Issue link: https://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/25248
I met Angus in Kuta, Bali, towards the end of the Indonesian dry season about ten years ago. It was in the Sari Club late at night, as most nights there tended to be, and I was at the bar sipping some strange fruity concoction spiked with a semipoisonous, megaproof rice wine. Suddenly, a big, hairy blond gorilla in surf trunks took a seat next to me. "Nice ta meet ya, name's Angus," he said cheerfully before draining his beer. I shook his massive rough hand and heard my knuckles crunch in his grasp. "So you're a Seppo, are ya?" he said with a smile. "Fraid so," I mumbled, already getting used to the label. "Seppo" is the Aussie term for an American, short for septic tank, or Yank. I could think of worse things to be called, so I had resigned to accept it. We hit it off instantly; Angus, a big-boned, foulmouthed, rough-and-tumble Australian with massive sunburnt arms and wild blue eyes, and me, a medium-sized, milk-fed, pampered Yank, six months out of college and even longer since my last haircut. By the time Angus left the bar that evening, reeling drunk but still a mountain of exuberant energy, he and I had made escape plans for the next day-we would flee from Kuta Hell, as we called that nightly whirlwind of bars, happy milkshakes and disco lights that was inevitably followed by horrible Arak hangovers and bodies unfit for surfing. There is no bottom to the depths of depravity that a surfer can sink whilst mired in a Kuta Beach flat spell. Kuta is like a Balinese Las Vegas; it seems to exist for the explicit purpose of separating tourists from their dollars, and it has every conceivable form of sin to make sure that that is exactly what happens. The difference here of course is that there's no Vegas flash, no 58