Brother Smithy Takes One For The Team

pjdillon@attglobal.net
I’m not going to say that I knew Milton Smith all that well because I didn’t.
We met once, about six weeks ago, across the bar at the Texas Bar-B-Q, a little-known buleh (albino) joint down at the hind’s teat of the frenetic Jl. Buncit Raya just as it slaps up against the controlled mayhem of the Jakarta ring road.
I can’t even tell you what his exact relationship is with the Texas Bar-B-Q though I’m told he was the owner of the place, that has somehow slipped below the general expat radar here in Eden. Sweet 16 oz sirloins, cold beer from the tap and a staff trained in the vagaries of dealing with a bunch of professional foreigners: hard to believe it took four years to end up in this friggin joint.
All’s I know is that when Nick the Suit and I were the only ones leaning over the Q’s U-shaped planks skulling pints of Bintang one recent Friday, that he was there, all hollowed out and hoarse-throated in a Harley shirt and jeans and, if my patchy post-malarial memory serves, drinking beer with a smoke in his hand.
Of course I may be wrong about the specifics because I wasn’t really watching him too closely as the after-work crowd, which runs from mallet-headed oil-patch workers to corporates whose suits that would set the average Indo back a year’s salary, started filing in. Always the voyeur I suppose.
The smoke and brew I picture might have been a lifetime’s nicotine-tainted negative, the flashed silhouettes of Hiroshima pedestrians thrown up a micro-second after the big blow, a shadow image, the result of protracted decades of abuse. How appropriate in the land of wayang kulit shadow puppets to be able to explain things away so simply.
Despite that air of spent-ness he croaked a “Hello” when Nick introduced me as the newest member of the ex-pat Harley Davidson-riding clan.
So, Smithy didn’t make it to the (Harley Owners Group) HOG-fest fundraiser a couple of weeks ago on account of being so ill, the first time he’d missed it, I’m told.
Died at about dinner time this evening. Cirrhosis. Been sick for a while.
I know he was a Texan, and I wish I had a few words of my own to offer to a drunk I didn’t know but I’m sitting at home and it’s rolling rapidly towards 2 a.m. and I made an executive decision not to roll down to the Q for the first wake because I’m not part of the inner circle.
So I’m gonna scalp some hard, outlaw words for the guy, from the intro to Malcolm Lowrie’s Under the Volcano, a book about a drunk. This is that merciless bastard and wannabe biker John Bunyan, writing in Grace Abounding for the Chief of Sinners in an age long before the V-twin:
“Now, I blessed the condition of the dog and toad, yea, gladly would I have been in the condition of the dog or horse, for I knew they had no soul to perish under the everlasting weight of Hell or Sin, as mine was like to do. Nay, and though I saw this and was broken to pieces with it, yet that which added to my sorrow was that I could not find with all me could that I did desire deliverance.”
It’s a bitch, the sendoff I chose for you Smithy, but we never got the chance to know more, and if I’ve take liberties, sue me. But I figured maybe you wouldn’t mind too much if I ran hard on the double-yellow and told the world to “Fuck Off” in your name.

And by the way, the rest of us are still here, dong, living and shit. Hooking up with Doggy Tim n his lovely wife lovely Aji, Clare and MP and Dave and the toastee, Ginny, who flies the coop Friday for life with the Jakarta mafia in Bangkok. This followed hard by a runner through northern Pakistan, the Chaman border crossing and a couple weeks in Afghanistan, the bitch. Yeah, it’s like a year ago now I was packing my bags for a protracted Kabul gig in a pre-Iraq-invasion-world and I’m a little envious about the road work. Damn. Peace out Ginny.