mural shows the history of radicalism from the 1960s to the 1980s – the free speech movement – anti-Vietnam War, flower power, psychedelic drugs, environmentalists, commune movement, and finally the mural shows the People's Park as it is now – occupied by burned-out kids, alcoholics and beggars.

Tracy noticed some grafitti on the mural and exclaimed that until recently no one would have written graffitti on the People's Mural – ‘That's a really tacky thing to do,' she said unhappily.

Everyone outside Marin County is reading
The G Spot and other recent discoveries about human sexuality
, by Alice Kahn Ladas, Beverly Whipple and John D. Perry.

In Marin, of course, they knew about the G spot years ago. It took a long time for some of us to learn about the other spot and now we have to worry about the G spot. The Grafenberg spot is a female pleasure source inside the vagina. Female ejaculation is in too.

But seriously, Chief, there's a lot in the G-spot thing – Tracy says it's true. When you touch it the woman says, ‘Gee'.

I'll hang out a little longer at the No Names Bar awaiting the old telex saying, ‘Extend indefinitely Marin County assignment. Send series on G spot, deep-tissue massage, and the mellowing of rock and roll.'

The Editor, Dear sir, I am the Recreation Director of the Inter-Continental Hotel, Port Vila, Vanuatu. The well-being and harmony of the guests here at the Inter-Continental is my first concern. There is someone here called Francois Blase claiming to be a travel writer for your magazine and wanting 15 per cent off everything. He's been asking for special rates from the nautch girls at the Club Privé. He did a performance, which he called ‘Somerset Maugham in Love', at the hotel talent quest on Monday and despite the fact that no one seemed to understand the act, he won the vote by rigging things with the staff and some air hostesses and won the lamp made from coral.

Here at the Inter-Continental we try to get people together for tennis and golf, and so on, and they can put their names on the guest notice board. This Blase has put up a sheet for polo and wants to get up a polo team to ‘ride against' the White Sands Country Club. But it takes four people with three ponies each to play polo. We do not have horses here. The people who come to the Inter-Continental can't ride horses. This has caused consternation.

He says that one always plays polo in the cool of the afternoon and it was always the highlight of his stay in
India as a cultural delegate. Vanuatu is not India. He gets around in ridiculous gear from his days in Beirut, which he gets from a company called Banana Republic Travel and Safari Clothing Company in Polk Street, San Francisco, and of which he claims to be an agent. He tries to sell orders for this stuff from a catalogue he has. He wears something he calls a bush vest, with many pockets, and a hood in the collar and a pouch at the back. He calls it a ‘walking desk'. It may have been suitable for Beirut, but it is wrong for Vanuatu. The polo thing and this selling around the pool make people very uneasy. He orders Gibsons from the pool bar, which is asking too much of the staff. Port Vila is not Acapulco.

He is very bad with the children.

He spoiled one little boy's holiday by asking him about his T-shirt. The T-shirt was quite nice and said ‘Hullo from Gippsland Victoria'.

Evidently Blase asked the boy if he was from Gippsland.

When the boy said no, Blase asked him why he was wearing a T-shirt from Gippsland Victoria.

The boy had replied, ‘My auntie sent it to me'.

Blase had then said to the boy that you wear a T-shirt either because you come from the place or because you've been to the place, and that you didn't wear a T-shirt because ‘your auntie lives there'.

The boy then took the T-shirt off and was so badly sun burned that he was taken to hospital.

When the mother remonstrated with Blase about this, Blase said, ‘What do you mean by making your
son wear clothing his auntie sent him? No one wears clothes that aunties send'.

She then said, ‘What about the clothes you wear about the pool? They aren't proper resort clothes'.

Blase then said to her, ‘These clothes come from the Banana Republic Travel and Safari Clothing Company of Polk Street San Francisco'.

She replied that she didn't care whether the clothes came from Andres of Chifley Parade, Baulkham Hills, they weren't resort clothes, and in future to leave her little boy alone.

As Recreational Director I had to come between them.

And another thing – he has been trying to sell a Mosquito Repeller device that is supposed to give off ultra-sonic waves duplicating the sound of an aggressive male mosquito. This supposedly scares away the female mosquito, which he says are the ones that sting.

Well, although one can't hear this thing, it is giving the staff and some of the guests ear-ache.

If he is your magazine's travel writer, he seems to be into all sorts of contra-deals and franchises which he is selling in your magazine's time around the pools and bars. He has about six watches on one arm, which he sells and which are a dubious bargain.

What I want to say is that this sort of person is bad for Vanuatu and bad for the travel industry. Why don't you send him back to Beirut, which needs a travel writer.

Signed, Recreation Director, Inter-Continental Hotel, Port Vila, Vanuatu.

 

Hi Chief, It's true I'm in Vanuatu and it's true that Port Vila is not Acapulco. I'm resting up after cultural delegating in China.

The reaction against me here is because I joked about the plumbing. The plumbing in the Port Vila Inter-Continental is the loudest plumbing in the history of hotels. It should be mentioned as an attraction in their brochure. The velocity of the flush is so great that if you put your hand in the bowl it would be crushed. It can flatten a beer can. I kid you not. Every morning the hotel shakes to the thunder of 166 bowel movements, and the roar of this flush is like the surf against the rocks. ‘Flush' is too anaemic a verb to describe it. I hope it isn't all going into the azure lagoon out front.

Vanuatu is not really a holiday resort, it is a training resort for people getting ready to travel overseas. The airline is called Vanuatu Airlines and is painted to look like a coral reef, but it is really Ansett, and the hostesses are from Australia. There's no tipping, but people are trained to it because the government of Vanuatu takes 10 per cent of everything. Every bill is 10 per cent higher than the stated price.

Everywhere you go you see people learning to eat in restaurants, learning to sit around pools, learning to shop duty free, and learning to count in foreign money. But because Melanesia is so delightfully slow, they have time to learn how to do these things. They
learn how to sign their signature exactly the way it is on the travellers cheque. They learn how to hold three official documents in one hand when coming through immigration control.

Frankly, I hang out at the Bar Rossi built in 1926, and I do my Somerset Maugham act on variety nights. My act is maybe a little too literary for the crowd, but I get a few laughs from the air hostesses to whom I have explained it.

I do a bit of dealing at the pool, but it is in my own time and anyhow no one's buying.

The two hardest things to do in Vanuatu are to get to eat the local speciality, flying fox, and to hear local music. It's so hard that I feel it is perhaps prohibited to tourists.

It is a good place for Australians to teach their children to be rude to people of a different colour and culture because the kids can get it right on the friendly Melanesians before they try it on American black waiters and Indian bell captains.

Of course, when I arrived I headed straight for the snorkelling deal to see the American Second-World-War wrecks. I wanted to see skeletons of American sailors trapped in the engine room and maybe bring up a rusty Smith and Wesson .45. All they showed me was a rusty anchor. And I got ear-ache.

People say that my Mosquito Repeller is giving them ear-ache. It's the snorkelling.

As always at these sorts of resorts I spend most of the morning with the existential dilemma of whether to go
for a swim or not. I never know whether to take money with me to the pool or whether to leave my watch in my room. If you take your wallet and watch and passport and you put them on the poolside table you get sore eyes from keeping them open under water watching your things. Everyone else seems to take their wallets to the pool. I get a wincing headache from the ripping of the Velcro fastenings of all those travel wallets. It is like a nurse ripping adhesive plaster from a body. I worry about putting on sunburn lotion properly, not missing any spot and reaching the middle of my back. Here in Vanuatu I smear it on the TV Screen and rub myself against it because they hit you 400 VTs a day for in-house movies and there's no television station and I'm not paying. I suppose the 400 VTs go to pay copyright to the people who made the films. Ho ho.

And what's the right time to hang out at the pool? When do the air hostesses go to the pool? And you have to decide whether to take a towel from your room which is against the rules. If you get a towel from the Recreation Director (which I do not for reasons I will not explain) you have to get it back by 6 p.m. But what happens if you want to get wet after 6 p.m.? What if the hostesses arrive after 6 p.m. and you want to do some fancy diving from the high board? Do you have your Gibson before the swim or after? I read of people dying from swimming after drinks. Does the wiping of the towel remove the sunburn lotion? What's the shower beside the pool for? Is it to wash off the chlorine after the swim or is it to wash yourself before the swim?
And who's saying who's dirty? If you had a shower before going to bed, and you didn't do anything dirty during the night, isn't that clean enough? Should you just splash about in the pool or should you do your seventy-five laps? How do you do laps in a kidney-shaped pool? People resent you lapping anyhow. They want to throw a ball to each other and when you plough through them they say things like, ‘Jesus, here comes Mark Spitz again'. If the lotion comes off when you swim, how can the pool be that clean anyhow? I tell you one thing – don't talk to kids at the pool. I asked a kid about his T-shirt and he took it off and got a touch of sun. All because I said – I forget what I said. I hope his mother cuts herself on coral and infection quickly sets in. If you've been sweating, should you just dive into the pool? I see people doing that. I point out to them that urine and sweat have the same chemical constituents. So much for hygiene. Do kids pee in the water? All the time. Is there a chemical that shows up whether the kids are peeing in the pool? No. Do parents teach their kids not to pee in the water? I doubt it. And would the kids take any notice? No. If there are more than five kids in the pool I don't go near it.

There is the lagoon but the Recreation Director gives orders to the attendants to raise the sunbathing buoys so that I can't get up on them. Petty. And I get runover by fun tigers and wind-surfers and bumper boats.

I'm trying to get a polo team together to give the place a bit of class. But there aren't any polo types here. I think I'll go up to the Club Privé tonight. I told them
I was the Night Club writer and I get a good deal up there, but would you drop them a note on letter-head paper? Thanks. I get 10 per cent at the Forbidden Room too. It wouldn't hurt to drop them a note also. I should perhaps go down to the Bar Rossi and catch the sunset. Maybe there'll be a few new people in who haven't seen the Somerset Maugham act. Maybe not. Decisions. Decisions. I could maybe just pay the 400 VTs and get the keys to the television set and just watch in-house movies. Then I'd have to clean the gunk off the screen. Maybe I'll just crack the one-litre bottle of Jack Daniel's and stay in my room (please leave all mentions of brand names in. Wink, wink).

Cheers.