He Told Me
It was near the end of a gray afternoon when I met Gerald. It had been raining steadily in Kuala Lumpur, not the noise and excitement of a tropical downpour, but the incessant droning of slow winter rain. A rainy day. Actually I had enjoyed it, wandering by myself, photographing water beading off the iron structures of the old train station and pedestrains huddled under umbrellas at bus stops. The rain made everything quiet, or maybe it’s just that I hadn’t talked to anyone for a while. I was similarly walking in solitude near the flag pole in Merdeka Square (at 100 meters, the tallest in the world apparently) when Gerald approached me.
He wanted to know if I was looking for the tourist infromation center. I wasn’t, but he had seen me staring at the closed entrance to Putra Plaza shopping center, an underground concourse beneath the square. That’s where the information center used to be, and the Lonely Planet still says it’s there. But the mall is closed now. “Those stupid Muslims built it too close to the river. The whole thing flooded a few months ago.” I nodded and looked more closely at my companion, now walking with me across the street, uninvited but not yet obtrusive. He was a middle aged Indian man, slim and dark, in business attire. But his clothes were grubby, the bundle of newspapers and old magazines he held turned out to be fished out of the trash, and he was missing most of his teeth. The few that were left were brown. He smelled, but only slightly. He was homeless, well groomed and poor.
Yes, I’d been to the Twin Towers. No, I hadn’t been to Menara Kuala Lumpur, the other big tower here. “Don’t do it,” he told me, “it’s a waste of money.” Apparently you paid 15 ringgit to ride the evelator before discovering that it only gets you to the second level. It’s more money to go to the top. Everything is always more money, he said. Instead, he pointed to the Maybank tower in Chinatown. You walk in there in the morning, he told me, walk across the lobby and act like you know exactly what you’re doing. Get in the elevator, and go to the 48th floor. There’s a gym there, that’s what those big windows are at the top. There is a girl who works at the gym. She’s very nice, ask her very nicely and she’ll give you a key to the roof. The best view in KL, for free. But the trick was to go in the morning before the business people filled the gym, and walk across the lobby purposefully so security didn’t stop you. He’d sent hundreds of tourists there over the years, and none had had a problem.
He pointed to an area near the central market. “Don’t go there after dark.” Why? Dangerous? “No, but there are a lot gays there.” That’s where the gays hung out. In a bar called Liquid. “They see people like you, they’re very agressive.” He told me that they’d buy me beers. Free beers all night. Then I should excuse myself and go to the toilet. The toilet had a back door, and I should use it. “One German guy, they bought him beers from 8 to 11, many free beer, then he get up to go to the toilet” — hand gesture here — “and just leave.” But be careful with those gays. “They’re very oversexed.”
Otherwise KL is safe, he told me. You can walk wherever after dark. But don’t ever go to a Malaysian’s house. There’s a scam going around. Someone approaches you and says they have a sister going to your country. Unless you’re American. “Americans are the best con men in the world, they won’t fall for it.” But otherwise, they’d start asking you all these questions about your country. What was it like there. Whether a Malaysian credit card would work. They’d get you to show them your credit card, to make sure you had one. Then they’d call a taxi and drive you to their house. They’d talk with you the whole way to distract you, make sure you didn’t know where it was. But when you got there the sister wouldn’t be home. The mother, you see, would be in the hospital due to a heart attack.
We had stopped walking. We were standing in the road in fact. I didn’t volunteer anything about my experience that first day in KL. I moved back on to the side walk. He moved with me. I invited him to finish the story. He went on. He told me that an older man would be there instead. They would show you every hospitality. The man would turn out to be a dealer in a casino. He would somtimes deal for a rich lady from Brunei. Abroad by herself, husband somewhere else. And he would show you the most wonderful close-up card work. “You want an ace, he gives you an ace.” They would invite you to gamble against the Brunei woman, he would fix the game for you. “You tell them you don’t have any money, they say no problem, you play with their money, you split the profits.”
I invited Gerald to sit down on the curb. Traffic roared by. I knew all this already. It was the part that came next that interested me, the part that happens if you agree to their scheme. I said nothing. He told me: if you did it, you’d find yourself playing against a fat woman dripping with jewels. First you’d lose a little money. Then you’d win more. Then you’d lose it all again. Then you’d win a lot more. The woman would offer a very large bet, and at the secret signal from the dealer, you’d accept. You’d lose. Surprise! The woman would decide to quit then. She’d demand payment, much more than you had. The dealer would suddenly be scarce. Anyway how could you talk to him without revealing your guilt to the lady? You’d plead poverty. She’d point out the existence of your credit card, and promptly drive you off to buy her the equivalent amount of gold jewelry.
I let the penny drop. “Exactly that happened to me, but I said no.” He wanted to know if it was a young guy, handsome guy. Yes, and he identified himself as Ramlee. “Bullshit, he’s no Muslim.” In fact, he told me, they were Fillipinos, Christians. Well, Michael then, one of his relatives had called him Michael. “Yes, Mike. I know him.” He had the guy’s phone number; he pulled a scrap of paper out of his wallet and I pulled my PDA out of my bag. The paper read “MIKE 66520603″, my entry was “Ramlee 016-652-0603.” I had guessed at the hyphenation; and I didn’t know that all mobile numbers in KL start with 01. “Sometimes he takes me out, buys me a meal.” Affiable. But he was known around town as a crook; once these guys beat him up and took 800 ringgit from his wallet. And he wouldn’t ever let any of the tourists take his picture, that’s how you knew he was a criminal.
They had conned Germans, Canadians, and especially young Japanese women. One Japanese girl had lost 32,000 ringitt; she was on a plane home the next day. Only once had they been outsmarted, by a Belgian. He had heard about the scam from a travelling friend. When he arrived in KL, he had only 2 ringitt in his pocket. He checked into the hostel, told them he’d pay later, he had to change some money first. Sure enough, an hour later he got picked up by these guys. Went through with the scam, played crooked cards until he was up $800 USD. At which point, “he just picked up the money and put it in his pocket.” Then he threw a chair across the room and demanded that they open the door and let him go. Or he’d start screaming. “Neighbors in Malaysia are busybodies, and they already knew these guys were foreigners. If they called the police — oh boy.” The Belgian got away with it, he told me, and went to the cops. He told his story, handed over the cash. “The cop was very nice, he said, just go, keep the money, don’t come back. He was a good man.”
“But I’m no foreigner,” he told me. 100% Malaysian. He dug out his government issued ID smartcard. The picture looked younger, I stared at it. “100% that’s my face.” His full name was Gerald John Baptist. He went to church every week. But they didn’t like him there. Sometimes people held their nose. Sometimes women held their purses. “It’s crazy! How can I snatch their bag and run? By the time I reach the exit, crowd of people there to stop me.” He shook his head in disgust. A huge tour bus went by, spraying us with diesel fumes.
He sold maps to tourists on the street. He dug newspapers out of the trash and read the business section, even though he didn’t understand it. He was trying to learn. He was trying to make ends meet. And maybe someday get a passport. He had a plan. “I want to go to Singapore. They have a Salvation Army there. And I can work doing labor during the day, then go to Salvation Army at night, I hope they can be my familiy.” He lived alone on the street. All he wanted was to be loved, he told me, in those exact words without any trace of irony. “Foreigners, they don’t like Singapore. Too many rules and regulations. But when you’re poor, you don’t care about rules and regulations. You just care about where your next meal is coming from.”
Just then there was a THWACK from the near sidewalk. I turned my head to see a young man holding an unbrella, walking away from a crippled pigeon now lying just off the curb. I hadn’t seen what had happened. He said the man had hit the bird, in flight, with the ubmrella. “Muslim man. They’re all the same.” He explained that their religion is marked on their ID cards — “it says I-S-L-M” — and they could go to the mosque on Fridays and each recieve 180 ringitt. But not if you were a Christian. “Then they spend it on drugs. Under the bridge.” He gestured at where the road went over the canal, its dirty brown water the sorry remains of the once mighty river that KL was founded on. Then these men smoke up and the police stand right above, doing nothing. “Islam is supposed to be a brotherhood, but it’s bullshit,” he told me. The pigeon flopped around helplessly on the road with its broken wing. I wanted a car to run over it but the traffic wasn’t coming close enough.
Every morning he got up early. He had to rise before the police did their sweep. When they found homeless people, they took them and dropped them off ten miles outside of KL. “They tell you, ‘don’t come back! We don’t want the tourists to see you!’” But he had outsmarted them, with his dingy suit. “When the police see me I hold my newspaper up and walk very fast.” His camoflague among the banks and office towers was to be a business man. He did look like a businessman too, an unsucessful one with a shitty job perhaps. And he was articulate, polite. He could pull it off. But in reality he lived by the flagpole. He sold maps to tourists. He offered me a map of KL, but I already had that one. He was 50, and on the street if he got five more years he’d be lucky, he told me. That’s why he needed to get out, to go to Singapore. He was a good Christian, he went to church every Sunday.
“The bird is still alive.” I had noticed it too, wincing at its feeble movements out of the corner of my eye. “What should we do?” he wanted to know. We had to kill it. I couldn’t do it. The best I could think of was to try to crush its skull, fast and painless. I couldn’t do it. But Gerald found a lone paving stone in the shrubs behind the sidewalk. He picked up the struggling bird and brought it to the dirt. He held up the brick. “Like this?” he asked. I told him to hit very hard, and to make sure he hit the skull exactly. My stomach turned. His didn’t. The bird flopped around. The brick came down, missing horribly as it crashed into the bird’s back. It struggled more. He held it with one hand, and hit its head again and again. I was hoping that one quick blow would flatten its skull and kill it instantly. But the skull didn’t break, only bloodied and deformed. The small body convulsed as he put the bloodied brick down. “Sometimes they live quite a long time,” he said. I thought of the proverbial chicken with its head cut off. We watched. He tried to reassure me. “He’s in a coma now, no pain.” Even so he asked me if he should hit it again. I wanted to say yes, but I couldn’t watch any more. In a minute it didn’t matter because the bird stopped moving. Passersby wondered what were staring at, on the ground behind the sidewalk.
I told him that once I had found a bird with a broken leg, and had taken it on the streetcar to the Humane Society. I couldn’t bear to kill it. He told me I was very smart, to think of killing the bird, then and now. I told him he was very courageous to actually do it. He asked me how old I was when I carried the bird. Seven. He was impressed. People here weren’t like that, he told me. “If someone saved a bird here, it would be a headline.”
I thanked him, and gave him 10 ringgit for his information.
December 10th, 2005 at 8:15 pm
a beautiful story. my favorite writing of yours.