Authors: Jon Cole
Back To “The World”
I got accepted to Arkansas State University and started classes in the Fall of 1968. Departure morning before the flight from Bangkok to Travis Air Force Base in California saw me as a dorky-looking little dude in black horned-rim glasses, dressed in a light blue sport coat and goofy clip-on tie heading to my new life as an adult back in “the World”. Or so my dad had told me. I did not really feel adult, but I was going to do my best to fake it.
My family, my best friend Dennis and girlfriend Bobbie (still righteously pissed off from the night before and rightfully so) were there to see me off. The goodbyes were exchanged in the military departure lounge adjacent to the arrival hall where the first sergeant had delivered his orientation speech only two short years earlier. As the plane left the ground, I looked out the window. The patchwork of farm fields and rice paddies threaded by canals which surrounded the sprawling city of Bangkok grew smaller till it was gone. It felt like my heart was being ripped from my chest. Most of the GIs on the plane were clapping and cheering like it was a celebration of escape from purgatory. I felt sorry for them again, and I always will.
Twenty hours later, the Saturn Airways 707 descended onto the runway at Travis Air Force Base just outside San Francisco. Once again, the GI passengers exploded into a riotous expression of jubilation. We were back in “the World”.
As I exited the plane, I was struck by an acrid, toxic smell: the smog stench of Southern California combined with the fuel odors of the sprawling American Air Force base permeated the still, warm night air.
Once inside the terminal, I gathered my bags and headed to the customs line. It was only then that I remembered I was smuggling in marijuana. The customs agent looked at me, stifled a grin and waved me through without even looking at the contents of my two suitcases which I had opened for him. Minutes later I was on the bus headed to San Francisco International Airport for my flight via Dallas to Little Rock, where I would be greeted by my huge extended family the following day. Stepping off the bus at the airport, the GIs from Bangkok and I went our separate ways. I was wondering how many of them had also smuggled some ganja.
Walking through the airport, I was half carrying half dragging my heavy bags. I passed a group of hippies, two dudes and two chicks sitting in the concourse. The hippie phenomenon had really taken off since I had gone to Thailand. Other than a few travelers I had met on the train trip from Bangkok to Vientiane, Laos the year before, these were the only hippies I had ever seen. They spoke to me, saying something like “Hey, brother … peace, man” or some other such hippie lingo while rising to help me tote my suitcases whose combined bulk weighed more than myself. Since the counter I was heading to was still quite some distance away, I welcomed the help. It struck me though that they were not helping me simply for the sake of peace and love.
When we arrived at the ticket counter, the girls asked in unison for some spare change. “Spare change” was something I did not have and, in fact, had never heard of. I was not going to give them one of the twenty-dollar bills Dad had given me for my trip. I told them to wait a minute and that I had something better than spare change. Before I checked my bags at the counter, I opened one suitcase and removed a pack of Falling Rain cigarettes from the unopened carton. I then checked my bags in and received my boarding pass for my flight leaving in an hour or so.
The hippies followed me outside to the top level parking deck. From there, you could see the lights of San Francisco in the distance. I opened the pack and told them it was ganja as I handed a filtered menthol cigarette to each of them and lit one for myself. From the quizzical look on their faces, it occurred to me that they did not know that word. “It’s reefer,” I elaborated. The air that before had smelled acridly foreign now smelled like Thailand for a few moments as the smoke wafted up.
One of the dudes smelled his cigarette and made a scrunched-up face. “What is this? You said that you had some pot,” he whined.
I said, “Just light it up.”
The whole scene soon became reminiscent of years before on the roof of the Grace Hotel, only without the Thai music. They each lit their cigarettes and started puffing away. The dude who questioned what I had handed him coughed after a few puffs and said, “Yuck … this reefer has tobacco in it.” That was the last peep I heard out of any of them. Minutes later, after I had finished my smoke, I recognized their silent slack-jawed demeanor. Their cigarettes had gone out and they each had stupefied stares on their faces. I left them standing there, well knowing how they felt.
Back inside the terminal, I was thirsty and needed change for a twenty. I’ve often thought of how preposterous their recounting of this story later would sound to other hippies: meeting a really dorky-looking kid with short hair at the airport who, instead of spare change, gave them a filtered menthol-flavored cigarette from a package with Chinese looking writing on it … and then the spaced-out stupor that had followed their sampling the cigarettes. Some people surely would believe them since you can’t make up that kind of crazy story.
University Daze
Attending Arkansas State University in the fall of 1968, I was trying to fit in and get with the higher education program. At the end of each day, I would return to my dorm room and take a ganja cigarette from my ever dwindling supply of Falling Rain. Upon firing one up, I would soon be wishing that I was back in Bangkok.
Freshman year at ASU was boring even with the pretense of attempting to enjoy college/party life. In spite of not really trying and being stoned half the time, my grades were above average, particularly my English classes.
I believe I had Mrs Saluga, my 12
th
grade English teacher at the International School Bangkok, to thank for that. She had been so engaging that I always wanted to hear what she was saying. I never imagined the admiration was mutual, since it often felt as if I surely incurred her displeasure somehow. But the passing grades she gave me in her classes proved that she was satisfied with my scholastic qualities, if not my moral character.
In the basement of our dormitory was an exercise room where I met another freshman student practicing a Karate
kata.
After an introductory conversation, he invited me to accompany him to classes at the Kang Rhee Tae-Kwon-Do dojo in Memphis, Tennessee. The trip from Jonesboro, Arkansas to Memphis was only about one hour. Once there, a surreal coincidence transpired.
After filling out a contract for a once-a-week training session with no idea of how I was going to pay for it, I met Master Kang Rhee. During the introduction, I presented my martial arts ID card that my Karate teacher in Bangkok had given me, showing that I was a brown belt in his school. I then said that I would be happy to begin my training under him as a white belt. The reaction to this was emotionally explosive. “What? … Myung Soo Kim!” he exclaimed before retrieving a framed photo of himself and my previous master from his wall of pictures. The photo showed two young men assuming full rotation reverse punch stances in front of a rock building. Identifying the young man pictured there as my master practically brought tears to his eyes. Master Rhee told me that he and Kim had many years before been students together in Seoul. In response to his inquiries, I told him about his long lost friend’s current endeavors in Bangkok and Switzerland.
Master Kang Rhee sent me off to spar with one of his instructors. He then asked how much Master Kim had charged for instruction. “Only 20 dollars a month,” I replied, and the cost of my contract was instantly lowered to that amount. I began my training under him as brown belt.
Later that year, my former teacher Grand Master Myung Soo Kim became the founder of Tae-Kwon-Do in Switzerland. The following year, Master Kang Rhee was contracted as the martial arts instructor for a rather famous student.
When I was seven years old, I had once seen Elvis Presley from a distance when he was processed into the Army at Fort Chaffee in western Arkansas, where my father was then a company commander. Twelve years later, I again saw Elvis at the Kang Rhee self-defense studio in Memphis; Master Kang Rhee had become his instructor. I have no idea how much he was paying for his training, but I suspect it was more than the $20 a month I was paying.
Summertime Blues And Dues
My first college school year was pathetically measured out by the number of Falling Rain cigarettes I had left. Fortunately, the late spring of 1969 brought a package, courtesy of my younger brother Steve, God bless him, posted from Thailand without my asking. When I opened it I found a bundle of ganja – two dozen Thai sticks.
That summer, my long time ISB friend and fellow House of Lek companion Dennis came down to Little Rock from the college he was attending in Kentucky. My mom had moved back to Little Rock while Dad was back and forth from Thailand to Vietnam. My brother Steve had gotten the whole family (excluding my father) deported from Thailand by the State Department because of his heroin use. He was just one of many ISB kids who were found to be using drugs and had brought the same humiliating fate upon their families that year.
Failing to find good summer jobs, Dennis and I went from Little Rock to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, where his father was stationed. Sergeant. Major K, a man you did not say “no” to, already had summer jobs lined up for us: washing pots and pans at the NCO club. We obligingly accepted. Dennis’ older brother Marvin, who had no high regard for me or his brother, would take us to Georgetown in his VW Bug on the weekends, drop us off, then pick us up later and berate us with his silence on the ride home. I always admired him despite his disdain for two stoners like us.
We spent the Woodstock festival weekend in Ocean City, Maryland, as Dennis and a couple of other Bahn Pee Lek aficionados were too stoned to make the trip up to New York state for the now legendary rockfest. A week later, I called my mother, who said she was on her way to Columbus, Ohio, to see my brother Steve. Steve was in a hospital ICU, having tried to commit suicide seppuku kari style while on LSD. He claimed that a face on a record album cover that looked like our father had told him that the “good people” were rising up to kill all the “bad people”. He decided that he would rather kill himself than have his own father do the deed.
He recovered, but years later, after a life spent in a schizophrenic torment, he would be shot dead, fleeing from a drugstore robbery. I have always considered it an unforgivable, cowardly act to shoot Steve in the back as he fled the scene.
The following Fall semester back at Arkansas State University was really boring. I tried fraternity life for a bit as an Alpha Tau Omega, but it was very unfulfilling. I had nothing in common with my “brothers” – I mean zilch.
My sweet little girlfriend Karen was also an overseas army brat and felt just as out of place as I did. Having spent the prime years of her childhood in France where her father, a US Army sergeant major, was stationed before he had retired to a tiny town in southeast Missouri, she did her last year of high school there in Missouri, where the local kids called her “Frenchie”. She was the only person I had any manner of real affinity with during those two years at ASU, which only made sense.
An “overseas brat” or “third-culture kid” is one who spends a significant time as a child in one or more cultures other than their native culture, then melds elements of those cultures with their own into a third culture. As kindred third-culture kids, Karen and I had more in common with one another than we did with kids who had spent their whole lives in America. Like most third-culture kids, after a childhood spent in other cultures, adjusting to our home country was a difficult experience almost always doomed to failure.
Having quit school after that second year and following a short three-month stint as a pseudo-hippie, I gained the dubious distinction of being the first person arrested in Arkansas for selling LSD. My dad quickly flew back from Thailand with my bail money in hand. But I spurned his generous gesture and opted for a plea bargain that garnered me a three-year sentence with the guarantee of quick commutation of the sentence to parole eligibility.
While waiting in lockup, I had volunteered to participate in the prison farm pecan harvest. I thought that the chance to get out in the field with the work crew would give me both a break from the jailhouse and the opportunity to smoke the joint I had managed to get smuggled in on a visit. There was no way I could have gotten away with lighting it up inside the cell block.
Once in the pecan orchard I looked for my chance. To relieve yourself, you had to first get permission from the guard on horseback, then go to the edge of the orchard to do your business. Having acquired the guard’s permission, I scurried to the bushes, squatted over a shallow hole made with my boot heel, pulled out my joint and started puffing.
Much to my dismay, a large black prisoner came and squatted but a few feet in front of me and commenced doing his business. He smelled my cigarette over all the other smelly distractions he had made. Turning to me, he held out his hand. With no real choice I could see but to share, I handed him the joint. He turned with it just as I heard the guard’s horse getting louder as it came closer. The man in front of me heard it as well and flipped the joint back to me as he stood up. I hid it under my foot and then realized to my horror that I had no fecal matter in my hole to show the guard my honest efforts there.
Then a clever idea hit me. I reached forward, intending only to borrow some dump from my fellow prisoner. In my haste, and due to its solid consistency, I came away with the whole damn thing. In those days, an Arkansas prison guard could get away with striking a prisoner, given the appropriate circumstances of course. This was one of those, I guess.
The guard arrived. Upon inspection, he found the black man’s hole lacking any content and struck him across his upper arm with a five-foot long hickory switch which he carried for just such occasions. All the time, he was cursing him, using a spray of racial slurs. My fellow prisoner looked down bewildered as he examined his empty hole, then glared at me, and then down at his waste matter resting in my hole. Without a word exchanged, we both continued the day’s work, me being careful to avoid close contact for fear that he would seek to avenge the excrement theft.
As the late autumn sun began to set, we made our way to the prison farm bus. When my fellow inmate got in line right behind me, I turned and gave him the remainder of our shared joint, and my apology was accepted. Being absolved by my victim was not enough though. I have since then lived with the fact that, in the literal more than the colloquial sense, I was now indeed a “turd burglar”.
Less than a month later, I was granted parole. I returned to my college career, only this time at the College of the Ozarks at Clarksville, Arkansas. It was a beautiful, tiny college tucked amongst giant oak trees in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains where I was pleasantly surprised by the presence of Thai students, lots of Thais, twenty something out of a total enrollment of only five hundred students. It was fun to meet and greet them in their own language.
Against all odds, I knew one of these fellows from Bangkok: Tom Sukaratana, whom many of the ISB students had known as “Tommy the Thai”. He had been the guitar player for a band called The Settlers that played at many of the functions the American kids attended, including our senior prom. He told me that some years earlier, two Thai students had come to Clarksville, and ever since, others had followed. All the Thai students there were from upper-class families. During the two years that I was there, they tried to help me with my Thai language skills since most of what I had learned at Lek’s was, it appeared, not always the polite form of the language.
The coincidences were only just beginning. A year later in Fayetteville, Arkansas, while I was waiting to complete the final month of my parole, Dennis came to visit from Virginia, bringing with him a pound of Columbian marijuana. On the first night he was there, we went to a dance club to have a few beers and, incredibly, ran into our old ISB friend and fellow Bahn Pee Lek habitué Mike, who was just back from his second tour in Vietnam.
Mike was wilder than ever, simply cruising aimlessly around the US in a shiny new gray Pontiac Bonneville with a tall beautiful girl named Patti. It seemed like he was running headlong towards or away from something. We spent a week trying in vain to out-drink and out-smoke each other until we had rehashed all the high points of our former glory days as high school kids in Bangkok. Talk of what we had actually done since Thailand was limited. That only made sense: we were all going nowhere and going there fast. Now and again, whenever the conversation lagged, you could fleetingly see that thousand-yard stare briefly cross Mike’s face.
When my parole was finished, I followed some gal to New Orleans, came back to Arkansas, and we wound up married for nine years. That is all I have to say about that.
During those years, my brother Steve taught me silversmithing, which he had learned while living in a commune in Taos, New Mexico, that was into things Native American. (All the residents of the commune were peyote-eating hippie silversmiths.)
As a consequence, I started my own little tourist-trap jewelry store in Branson, Missouri and met a tiny, lovely lady named Dori, who was living in a primitive log cabin in the woods nearby. Her strong, earthy and outspoken demeanor reminded me of a young version of Granny Moses from “The Beverly Hillbillies” TV show. Incredibly, she had also gone to the International School Bangkok and had likewise been a visitor to Bahn Pee Lek when she had lived in Bangkok only a few years earlier. Dori was an intellectually tasty breath of fresh air whose companionship I sought often. It was nice to have a kindred spirit and fellow ISBer close by.
Having moved from Branson to Tulsa, Oklahoma, I opened a jewelry store there. In my free time, I taught martial arts at a dojo there in exchange for training under the dojo’s famous martial arts master, Dr Roger Greene. At the Oklahoma City PKA invitational, I won first runner-up national champion in my division. Typically, my father reminded me that “second place” really means “first place loser”.
Once again, Dennis had come to visit, and at a pizza restaurant two blocks from my house we ran into JoHanna, another ISB friend. We spent that evening smoking reefer and reminiscing about Thailand. Bangkok was now almost constantly on my mind. Not too long after that, I lost the lease on my jewelry store, sold almost everything I owned and went to Thailand to start an import-export business in the gemstone trade.