Trules Reviews... the Decades, Part 4

The 21st Century

NOTE: You’re receiving Part 4, as you did Part 3, from my “Trules Rules” Substack, rather than my “Santa Fe Substack” because I feel it’s a little more appropriate, being more about Trules, than about Santa Fe. I also moved Parts 1 & 2 over too. No need to read them again, if you already have. Thanks.

“Y2K! Y2K!!”

Remember that? The commonly-used scare phrase and meme that was ubiquitously used to refer to a widespread computer programming shortcut that was expected to cause extensive havoc as the year changed from 1999 to 2000? But which instead, turned out to be, and which we all should have known, was only another short-lived hoax duped and bedeviled upon the gullible nature of mankind across our entire beautiful and lonely planet as we crashed magnificently into the next millennium.

Me? I was in Kauai, the most beautiful of the Hawaiian Islands, with my two best friends from LA, Todj and Michael. We’d been flown there, all expenses paid, by Todj’s “patron”, Catherine (Emmy) Davis, and as the New Year rang in, the three of us sat there, under the sheltering Hawaiian sky, full of sparkling stars and shooting new millennium meteors, waiting for the Y2k virus to wreak havoc upon us. The clock struck midnight… and nothing… occurred. Our iPhones didn’t blink. Our laptops didn’t burp. Everything remained… exactly… the same - except the calendar changed an entire FOUR numerals, as we, and the rest of the human race, limped, staggered, crawled, or leaped, depending on how you saw it — into our next one thousand years.

2000-2010 (53 - 63 years old)

Without a doubt, the biggest and most transformative thing that happened to me at the beginning of this new decade/century/millennium was - my wife-to-be, Surya’s, arrival in LA on August 3, 2001. That’s when the life of this curmudgeonly, dyed-in-the-wool, artist, educator, committedly uncommitted bachelor… changed… forever.

Let me explain.

In the summer of 2000, I decided to take off for the “Asian void” for the very first time. I flew 30 hours from LA to Bangkok, the sexy, exotic capital of Thailand, where they said,

You can get anything you want anytime you want it.

I was girlfriendless, childless, and without prospects. I had recently crossed the half-century mark. I was lonely. Girlfriends came and went. Recently, more went than came. I was still living in Echo Park, still paying rent, still under the illusion that I would be living at Lucretia Gardens “forever”. I was still teaching at USC, a popular professor; but who knew how much longer that would go on? I had survived cancer, disappointments in love, life, and loss… hell, that was life! But that was the thing, I was just carrying on.

The summer before, my Mom had died. Suddenly, from a stroke. I was there. I had just returned from a trip to Israel. As I said in my last post, the Moravs, my Israeli diplomat Servas hosts had twisted my arm to visit them in Jerusalem, and as per usual, after a trip abroad, I’d gone up north to Walnut Creek, outside San Francisco, for a week to visit and hang out with my parents.

However, on this visit, in the summer of 1999, my Mom wasn’t feeling well; she had an earache and headache. But since I was still packing my rain or shine, all-purpose, “ready for anything travel pharmacy”, I stubbornly convinced her to take some of my homeopathic drops to help her pain. She was resistant at first and I had to, sort of, twist her arm, but finally, she took the drops under her tongue and went to sleep.

She never woke up again. We found her unconscious in the morning and had her ambulanced to the hospital. She’d had a massive stroke and brain hemorrhage. She never regained consciousness. After three days on life support, the doctors told us that she’d never recover. So, we decided, as a family, to let her go. We took her off the breathing machine, and we watched her… expire.

I never forgave myself for my mother’s death, even though I know logically that there was absolutely no medical connection between my giving her the homeopathic remedies and her having the stroke immediately afterward. But that’s the way it happened.

I also know that my mother always blamed herself for my ending up “alone”, for never getting married, for not having a life partner, for not becoming a father. That somehow… her selfishness, her “not being a good enough mother”, that… something she did… was responsible for my being alone… something that caused her much grief and pain. And every time I’d introduce her to a new girlfriend, she would be so friendly, so enthusiastic, so welcoming, and then so disappointed… when the relationship ended, or “didn’t work out”. She finally said,

I don’t want to meet any more girlfriends, Eric.

And then she died

Off to the Asian void. Summer, 2000.

Bangkok, Thailand. Buddhas, sex shops, “anything you want, any time you want it”. From there, I take a dangerously, still-warring, bloody Khmer Rouge military road through rural Thailand across the Cambodian border to see the magnificent 11th-century Khmer temples of Angkor Wat in Seim Riep, onto Phnom Penh, the stylish third-world capital of Cambodia. Next, a speed boat down to Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) in South Vietnam, then north, up along the Vietnamese coast, shipping home traditional, carved wooden water puppets and kilos upon kilos of custom-made tuxedos, overcoats, dress suits, and designer shirts from the charming little tailor town of Hoi An. Then, all the way up to North Vietnam’s jam-packed, secret-alley, French-cuisined Communist Hanoi.

Next? Why not take the slow boat up the mighty Mekong for three dreamy days on a fanciful, once-in-a-lifetime sloop from northeast Thailand to Luang Prabang and Vientiane in southern Laos, then make my way down the long fertile strip of Malaysia, synchronicitously organizing my first Fulbright grant there for 2002? Then? How about jumping off the tip of Malaysia to visit the still “wild men of Borneo”, finally, keeping a promise to myself and my short-lived Colombian-Parisian documentarian soulmate, Ms. Villar, to meet “my destiny” in magical Bali, “Island of the Gods”?

I know, that’s a lot of ground to cover, and as they say, “the devil is in the details”. But rather than give you all the beautiful and gory details here, I refer those of you who may be interested to my travel website, “e-travels with e. trules”, where I have many, many posts on the tales above. And for those of you who might want to listen to some of these colorful adventures (and misadventures), please go to my Podcast of the same name.

The “real world in the first part of the 21st century?”

The story of the early 2000s is told using the words of technology, globalism, and the concept of a “one-world digital economy”, but obviously, the biggest single event occurred on September 11, 2001, when Osama Bin Laden masterminded and coordinated the Islamic terrorist group Al-Qaeda’s series of four terrorist attacks against the United States, during which both Twin Towers at the World Trade Center were destroyed. And just like after the United States’ twin atomic bomb attacks on Japan in August,1945, the world has never been the same since.

Many of you may have heard before - how I met my wife-to-be - then calling herself “Wati” - by accident and incident - in front of an ATM in Kuta Beach, Bali in June, 2000.

Kuta, being the last place on the island I wanted to be, and the most touristic, I was simply lost, waiting to fly back home. I was asking two random strangers, the first two I saw, for directions. One of the two, the pretty young Batak girl who had left the island of Sumatra to work and “expand her horizons”, didn’t speak much English, but having caught the bule’s (Indonesian for gringo), my attention, she smiled and generously attempted to point me in the right direction. I smiled back but apparently, still looked confused.

The young girl said,

I so you. (“I’ll show you.”)

And off we went.

And…

...she’s been “so-ing” me ever since……

It was a crazy and ridiculous roll of the dice for the both of us. We’d met for one night only, that night in Kuta Beach, before I had to fly back to Bangkok and LA the next morning. She spoke almost no English. She didn’t know who Bob Dylan, Richard Nixon, or Martin Luther King were. I was 31 years older than she was. We had almost nothing in common. Yet after I went back to visit her over Christmas, 2000, and we mimed and fought our way into each other’s hearts and consciousnesses, we decided to take the leap. I would help her get a passport and visa and she would come to visit me in LA. Nothing more or less.

As I said, she arrived barely a month before 9/11, on a tourist visa. If it had indeed been a month later, after 9/11, there’s no doubt in my mind, that she, being from the most populous Muslim country in the world, Indonesia, “Wati” would have never been allowed entrance into America, my life would have never been the same, and that I certainly would never be writing this post. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if I wasn’t by now, a bitter lonely old man. And for that, I must say, sardonically,

Thank you, Mr. Bin Laden! Good timing.

Not to say that Wati’s arrival in America wasn’t challenging and her learning curve steep. They were. Tremendously so. I remember, all too well: her staring up at the tall Los Angeles skyscrapers, completely overwhelmed, looking at all the LA women with their glossy red lipstick and high high heels, even walking into “her” new big house in Echo Park and meeting her new “giant anjing” (dog)! She felt soooo out of place, especially with all my kind, solicitous LA friends, all being gray-haired, all thirty years older than her, and all speaking to her in a language she didn’t understand at all. She had no job, she didn’t drive a car, and we lived on a steep, steep hill. Did I say the learning curve was steep? Did she feel isolated? I’d say so.

“Wati” enrolls in Evans Community Adult School”, the largest English learning school in America, conveniently located right down the street on Sunset Boulevard between Echo Park and downtown LA. Taking classes 4-6 hours a day, she meets fellow immigrants from Senegal, Brazil, Thailand; doctors, lawyers, educated professionals, blue-collar workers, wannabe Americans who study hard, want to learn English, get jobs, become citizens, and send money back home to families, just like generations of immigrants before them, just like my grandparents who entered NYC via Ellis Island, just as immigrant have since the birth of our nation. All living and believing in the “American Dream”. Seeing THIS, makes even this hard-core, skeptical intellectual NY liberal, government-damning Trules - start believing in America again. Start seeing the American Dream alive and well, in action, in the living and breathing present of his wife-to-be, and in all her hard-working immigrant friends.

Soon, Wati has her first job tending bar at a Thai joint near Hollywood Boulevard. She’s recommended, of course, by a pal from Evans, and she serves, so to speak, “under the table”, while it takes me six years to do all the legal immigration work to get her a green card, which eventually will make her a US “permanent resident”. We wait on long lines together in downtown LA on Spring Street at 5 a.m. that wrap around the Federal Building. We attend hard-core interviews with USCIS staffers who ask us “which side of the bed do you sleep on?”, and “where do you keep our toothbrushes?”, just business as usual for an overwhelmed department that’s often being scammed by phony marriages and more than its share of grifters trying to become U.S. permanent residents and citizens.

Along the way, “Wati” becomes “Surya” (her full Indonesian name being “Suryawati” = “girl of the sun”), and bartending leads to restaurant serving at some of the best restaurants in LA, and to catering with Wolfgang Puck, and to serving “Meryl, Beyonce, and Brad” at the Oscars, and to going to x-ray technology school, and to buying her first car (a little red Geo Metro), and to sending her younger sister back in Sumatra to nursing school and onto a self-supporting career in nursing, and most impressively of all, to converting this lone wolf stubborn old man into a - somewhat flexible and amenable, loveable and loving, partner and husband. Impressive indeed. Wouldn’t you agree?

And yeah… we get married.

On Valentine’s Day, 2003. At LA City Hall. With our friend, Todj as our Best Man, our only guest, and as our Greek-fisherman-capped chauffeur. (smiley face)

The World:

2003 — Using a never-verified “weapons of mass destruction” premise as an alibi, President George W. Bush sends American combat troops to invade Iraq, commencing the first stage of the Iraq War.

2004 — Facebook is formed by Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard.

2005 — Terrorists hit London, leaving 52 dead and 700 injured.

2007 — The global financial crisis, the worst since the Great Depression, hits, and Steve Jobs and Apple launch the first iPhone.

2008 — Barack Obama wins the 2008 election, becoming the first African American President in US history, and for perhaps a brief moment in time, Americans, and others all around the planet, believe in his campaign promise of “hope”.

On a slightly delayed honeymoon, Wati and I go to South America right after my academic year ends in May, 2003. We’re lucky to get her a “re-entry permit” from the Department of Homeland Security (USCIS) while her immigration paperwork is in progress over the next six years.

The only problem in going to Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador is that “Mr. Experienced Traveler” (that would be me) forgets that balmy summer in LA, Europe, even China, above the Equator, is actually freezing cold below the Equator in the dead of winter, especially at 12,000 feet above sea level in Cuzco, Peru at ancient Machu Picchu and at 14,000 feet above sea level at storied Lake Titicaca in Bolivia. Not to mention the soroche (altitude sickness) we both get, or the tragi-comic, but near-fatal, clash of a new marriage finding itself twisting its way through the Ecuadorian Andes to El Nariz del Diablo (“Nose of the Devil”). We survive three months roughing it in The Andes - barely!

Then, after a year off from travel in 2004 when Greek-capped Todj twists my arm to create a pilot film and video program at Washington Prep High School in South Central LA, I go to Granada, Spain in southern Andalusia in the summer of 2005 to present an “academic paper” on USC’s dime, dancing flamenco with gypsies at night and unwisely crossing over the Morocco border by foot to the mythical North African town of Chefchoauen. The next year, 2006, I also go solo (while Surya stays home in LA to keep her multiple jobs) to Southern India (Mumbai, Kochi, and Kerala), - on an invitation to meet my mysterious German friend Stefan, but he never shows up!

The next summer, 2007, just a year away from a hip replacement, while Beijing prepares for its heralded 2008 Olympics, I somehow miraculously get invited by Willie Tsao, director of the Bejing LDTX Dance Company, the Joffrey of China, to teach a company workshop, and Surya joins me to see the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, and the Terra Cotta Warriors in Xi’an. The high-speed trains are fast and the cities overflow with people. They say if you eat a different kind of local Chinese food for every day for your entire life, you’ll still have tried only a fraction of the varieties of food cooked in China!

In 2009, with a brand new titanium right hip, we visit Cuba, via Jamaica, mon, still a few years before Americans are allowed easy entry to Fidel’s Communist fortress, but the truth is we prefer the happy-go-lucky vibe of the poor Jamaican people to the uptight money-crunched attitude of the desperate Cubans, who actually cancel our bed and breakfast reservation the day of our arrival when another guest offers them more money. The exhaust-fuming antique American cars, the doctors having to drive taxis to survive, the daily loaf of bread Fidel leaves at every compadre’s doorstep… sad.

I know, once again, a lot of miles covered by one Batak (Surya’s Sumatran tribe) and one Ashkenasy (I leave that for you to figure out). If you want to read more, please visit my travel website, “e-travels with e. trules”, where I have many posts on the tales above. And for those of you who might want to listen to some of these stories, please go to my Podcast of the same name.

As for “Why travel?”, as my podcast asks? Why leave the comfort and familiarity of home?

For a change of scenery? A change of pace? For rest and relaxation? Or maybe to push your boundaries? Some new food? For the exotic and different? To discover another land? A different culture’s art, history, ideas?

Or for something else?

What about this?

Travel is an amazing elixir. Enticing, adventurous… mind-altering… even addicting.

Travel expands your consciousness, stretches your horizons; disrupts your habitual patterns and behavior.

Travel broadens your perspective, refreshes your worldview, and hopefully even, cures your myopia.

What do you think?

I think these posts are getting toooooooooooooooooo long.

I’ll stop here and continue in two weeks.

This Decade Project is taking “a while”…..

Hasta la vista, Babies,

Trules

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